Bobby Shew Interview Part 2

hey everybody we are back paul barron and i with our dear friend bobby shoe for part two of this uh wonderful and interesting interview uh we left off last time and bobby was talking about some of the uh people he's worked with and he was talking just starting to talk about trumpets and we've had a post a question in the group uh which is do you still work with yamaha on the horn designs and let's pick it up there well yes and yes and yes i've been i'm in my 46th year working with yamaha and i have to say it's a very humbling and flattering relationship it's a wonderful company to to be associated with because of many reasons one of which is that when i first first got tied up with them was it was back in the 70s and i was on tour with toast goes man this would have been about mid 70s 75 or six or something like that and the uh we were doing a sound check in tokyo and i backstage there was kenzo kawasaki and a young kid about 19 or 20 years old by the name of hiro okabe and hiro okabe eventually became the head of all of yamaha worldwide i mean sort of and he's retired now but he was like a 19 year or 20 year old kid then but they asked me if i would test some horns for them and i did and i whatever i won't go into all of that but they were just starting they weren't building pro horns at that point they were doing a few student model things and just starting to get the bannon orchestra division opened up so i every time we went to japan i would go with them and so forth years later um uh well well i brought a few different horns back to l.a and people said you're not playing a japanese trumpet how are you and i said well try it and then people would play and they'd say geez where can i get one of these you know and they weren't making them so they were doing them by hand through a dick charles music in glendale you know he was like the sole dealer and whatever they would make by they'd make ten of them by hand ship them over and and all the studio guys would run down and buy them you know everybody was one of these yamaha trumpets so over the period of time we kept developing various models and trying different bells and different things and so forth the a and the b and all this and the copper and the red rose brass and the yellow bra and we did things and and it was like a big education because for me i mean i knew some things about it but i was not really like a an engineer or anything like that i just pick it up and i say it sucks or it plays nice you know and i had been playing everything from i started on a 39 trumpet from montgomery wards catalog and that's what i played on all the way through first chair through high school and all-state orchestras and everything yeah 39 trumpet and guys had 200 dollar rental contemporaries and everything but you don't need the expensive trumpet to sound good you just need the right channels but anyway i once bob malone started getting him tied up with yamaha and that would have been probably i don't remember what year in the early 80s maybe or something like that you know um is a bit you know he knows things that it's almost like from another planet this guy knows he's such a smart cookie and he he's got you know i i just like sat back and he taught me so many things i couldn't believe you know and uh and he's a fun guy to be around he's a great hang and we've got to hang out with him a little bit over in in buena park down there and you know but great guy and a member of our group i gotta say it's a little shout out to bob out there uh yeah well you know he's he he's like a brother to me man i mean he's a teacher and a friend and everything you know but um anyway uh the thing is over the years of working with yamaha i have had i've met some screwball people with that company and some wonderful people with a company it's a typical you know it's got a mixture of all kind of things but they are a very powerful company worldwide they have they make the products they make are so consistent it's almost scary you know i mean i have i don't know how many yamaha trumpets i have in my studio right here right now but i if i turn my head just slightly i can see about seven of them you know and they're all like this is a this one right here is uh uh this is a a very old 83 10 z it goes back quite a few years i mean i just they're all over the place every room not every room i don't take a trumpet to bed with me you know and the bathrooms don't have trumpets in them but my offices do they're out here in the studio there's ones here across the room this is a big this is a big studio i'll give you a little glance that it is it's it's 20 2600 feet this room that's bigger than a lot of people's homes yeah that's a big that's a big studio and we can get a big band in here which we have done you know but uh um i keep trumpets out here all the time and they're all over the place and different ones you know and i have my narration model here and i get you know bob sends me things to try and we've got we're going to start working on a new flugelhorn coming up pretty soon uh they're in the process of putting together some prototypes for me to test but i like working with the company because they've honored me with by trusting me to be the deciding factor of whether a horn should be put on the market or not whether it's ready and in some cases back in the early days you know they weren't quite ready and they were throwing all these horns together and i was testing them and i said not quite right not quite right and then we had to change a few braces we had to change a few things you know the horn especially the z trumpet is a very light and very responsive instrument and it it's not typical that a classical player would go that way because they tend to like little heavier horns for a little more sturdier resistance for the way they play music you know but um anyway they they've honored me with being able to kind of design the bobby models and stuff and they sell like crazy i mean you can't most stores can't keep them in stock you know with the pandemic the way it is right now production obviously is down you know it's very hard for them to excuse me for them to keep their production levels up at the highest thing but they're doing what they can and and the horns are all over the world and they come out with a 8310 z2 a new version uh just recently and that's selling like what's the difference in that between the the one and the two i'm not free to tell you all okay okay you know there are a few things in it with annealing a couple of things have been changed braces you know you can they made the first models too light and they didn't have enough resistance and you know people talk about resistance in a horn it's like oh no it has resistance without resistance you're not going to center any notes you know you need you know for every action there's a reaction so to speak in physics you know when you push air through a horn and try to set up vibrations if it's too light it goes haywire if it's too heavy it's like you have to put on your military gear to make it vibrate you know and somewhere in between trying to get a horn at the right weight that it responds to you for the right type of playing now i mean somebody playing first the first trumpet in a chicago symphony orchestra uh probably wouldn't like the 8310c because it's probably not gonna it's too light phillips is a famous story a true story it was only related to me by one of the yamaha tech guys in new york phillip smith with new york phil was looking for a b-flat trumpet and he went into the yamaha italia in in new york city and they put a bunch of p-flats out there for him as the xenos you know which are a little more heavier classical kind of thing they put a bunch of different ones out there and he picked up a z trumpet you know and he and he kept playing and he kept going back to it and he found he said to this to this guy uh i can't remember who was the tech guy he said my god this is an unbelievable trumpet you know he says it's unbelievable unbelievable and so the tech guy says well i'm glad you like it we'll get we'll give you one if you like he's and philip says oh no no no i would never play this trumpet and the guy said well why not i thought you liked it he says oh it's far too easy to play i said there's your ad right there just take a picture of philip smith saying this drummond is too easy to play back of it you couldn't make enough of them you know but the thing about that is people get on autopilot with the neuromuscular systems in their body you get where you're you get habitual kind of feelings in your body when you play a horn you know it's like a certain kind of resistance and then you pick up a different horn from a bot you've been playing a bach stradivarius for a lot of years a 72 or whatever then you go pick up a selmer or a van laar or a model and it all sounds and feels different he goes you know it's like you've been driving a pickup truck all of a sudden and you're getting a ferrari it's going to confuse you you know because your your neuromuscular system your brain and everything is not geared for that and a lot of people don't understand that technology in the neuromuscular they call it muscle memory but it's neuromuscular because the muscles are just pieces of meat that do things because they are capable of squeezing and punching and and doing exertions you know but they get they can't do anything they don't get a message from the brain to tell it what to do so we have neurons in the brain that tell the muscles they go down and trickle down through and connect all the neurons interconnect until you get muscles when you practice for instance and you play a particular arpeggio or a scale or anything over and over again the one of the most important things in playing is repetition but if you do it differently every time then it confuses the brain and you set up or if you do it incorrectly every time you set up a bad habit that's going to mess you up and you won't have any chops or it pinches this or something that's wrong with your plane and guys like myself when people come to me i i'm not giving them so much as i'm taking away bad habits i'm trying to but i can't take away a bad habit i have to reprogram them with something new that's the use of neuroplasticity anyway back to the whole point about about trumpets and stuff like that when we get when people go into a store and try to try new trumpets or go to a trade show or something one of the most disastrous areas in any trade show an itg thing is that that exhibit area you know oh yeah every trumpet player is in there trying to play high gs on every trumpet you know and then you get some like oh did i say you get some that comes in there they can play them he's got to go around to every booth and play high gs and double c's and draw everybody's attention over there and they've got to run over and say that oh look at oh look who it is it's always you know that's he's very famous you know then he goes to the next booth and then he plays a double c there and the kids are all just following him around like flies on a turd you know you know and all he's doing is showing off and though i can't go into those exhibit areas at all i cannot i don't want to be in there people like dave monet he doesn't want to be in the same building he always gets a he gets a a loft in the in a belt tower a block away or something you make an appointment to try his horns or something and yamaha always tries to get way down at the end of a hall in a private room of their own you know but but the thing is people what my point is that people don't know how to test and the i've written an article how to test there's a video that you can get i'll send it to you if you want it uh on how to test the z trumpet you could apply it to anything but i'm not out here doing videos on how to how to go buy a van liar or a monette trumpet you know i mean yamaha had me put this thing together for them but the principles of testing and equipment have to do with common denominators and not trying to do idiotic things on it if you try if you play the same thing on five different trumpets then you can tell the difference but if every time you pick up a horn you play something different you play joy spring on this one and homolog that one you have no there's no the vowel the test is not valid you know unless you have common denominators in it you know so i've devised a really like what i think is a very sensible logical and pretty intelligent test method it can vary based on the skill level of the player a 13 year old kid's not going to do the same thing that that wayne bergeron's going to do the testing equipment you know but you know guys that go in there with with big egos which is parentheses self-importance that's what the definition of ego is is that they think they're so important they've got to show off and show everybody how how no i won't say that that's i'll use another tournament how big the car is that they drive we can infer where you were going i know you can you know but but the point about it when they have to go in there and do that self-importance thing you know it it doesn't do anybody any good and it certainly you know uh but i mean blessed sold uh jerome khaled you know when he was alive and all of that he used to he used to have a booth and and they used to throw him out of the trade show sometimes because he couldn't really play any music but he would play like the loudest double c's in the world you know and he people would go would go over there and they'd hear this guy playing double c's they'd run over there oh my god that's the greatest trumpet in the world i have to buy one of those you know and of course it wasn't you know but the he would be his booth would be right next to a flute exhibit or a violin player and they'd finally after five days of the texas bandmaster association of jerome collins screeching double season or him hiring a player to come in and do it for him they they put in a request and everybody signed a petition to have him removed they'd bring in like the police would show up at his booth and have him wrap up all his stuff and walk him out you know and it was like sad to see but you know this is like the eagle kind of things that happen those things actually when i go to the itg's and stuff like that i don't go anywhere near those booths you know i stay completely away from that stuff i don't want it i mean what do i need to do and if i pick up anybody else's trumpet if i see a friend of mine who works for such and such i've got friends that work for other companies than yamaha you know and if i say hey haven't seen you in a while ernie how you doing man he says hey oh this is our new trumpet bobby i play a few notes on it i play and everybody go oh bobby's playing the ernie trump but always bobby's switching trumpets and then the word i get like phone calls from yamaha what are you doing playing on ernie trump but you know i'm not playing i just do a couple of notes on it it's a friend of mine you know you did what i'm saying the next thing you know it's all over facebook this photo i'll be playing a acme trumpet with a picture of a road runner on it or something i mean you can't i can't go anywhere without somebody like trying to get me in trouble you know it's just anyway that's the whole the whole thing about all of this is it's a it's a it's it's a screwball kind of a world with trumpet players and so forth like that but that's what i try to do is teach people to test the equipment properly and so forth you know it's important yeah very cool well let's talk a little bit you know i know you are you know you you were talking about the mind you were talking about neuroplasticity but let's let's talk about something here and you can make this brief if you want you know you know just improving how does one go to improve their let's say their mind horn your body mind coordination or whatever you want to call it you know i mean i know you were talking about listening playing by ear for me that's that's a big part of it but what other techniques are out there for people to improve the mental aspects of playing well i mean when you look at playing you have to you can look at it in two sides like the left brain the right brain so to speak you know but there is the mechanical side of the instrument then there's the creative side of in the emotional side of you and the musicality you know one of the most important things in in putting yourself together and improving as i showed you earlier in the part one the thing about the pursuit of excellence you know how gratifying and healthy it is and how to do that how to practice and i i don't know if i've sent you but there's articles i've sent about a better approach to practicing and stuff like that and i see how kids practice sometimes and it drives me nuts you're wasting your time in here you're playing the same you played yesterday if you know how to play something don't play it you know play stuff you gotta there's three parts to practicing it's maintenance it's uh problem solving and moving to new territory but maintenance doesn't have to be two hours of long tones and pedal notes and playing the same scale the 25 pages of the clark or arben if you that's not maintenance maintenance is really getting all the fundamental great green lights on the four fundamentals of troubleshooting which we've talked about and you know what they are bobby from that's in everything that that's the feeling of the lips abdominal support of your air controlling the aperture and playing on the right mouthpiece those apply to boris andre and chad bank in the same way but they don't all play the same office and they don't all breathe the same way but we personalize everything past the thing so you have to stop first and foremost and look at your your fundamentals get the green lights on do your chops feel good are you using your air properly are you getting a good sound that's a sign of of of tone production mechanics that's aperture and control then is the mouth be serving you well you're getting the right sound in the register and moving around that's fine get the green lights on and then get into problem solving problem solving for me is the most important thing it requires first and foremost humility because humility you cannot grow and and expand what in the lack of being humble about yourself as a player you know if you sit there and say you know i'm a bad cat you know i'm gonna show those cats in l.a what it's all about you know i'm gonna get out there man you know and gary hay ain't got nothing on me you know or whatever you know get the hell out of here we're back to couch canyon again you know i could have made more money as a shrimp i think it's a lot of work for trumpet players in that field you know but the idea is make however you have to do it you can do it psychologically mentally or you can do it physically which is you can get a little practice notebook spiral notebook and say my weaknesses and be honest about them you know if you can play comfortably autumn leaves in the key of a g minor concert fight can you play it in a flat minor concert can you play it in f sharp minor country can you play it in b minor concert well oh no no maybe not well those are weaknesses aren't they you know well for me every guy and whatever genre of music he's into has weaknesses in his playing whether it's responsible music but you have to prioritize everything first and foremost since the top of the list is the sound quality that you get for the type of music that you're playing if you if you get a classical sound and then you try to play joy spring it's not going to work you know it does it's the wrong thing if you get a mariachi sound and you try to play like a tribute to chet baker they ain't going to work you know or if you get chet maker sound you try to play in a mariachi band you're fired you know so the point about it is each genre of music that you're playing and people people who are like studio players who every three hours you're playing a different type of music a different style because you're in universal now and then you're at warner brothers and then you're whatever you know and you know every three or four hours you're playing something different you never know what you're gonna play so people who are eclectic players need to to have different categorical things so back to the point you get sound quality for genre first priority second one is intonation third one is articulation number four is flexibility and then you can look at you can add things like range if it's necessary like if you're doing a tribute to chet baker you don't have to worry about a double c or a high g you know so the point being that you have to but prioritizing sound quality first and foremost so you get you get in and if you get the green lights on you're getting a good sound you're playing in tune you're moving around flexibility the articulations are clean get the hell out of there maintenance is done now go into the weaknesses in your playing and work on them they're not all going to go away in one day even if you pick the key of b one day it's not all going to be masterful in one day but maybe if you only pick 30 minutes of it and you play play the key of b play the scale of the b major play and i joke around with this when i say play mary had a little m and london bridge is falling down in the key of b by ear play the first play the first eight bars of the star-spangled banner and b by ear you know you don't have to do the hummel in b yet you know but the idea is to explore the key of b like it's going into a room everything's blue wow everything is blue in this room you go into another room oh well in this room it's all pink this is f sharp or whatever you think you've got to explore keys till you become really comfortable in various keys because when you sit down in front of a piece of community you don't know what the hell five sharks are oh my god you know who did whose idea was this you know what's the old joke about miles davis about a transposition when somebody said miles when they when the trumpets when the piano's in f where does that put the trumpet why in g and when the piano is in b-flat words i put the trumpet and c and when the piano is in e where does that put the trumpet right back in the case well i remember you telling me one thing that that kind of relates back to this as well which was you know you had a way back then and i i said i suppose you still use it you called it this the snowball effect you know and it was really kind of a revelation for me at the time because in college you know you're expected to we got to practice all of this stuff you know and it gets overwhelming and i've seen on in our group that people are overwhelmed sometimes with what to do and what to work on and this and that and how you choose things or whatever but the idea that was very helpful for me and still is to this day is just set don't set a clock or anything just go in and try to do one thing and work on that until you got it whether you said whether it takes you a minute or whether it takes you an hour accomplish it walk away for a little bit take a little break and then come back and work on the next thing and then you develop this arsenal of things and so that's something that's along these lines here that i remember well it is true and the thing about it is what you have to watch out for here is that you can set the goal of that of that process a little too aggressively and like with the eagle you can say i'm going in there and i'm gonna get the son of a gun you know well no that's a stressful way to approach it you see take the key of b and just get friendlier with it you know if there's a neighborhood bully that lives around you you're not you know you've got to get to know him a little bit and find out that you both like the dodgers and then that helps you know eventually you'll find that you both like maurice andrea and that helps more and then you then you'll find out that that he likes cheesecake and you can't stand it and there's going to be differences you know but the point about it is that you have to get to know this guy so that you can be neighborhood buddies and you may not agree on about everything and every perfection ain't going to happen but you're making progress and so a lot of guys go into a practice room and they beat themselves up they spend too much time on one item expecting it to go completely away in one day which it's almost damn near impossible for the human brain and the neuromuscular system to completely overcome a major problem in one session but what you can do is like you were talking about the snowballing effect you know it you pick you start slowly and if you approach it properly the next day you get a little more speed and then it picks up speed and eventually you you make progress towards it and you get the idea is to get it better each time you work on it rather than just finalize it every day and then finalize the next one the next day no no you're not chopping down trees here you know what i'm saying what you're trying to do is overcome your unfamiliar unfamiliarity with certain aspects of the playing it might be with your warm up you could i know guys that that i could tell you a lot of players need to put the whole thing away and the trumpet and everything in the case and sit down and study how to warm up properly if they did that they would it would create unbelievable improvements in their playing because a lot of people warm up lazily they don't warm up same way they do too much they don't do enough they cheat on this they don't understand why fluttering is they flutter yeah no they don't know i don't know where the muscles are oh so you know or whatever you know and so you could focus in on one thing like that or if i look at your breathing or look at mouthpiece buzzing and stuff like that all of these things are components that add up until when you put that horn up there and everything goes oh my god this is great but if you don't prepare yourself properly or if you don't work on all of the elements that's physiological okay so work on those things then put the horn down go put on a chet baker record listen to a couple of tracks take a break you know drink an insurer or something and then come back and then pick up the horn and then and then close your eyes and go work on something else work on something creative leave the the left brain side alone for a while and go learn to play something creatively learn to improvise or something you know so the idea is and i'm a great believer in interval training which is not but herself and i uh you know i never got a chance to hang out a lot with him but i did a few times with dave monette and charlie gorham and a few people but you know the one thing about it is bud kept a lot of horns out of the case with mouthpieces in him around his house kind of like i do you know and when he'd go into a room into it then he'd pick up a trumpet and play on it for 10 or 15 minutes and put it down sometimes if you practice if you want to get three hours or two hours let's just say two hours of practicing in a day how about you do a half hour here and then you take a break and read a chapter out of a book about something or you know do take a walk play with a dog a little bit come back a couple hours later practice another half hour if you practice four times a day for a half hour each you're getting your two hours in but you're resting in between the two hour things you're resting flushing a lot of you're fluttering getting a lot of blood in there so the person who sits down and practices for solid two hours he goes oh christ all my chops oh my god oh my god that what happens is subconsciously the mind starts to equate that practice he's going to this is going to hurt practice equals pain sorrow you know so the person who always ends up their practice session totally depleted of chops with aching in their corners and everything else and can't get even a sound anymore the subconscious mind watches everything you do and it takes it as that's well that's what he wants i guess you know it doesn't think there's nobody there it just takes it's just like a great big hard drive whatever you feed it that's what it records for you and that's what you get and if you practice stupidly you'll play stupidly if you warm up haphazardly you'll play haphazardly if you don't focus in on your weaknesses and like to pat yourself on the back by playing your favorite little all the time and patting yourself oh ain't not goody not good ain't i good no you suck you know come on deal with where you suck yeah we all suck but i suck in a lot of areas but i'm not telling you what they are yeah that's my private business you think and so like like for me the big thing at this point in my life is i'm not interested in things that don't apply to me as i mentioned earlier in the in the previous uh interview you know i focus in on what do i do here me from my the time i have left in this earth to play what am i going to do i'm not am i going to play the carnival venice i hope not you know you couldn't pay me to play that thing you know and and i'm not gonna spend time working on it just for what for a truckload of hundred dollar bills i got a truckload of hundred dollar bills i don't need another one they're in my mind of course but you see the thing about it is people need to learn how to practice and go there and and work on things with humility and try to make little improvements without getting upset and oh my boy my socks you know don't do that to yourself you know pat yourself on the back for for the fact that you took up a musical instrument you had the sensibility to do that that in itself is a magical thing you know how many millions of billions of people there are on this planet to wish they knew how to play even a harmonica an ocarina anything but look at us we're playing like the the king of the instruments the trumpet so i i i think that's important especially this pandemic thing it's very important that you know how to be in that room alone and work on and make progress you can't sit here and cry there's no gigs there's no well nobody has any gigs you're not the only guy why are you sitting here crybabying it you want to see how many crybabies there are on the planet right now with trumpets millions every one of them exactly let's see and a lot of them are trying to teach in order to make a few bucks but unfortunately what they're passing around is a lot of uh dog poop there's a lot of false data being disseminated casually just for dollars and cents and that's well i guess i shouldn't about that because eventually they're going to have to come to me and get it straight there you go well well one of the questions here and i think tom tom marriott said this the other day to us um but and it's not just him he posed a question but i know everybody's wondering it and certainly i am and i bet paul is to you know is is it what is bobby shue you know practicing what are you doing to stay in shape and just keep things rolling what's your practice day like here is it daily is it uh what what have you been doing for the last year here now with this pandemic in place well i've been teaching online for 21 years so this is not new to me one of my one of my very dear friends it's a great drama player in vegas gil kelp uh he's like one of the top of lead players in the las vegas area i met him in germany he was living over there uh and one of the top players but gill's a genius with computers and he got me into teaching online with uh i chat about 21 21 years ago and that's long gone i guess and then there was i did skype for years now skype is getting ready to fold up they're going to cancel skype this spring that's what i heard uh it's going to go out of business but i've been doing zoom and there's a couple of other ones out there you know that i haven't really gotten too far into facetime and a few things like that but but i've been teaching i and i so the the pandemic didn't change my life i just stopped going to airports you know which is a great pleasure for me you know and no more handicapped rooms and shitty hotels and shitty restaurants for me trying to i've been traveling with a wheelchair and walker for the last two and a half years because of a bad injury and hip and femur replacements and broken shoulders and the whole right side of my body is almost all metal i look like i look like the transformer or something like that when you actually you know but i'm i'm i did 61 years on the road so i'm just here but i'm not dead and i'm not depressed and i'm i'm still smiling and i'm still laughing and i enjoy life and when i pick up i pick up the trumpet probably anywhere from five to eight times a day i don't sit and practice as i said just a minute ago i don't practice until i'm tired i practice what i want to play i wrote an article called new freedom which i don't know if i sent that to you but it has to do with a realization that i had during the pandemic that i don't really need an audience to satisfy myself i don't give a whether they like my playing or not i only care about whether i like what i'm doing you know and there's a tremendous sense of freedom in that in that you know i'm not saying and i have a there's part two of this article going to come up very soon because i've gotten a lot of reactions to people say well yeah but you need audiences we need audiences you know well i know that i mean i haven't gone down to a two-digit iq here over this you know what i have realized is that instead of me practicing to make to work on things that people will like that will really impress them when i go to the stage and i'll go oh my god did you hear what he just played isn't he great oh my god let's get him on the front of a wheaties box you know or something like that you know get out of here but what i care about is how how honest and how truthful and how connected am i to me you know the music is like we in the first part of this interview uh that uh you know we talked about the music is an ancient form of prayer and chanting and so forth it gives you it's a form of therapy that's why music therapy is such a valuable field within the medical industry is because people who have had strokes and things like that sometimes you can't get through to them unless you play a song you know and there are people who have had have have you know uh all kinds of problems physical problems mental problems if you put them at a piano or something and all of a sudden this thing comes out you know and music has a way of connecting the inner part of a person so in the practice room like i don't try to do every moment like i'm not on the himalayan mountain top like as a in a orange robe every time i pick up the trumpet not trying to create that kind of a concept but i love to play and my wife is very knowledgeable about music and she knows a lot of songs and a lot of things like that so we play a game sometimes and she'll holler out you know i'll be playing on the horn and just be fiddling around in front of the tv or something i mute the commercials and stuff and i'll be playing and my wife will yell out if i should lose you i'll have to go i have to play it for her and then then i'll play a song and she has to guess the title of it you know show it yell out your blase [Laughter] we have a lot you know it doesn't happen every day like that but occasionally you know but i have a lot of fun i pick up the horn and i try to play something that has some value to me and some meaning and i i compose sometimes i play with no bar lines i play rhythmically i play a rhythmically i play everywhere i do the other thing i do is i think very conscious conscientiously about the physical side of my body and its relationship with the instrument so the three things i do fluttering correctly lip buzzing correctly mouthpiece buzzing correctly and and then if i do pick up the horn i'm prepared so that when i finally pick up the horn it's reflects i always tell people that that this thing here is the trumpet and this is the amplifier for the trumpet and this is a very true thing in a sense that that a lot of people have to catch on to so i i tell people if you're struggling with an embouchure setting and having any kind of problems here put the trumpet in the case and take them a couple of loaves of bread and go sit in the park and throw bread to the pigeons and buzz on your mouthpiece but don't buzz on your mouthpiece until you fluttered and lip buzzed and prepared because if you put the mouthpiece up there for unprepared muscles you're gonna suck then i have a little game that i play pretty much every day and i keep a lead mouthpiece in the coffee table or they're they're everywhere where i sit but take a lead mouthy so once i'm warmed up i start down and i do this drill and all i'm doing is making sure that my aperture is set and centered for that note okay from there i go like this okay so i'll do i'll do that you know i don't hold it until the aneurysm it sets in you know i'm not looking for i'm not looking for like a stroke here or anything but what i want to do is i want to i'm training i'm working this is an isometric for the corners and the face muscles out here you know and so when i do that i hold that note up at the top you know i can hold it for you know a fair amount i'm not going to hold it for 30 seconds you know but i'm going to hold it for five six seven eight seconds or something like that and i'm gonna get out of there before anything collapses on me but what i do is i pull it out then i'll you know side cheek flutter and then i'll set it up and do another one and i might do a five six of those maybe ten of them and i do it maybe two or three times a day but i can i can play the double c for you right now you know better than i could earlier on because i'm because i just did that and so my chops are all always in shape you know and if i if i just you know if i just pick it up i'll get away from [Music] you know stuff like that i have a lot of fun doing that i don't know what that was and i'll never remember it but it's totally in the moment you know so bobby do you precede each of those eight uh little practice sessions when you come up to the horn with the mouthpiece buzzing and and do that siren thing or is that only a one time in day no the first time i go to play it in the morning you know i do the real proper fold flutter lip buzz mouthpiece buzz and do the proper warm up on the horn then two or three hours later i don't have to do go back to square one all i got to do is replenish a little blood supply maybe do a quick check on the buzzing do a quick you know fine i'm all right then i can i know i'm cool green lights are on i get it right onto the horn i don't have to sit there and do like the military marine camp pendleton warm-up every two hours or so you know that's the whole idea is that i just do but i'm very much aware of alert with and in tune with my chops i try to stay very much in tune with them at all times you know and that that's kind of what bob herseth was getting across to me you know when he talked to me about kind of how he you know when he's home and so forth and he's not you know sometimes when the orchestra when he's sitting there and they're rehearsing stuff you sit there for 40 minutes you don't play a note you know i that's a what an interesting gig you know so i uh craig johnson almost exactly about a year ago before this covet hit and shut us down um he gave me a great little mini lesson on your fluttering but how to flutter correctly and i had been doing it incorrectly all these years i just you know basically that but he got into the whole thing yeah can you share that or have you done that way too many times you'd rather not well i'll show it because it's very important i showed it to severance and it blew his mind you know and died said doc let me see your flood or you went yeah there's no muscle in the lips the lips are mucosa it's a mucous membrane there's no muscle in there there is like a little transparent thing that covers the outside of it for protection but it's not you can't play on it the muscle is the orbicular muscle surrounds the muscle the lips here you have two sets of muscles that go back here to the tmj you got two muscles depressors that go on the side and you got this modiolus it's called it's not a muscle it's where the muscles all converge and hold hands like that that's your corners all right so you want to get blood into the facial muscles out here and your primary target is is out there into the muscles so if the average guy does like this and you i'll have you do it put your finger on one of your corners and do your fluttering and watch what happens no flutter the way you did a minute ago you see that tighten up where your finger is yep and it tightened on the other side where my finger wasn't yeah it dies on both sides yeah what happens is it forms a kind of a wall a levee and it impedes any kind of blood flow all the way out to the muscles in the cheeks and i had a realization about this because i just got every ad anatomy book that you can buy online almost here but when you do this you don't you don't tighten the corner and even if you even if you take a little hand mirror like this and hold it there and you look at it you go oh my god did you see that a lot more flapping yeah well it's flapping and the idea is even if you because we're on autopilot with tightening that corner what you can do sometimes is take a finger and put it there and say now i want now pull it away about an inch and say i want this corner to touch that finger well it may not touch the finger but it'll try you see right there you see that exactly so you do one you do 10 of them on one side 10 on the other side check it out go like this and go hmm now you're starting to get control over the feeling in your chops you know whether they're full of blood water whatever they're ready to vibrate they're ready to do something but if you the dumbest warm-up in the world is to pull a cold horn and a cold mouthpiece out of a case stick it on a coal set of chops and expect to play what do you expect to sound like you're going to sound like pee-wee herman not woody already i can feel you know like having done that and trying to get my chops to reach that i can already feel that it's tingling this much further out now exactly the tingling is little capillaries in the surface that are close to the nerve endings that you can sense the movement of the blood in there that's what tingling is all about it's actually motion you know of the blood moving through the skin surfaces and activating nerve endings and so forth through that but that's a proper way to flutter if you do it fluttering properly it doesn't take very long to fully flutter you know a guy that sits there and does this i mean he hasn't really he hasn't hurt himself but he hasn't really done himself a hell of a lot of good either you know but almost everybody does it that way you know and i was looking at the most facial muscles one day and i went then i went holy crap there's no blood going out here you know there might be a little bit but what about the slower you do it the more flappier it gets the more blood goes faster in a shorter period of time duh not rocket science so what i noticed when craig first showed it to me is that i i was locked in with my corners and when i tried to do that i was so tight um you know eight shows a week and beating my head against the wall and everything i got light-headed i i have a fair amount of i think a fair amount of lung capacity and yet trying to make that flap slowly and uh you know to get the that blood flow back in here i was i was getting woozy man it took a while one of the things it's what you're dealing with is is that uh a lot of people don't realize but when we take in air we think we're taking in oxygen some of it is but it's it's about 82 percent nitrogen and maybe 18 or 19 oxygen the average intake of air is really not all oxygen so what oxygen you take comes in to the lungs converts to carbon dioxide okay carbon dioxide can have a beneficial effect on your muscles in your body but in order to do that the muscles have to absorb the carbon dioxide properly so while you you wait and it allows the carbon dioxide to absorb into the muscle but if you do if you don't do the little pause in between the the breath or the flutter the carbon dioxide is not absorbed in the muscle and goes to the brain and makes you hyperventilate pass out get dizzy so people do this bye yeah that was me yeah okay so here's what you do you you do this one two one two two seconds in between keeps you from looping and the looping is where the the carbon dioxide doesn't go into the muscle it goes to the brain instead but if you if you do the two seconds about two seconds pause in between just do it one two two delete up one two doodly doo dee doo and then you go oh and there's something i'm going to write a big article i'm i'm reading so many books uh do you know who keith winking is by any chance he's a trumpet teacher at texas state university in san marcos i've known him for years he's a really great guy great player and everything but he took a we did a zoom thing recently and keith and i both have respiratory issues i was born blue i was not breathing when i was born and i spent my whole childhood come up through elementary school in sleeping in tents and things like that and with you know atomizers pumping chemicals into me so i could breathe and i had all kind of like problems you know as a child and when i took up the trumpet is when i started not having respiratory problems anymore because it exercised my respiratory system i had a pulmonologist in california one time tell me he says that trumpet that's why you're alive he said if you if you hadn't taken up the trumpet you might have passed away as a teenager you know somewhere along the line but the yoga breath at maynard gave me the science of breath book and you you that in addition uh has helped keith winking sent me a book by uh james nestor called breath and it's an intense book and and it's about james nestor who is a person who had respiratory problems he went to all these himalayan gurus and hindus and everything all over the world to try and learn to breathe i'm reading a book right now called what doesn't kill us it's all about these people that submerge themselves in ice water and stuff like that to stimulate a respiratory kind of reaction you know but i'm going to write a big article coming up about some breath exercises some new yoga breath exercises not the ones that you use for playing but ones that you use for for like just chilling and just getting you know yourself i even have my students do a little yoga breath before they warm up so that they warm up in the moment rather than in the future or in the past they say oh i got to do a warning because i got this gig tomorrow oh you know oh no you're not you know you're not going to get a good warm-up like that you know and say oh jesus yesterday my warm-up really failed me you know and you know you're com you need to be in the moment now and that makes you much more you're going to play better and you're going to warm up better and you're going to practice better and whatever so the fluttering is to do like you know whatever 10 5 6 10 on either side and stop and then close your eyes and roll and squeeze your lips together like this hmm now the first assignment i tell every student is when you're practicing and you say god lee my chops feel really good today this is so grant feels nice you know stop put the horn down close your eyes so you can see and do this squeezing your eye lips memorize that feeling now when you close your eyes you activate the right hemisphere of the brain it takes you away from the mechanical there's a little mechanical going on here too but you conceptualize you're getting both so you're getting left brain and right brain you're doing a mechanical drill to conceptualize that's my feeling it just might be the feeling you want every day now if you could find your feeling that says stability if you could get stability every day you have consistency no more roller coaster ride no more a good day bad day good day bad day why do the bad days always show up on the record day when you're recording or solo you know or on a game you know but one of the things it's it's called a controlled warm-up and if we learn to control and be first and foremost aware of the feeling if you have a bad day and you your chops feel terrible put the horn down and do the same thing and go oh my god they're filled paper thin they've or they're so swollen i don't care what it is swollen thin fat ugly smell bad whatever you flutter and it'll neutralize everything well and a toothbrush maybe you know but i the idea about it is once you study physiology and understand what's going on here you have tools that can bring about predictable given results on a daily basis hello wouldn't that be nice to have a consistent set of jobs do you think wayne bergeron can go to work every day with it with a roller coaster set of chops no way same with anybody the guy sitting you know first chair and symphony orchestra he can't have roller coaster chops he'll have roller coaster payroll you know and all of us this is one of the things that a pro has to work himself toward and i have to say in all honesty that i've seen an awful lot of people who consider themselves pro players in the studios in new york or l.a or london or wherever we don't really have their together they don't really know what they're doing they're hoping for the best it's and then it comes to about brings about what i call the three p's pinch press and pray and if you put that horn up there and you just hope for the best well so you if you're not doing good things with your breathing and didn't get a good warm up and don't know how to use your jaw to control the aperture and the airflow and so forth and playing on a you know a bird bath mouthpiece for trying to play lead or something you know you're playing lead with the big man on a 3c mouthpiece are you you're at home plate with a banana trying to get a hit are you crazy you know it's the wrong tool for the job you're not going to drive a nail with with a with a screwdriver or something like that you know so the the point being that that once a guy gets a grip on all of this stuff and starts to control himself he starts to excel as a player things happen start consistency starts to happen he doesn't have bad days anymore you know and you know you find ways when when you're doing when i did studio work you can do a movie soundtrack and you can sit there for two four hour sessions in a day and not play 25 minutes of the whole day you're just sitting there through like while they're trying to get the synthesizer right or a flute part or a violins or something and you're just sitting there you know and you then all of a sudden they say okay here we go let us see jump at like high d you know you've been sitting there for two hours you know so you gotta have your together and there are things that i do while they're when they take a break when they're not recording i i don't i don't necessarily flutter for the entire orchestra to see me but i'll [Applause] i'll do that and i'll maybe do and then when they take a break says okay take ten you guys okay what'll i do i'm gonna go i'm gonna do i'm gonna keep my chops connected to the instrument one way or another you know and if i'm running from universal to to uh paramount and i in the car and i didn't play much at universal and i don't know what's coming up at paramount i got the mounters in my hand and while i'm driving through traffic i'm buzzing on the mouthpiece so that when i get to to paramount i sit down and i'm ready whatever and if there's nothing but tacit sheets i'm still ready but if there's like high g i'm ready and so readiness is one of the things i i showed you earlier on this thing about luck remember that thing here's the other half of it you do that yeah absolutely it goes in coincidence so if you're if you're well prepared you're going to sound like a lucky guy well how about that you know does this all make sense to you i mean does that answer the questions and stuff it sure does yeah that's great great stuff and being prepared for me also has always been a source of calmness as well it's the times that i'm most afraid showing up at a gig where i don't know what's going to happen in the studio or you know the first time sitting down to play a show and and all the uh the creatives are there the people signing my check and and ready to fire me and that's when my nerves get the better of me but i've found over years a lot of trial and error mostly error is when i'm prepared then i'm a lot more confident and i can i can actually do the job that i know i can do from the practice room one of the things i want to interject in here i thought about this earlier when we were talking about practicing and i i don't want to uh have done this this long sessions with you two guys and for the for your group without interjecting this one of the things that's really important for me in practicing it's called target practice okay and it's i don't like guns and i don't believe in that people like you and i should have guns i think i think they're from for i don't even think the military because most of now we found out on on january the 6th that a lot of cops in the military don't deserve guns either because they're full of too you know but target practice for the trumpet is one of the things that makes the trumpet causes our blood pressure to go up and makes us nervous is whether we can be accurate you know one of my students a young kid the other day i said what's the biggest issue for you he said cleanliness you know he doesn't want to miss any notes well i understand but you got you can't do perfection we have to throw that out but target practice and so everything happens on a step-by-step process it's called the gradualness or gradient or whatever so here's here's an example that's okay so i get i get warmed up i haven't assumed i've done a warm-up all right i'm not really at my maximum warm-up right at this moment but it's enough to show you and so i'll take something just like an arpeggio like that in the middle i'm not going away tub tub fart zone low on this thing and i'm not worried about a double c but i want to do this [Music] is a very important thing in this go slow don't get too fast you know wow you're opening up the intervals but you start with the easy ones and then you start taking one out pull another one out pull another one jump from here up to there come back down oh wow oh because that's and then i'm going to open it up [Music] they got started practice those that's like you're now entering into the vizuti zone you dig you start getting where you can jump around and double tongue like quadruple octaves you know that guy can double tongue between here and venus and without breaking a sweat well i know that he's not he's not from this planet but you know the idea about it is then you change it you know be random with it move around and don't think ahead too much on it let it happen like real right now right now right now you think it just the second and you play it you know and you know you can start pushing the envelope as far as you want without getting egotistical about it you know and getting like trying to wave your whatever in front of everybody you know the idea is to gain that ability now if you use air pivoting and you're playing and so forth where you know where the pivot targets are inside of a couple of your mounties you can sit there and you can have sat through 200 measures of violin solo and come in and go you have to come right in on it sit there and go four scoring 20 years ago our forefathers up the constitution by okay you know he did what i'm saying challenge yourself play games sit there and recite mary had a little lamb and then come in and play that high c again and by boy you want to you create challenges for yourself like this but you can't do them prematurely because you'll invalidate yourself and you'll list you'll miss and you'll miss and you'll miss you'll say i'm not worth the yes you are with the but you have to teach yourself how to do that in a sensible way without being uh you know like without all of the self-importance and trying to you know all that stuff i want to buy a bigger car you know you know what i mean bigger gun something like that but those kind of things target practice is a very important thing it's it's part of a very important part of what i practice these days because you know i i still want to be accurate on the trumpet you know and i have to do something uh i have a couple of recordings i'm doing a couple of guest appearance uh guest appearances with college bands coming up um in a few weeks where i have to they're gonna they've got the charts you're gonna record all of the big band charts and send it to me i'm gonna put on earphones and stand in the back of the corner back there and record my parts for a bunch of big band charts it's got double c's in it and everything else you know i got to be ready for it you know i'm not worried about it at all i'll get it i'll nail it there's no problem with i would have i'll probably have a beer next to me when i do it you know no i don't know but you know the point being is we we are our own best teachers and we have to be smart enough and skilled enough to go into that practice room and think about how we approach things in a sensible way with you know to make move ourselves slightly forward and gain a little more control here and there about this and that and you know play games with the thing but know what the hell you're doing don't be stupid you know don't sit there and try to be wayne bergeron or anything like that i mean one of wayne bergeron's enough [Laughter] yeah damn it somebody somebody asked a question now this just getting back to this uh the pivot the pivot points within your mouthpiece somebody asked when you are playing in the real extreme upper register is your tongue touching your bottom lip when you're say on a double c or something like that or is that something you even think about i don't know that question needs to get it back in there talk about the lack of a choo-choo train as a child [Laughter] i mean a lot of people over they uh get into too much little significance things you know there's a lot of stuff on youtube about trump and teachers out there teaching all this you know and with the tongue the tongue the tongue tongue where's the there's the fish tongue thing now like jen's lindemann plays you know i try to i cannot play where they i cannot do that i mean nailing my tip of my tongue to my dead yeah yeah articulating with the surface of my tongue get out of here but i sound bad enough as it is that i'm adding back to that but no i mean i don't know when i'm playing a double c the last thing i'm doing is sitting here going now where the is my tongue oh i'm sorry you know i don't know where my tongue is when i'm playing the double seat you want me to find out no but it it that the whole thing with a pivot is i'm not pointing my tongue in there anyplace let me see [Music] it's kind of my tongue at that point is kind of right on the touching the top of my bottom teeth but on the back side of them a little bit you know but what's important is that the back of my tongue is up here because it's helping it's the venturi kind of thing that's helping keep the airstream velocity at the higher level that may enable me to play that note you know but if i if i start playing games with my tongue i'm more interested in my jaw with the pivot because the tongue and the jaw being connected as they are the tongue is a form of a muscle and you can you can do certain things with it the pro problem with most people with their tongue is they raise the tip of it too high prematurely and it raises the job and it reduces the size of the aperture and if you try to play with too small of an aperture up there you get stuff like that and then i know guys that'll stand around and say you hear that man it was a triple shoot no one he just pissed off every dog and then and look at the neighbor just pulled his gun out you know so yeah i did i i did hear you speak on you know one of the biggest problems that trumpet players have is that they tend to play much too tight here and that this needs to be opened up and you need to learn to breathe and support in the proper manner yeah and one of the things that goes with that why the fourth fundamental is the proper mouthpiece is because if if the mouthpiece is here these are your lips and your throat is here and the air is coming up here going in that way in the mouth you have a by the way you compress at the wedge area down in the abdominal area you create psi pounds per square inch that compression converts the velocity the faster the air is moving the faster your lips are going to vibrate like your guitar string the higher the pitches are going to be but when you have a certain velocity like 300 mile an hour air and it goes into this one and a quarter c mouthpiece it goes oh boy it's a cathedral look at this you know and when when your air goes into the wrong cup it slows the air speed down and you have to only way you can get the air speed back up is by pinching your lips tight together again and that reduces the size of the aperture that's going to reduce the size of the slot and that's going to make the note sound like you know like a mouse part with anything if or shut it off completely so uh and a lot of teachers i know say say the letter mm-hmm m there's no aperture so how do i create an aperture well i have to blow like hell until i blow my lips apart well that's an effort but if i just drop my jaw i've actually controlled the aperture by a jaw movement which i mean you know that was easy enough and i didn't have to blow like a maniac to make it work you know so there's a lot of false data being passed on to students worldwide about that when they don't know about how the physics of acoustical physics of what makes sound and all that so i'm not i'm not an expert at all that but i'm not dumb either you know so you know absolutely i mean this is just even for me just to reiterate to have you reiterate some of this stuff is uh it brings back a lot of great memories and it it's inspiring right paul i mean jeez you know you're still you're still there doing it you you've been kicking ass for all these years and uh have helped so many of us and inspired so many of us that uh i'm just so so glad to see you at it and um you know what can i say i i think this may be a good area a good place to you know kind of we're coming kind of to the end of our time here but uh you know i just want to express that from the bottom of my heart how much you've meant to me over the years and even though we haven't always been in contact and stuff and i know i speak for a lot of people because i've talked to a lot of people they say oh yeah man tell bobby hi what you know make sure you mention it and this and that but there are a lot of people man that you've made just an absolute uh huge impression on their lives and on their careers i honestly don't know if i would have ever even had a career as a trumpet player musician you know had i not met you you know and so for that i am uh forever grateful well i want to throw on one little thing before we finish here sure i read a band director down in lafayette louisiana back in 1968 gave me a transcript of a lecture that gustav holtz did at yale university and i have the the transcript in a pdf form anyway but just to paraphrase the little thing that he said in the middle of it he says that anybody that makes any progress in the field of the arts especially in the field of music owes it to the next generation to turn around and help the next generation come up and show them what you've learned and how you've how you've managed to succeed and show them the tools that you've used to help he says and to not do so is a crime of omission he says how can you see a little lady needed to go across the street but god said help her put put your sit down and go help the little old lady you know i mean someday you're going to be walking around and need some help and some what goes around comes around you know and when i read that that chance that the transcript of gustav's thing and i read that thing about a crime of omission i went jesus you know and i've been teaching anyway trying to help people play you know but i i essentially didn't really know i didn't have the energy and the dedication and the and i and the knowledge first of all for i didn't really know what i was doing you know i was helping people but i didn't have all the data about the yoga breath and the muscles and stuff you know but it it it slapped me in the face like a wet mop you know and i went you know that's true man i need to really make sure that that i get myself in a position that i can really help these people i mean if i'm crippled i can't help that little old lady across the street well so you know buy a walker or something help her some way get some roller skates but that's one of the things that turned my whole dedication attitude around as far as teaching is that that little thing by gustav holtz is to to try to you know turn around and and show people try to help people improve you know there's enough people struggling in this world with problems and everything especially now what we're going through with this covet thing and all of the political and the religious wars worldwide and all of the crap and the i mean it's just insane you know and i feel like i got off at the wrong stop sometimes you know you know maybe i'm supposed to be on mars or something i don't know but but the point being that i have a i have wanted to read like bobby as you're saying i have a tremendous i'm still doing it yeah you know and i could easily get burnt out but not really you know i lay awake at night my wife says will you sleep i'm sitting there thinking about somebody's chops i'm thinking i'm half writing an article in the middle of the night i sleep two hours two and a half hours i wake up i start working on an article you know oh i'm thinking about some kid in you know south of oregon working on his chops or some thing and i don't get a hell of a lot of sleep but i do get an awful lot of smiles on my face from a lot of kids that are doing all right and that's and that's a great pleasure to me i'm always like pleased when i when i see another kid a kid from germany just sent me a bunch of tracks of his first cd you know and he's and i would listen to him and i went holy and this kid talks about going to my clinics and taking a lesson i didn't even remember the guy hardly you know but it's nice to get responses like that from people and know that i've been able to help somebody with their career i don't teach people to play i give them tools to help them teach themselves how to play the way they want to play and that's what the shit's really all about you know i don't there's an article i sent i think to you called teaching versus learning teaching is not what we do learning the recipient is what's most important that i give the right tools so that the recipient goes wow i got the right tools i can build my house i can build a career i can play the way i want to play if i've done that for somebody i'm happy yeah you know so thank you very much for inviting me under this i always love seeing you and paul nice to see you again good to see you again too and uh i i love talking about all this as you guys can tell i'm not i'm far from bored sitting here talking about stuff i love you know i have a great passion for all this you know so i hope the people that i hope the people in your group that listen to it um get something beneficial about out of it you know and and i'll maybe i'll hear from some of them in private lessons or whatever or whatever but i just want to contribute so thank you very much man thank you for joining us i i know i'm going to have to go back and watch it again and take a few notes because absolutely i didn't want to take my focus away from here and start writing but i know that there's some some real gems in here so thank you all right well you guys thanks an awful lot and and good luck to you and let me know when you post this thing i'd like to i'd like to see what i said okay we'll send you some links and we'll we'll uh we'll put up the link to the wedge on there too just because that's another great video that everybody can benefit from so all right well we'll look forward to speaking with you again in the not too distant future and take good care and wishing you the very best in your life and your health and uh say hi to lisa for us and we'll look forward to seeing you soon bye guys thanks bobby thanks

Channel: Tips For Trumpeters 50 and Beyond

Views: 3,563

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Id: kDsZoGeY8eI

Length: 83min 2sec (4982 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021