How to Easily Expand Your Trumpet Range (without Hurting Yourself!)

a trumpeters my name is Charlie Porter and it's been a while but I'm going to share just a little bit today about how to work on your high register and how to make the high register easier and more efficient and basically more like the middle and lower registers it occurs to a lot of people that you know they have problems as they start going into the upper register but those problems don't just immediately come out of nowhere if you haven't watched the straight line approach and a-three compressions video that I've done check that out because there's there's some helpful information in there but if you're practicing and you're trying to to expand your range then one of the things that you can do right away is as you're going up higher don't play louder play softer or at least keep the same dynamic but try going softer as you go up higher and as you do this try keeping the same setting as you have for the lower range the only thing that really needs to move is going to be the very middle part of the embouchure called the aperture that little hole in fact what we're what we're trying to do is just basically keep that hole from popping open as soon as that hole comes open as we force a lot of air through the lips then we're going to lose the focus that we need to play higher playing higher isn't necessarily harder physically it's just harder in terms of coordination it's like throwing a basketball into a basketball hoop versus throwing a basketball into a swimming pool now if you consider the harmonic series as we go from the lowest notes to the highest notes on the trumpet we have a lot of room for error down low because the intervals are really wide apart in the harmonic series as we go up higher and higher and higher the harmonic series become smaller and smaller and smaller in terms of the distance between the notes which means we have to be more exact in how we're slotting those notes and how we're focusing on those notes so for example take a low note like a low B flat ah now try to play the B flat above it softer and in the same position as the low B flat what's going to happen when you do this is that the lips as you back off the air the lips are going to come in a little bit naturally on their own you almost don't have to do anything and of course the tongue is going to come a little up a little bit like wouldn't we whistle I'm really not you're trying to change my setting at all I'm gonna do the same thing and go up to the next octave and as you see I'm just trying to keep the same setting whatever change is happening I'm not trying to do a bunch of change here you know with the lips or anything like that the change is very small it's happening on the inside and basically I'm trying to rein the lips in I'm trying to get them to focus smaller and smaller and at the same time I'm just lifting the tongue up but I want to emphasize that I'm not thinking putting the lips together tight like that in fact basically by backing off the air my lips are starting to come together naturally as much as they need to now once I get up to that high b-flat and I've established that low b-flat setting one way I can work on range at this point is to then keep that b-flat and then go to the C to the D so on and so forth going up the harmonic series trying to make as little change as possible in the setting like no change in fact in the setting where the mouthpiece is on the lips that does not change but as little possible inside where the aperture is as possible as I'm going higher and higher and backing off not going ladder because if we go loud at this point before you've built coordination if you try to go loud that requires stamina and if you don't have coordination the stamina is not going to help you you have to establish coordination first get the notes and then you can learn to play louder on those notes so again starting down low getting the setting carrying that setting all the way up and then from there start to move around go up very slowly so you see right there I missed one of the partials so I'm going to go even slower and back off as I go higher so by playing this way you can actually start to find where those those I guess what you call the note slotting you can find where the note slot on the harmonic series and check this out one of the things that most trumpet players do and they don't even realize is they're putting in way too much effort they're trying to slot a note that's like an octave above in terms of effort so really it doesn't take much effort at all if you consider how small the distance is between a low C and a c-sharp well once you're up higher a half-step is even smaller feeling than it is down there now imagine if you were to use a lot of effort to go from C to c-sharp if you want you get some kind of crazy skip like that was the same thing except upstairs when we're doing that if we use way too much effort usually what we get is an airball we just get no sound at all or we get some kind of crazy distortion so just remember it's a lot less than you think you have to just pretty much try to stay on the same note you make the smallest movement you can so eventually you want to be able to connect them all into a straight line such as such as what I just did now and remember these high notes if you if you're getting them and you can only get them loud then you're not getting them efficiently if you can get them softly then that's something you can grow into a nice efficient loud sound on the other thing too is to make sure that you can connect them from the top all the way down to the bottom because if you have a lot of breaks in between then that means you're resetting if you reset then that means that when you're playing music and you're coming from a low note then you got to go to a high note well you don't have one option that it can accomplish all those different tasks and that's really what we want to be able to do that's going to give us the best sound the most homogeneity of sound from from low to high so again get those high notes but make sure they're connected to the bottom make sure that they're soft up high and that they're nice and and fat and big on the bottom and let me show you one more time so right there you know I go up as high as I can making sure not to stress too much not to try too hard of course this is something I'm working on myself so I try to peel back those levels of up trying too hard so really when you're doing it right it should feel easy and it shouldn't feel I want to add this too don't don't put a lot more pressure as you go on higher you put a lot more pressure you're going to be cutting off the vibration of the lips you might feel like you need to use a lot more pressure and the reason people do this is because they're usually blowing too loud they're blowing the lips out and then they gotta press on the mouthpiece you know on to the lips in order to rein the lips back in to press the lips in so if we're playing really softly then you won't need to use a lot of pressure in fact it'll be the same pressure as you do download same pressure all the way down anyway so there you go remember uh get the setting for the lower note take that upstairs go softer as you go higher make sure the lips keep a focus of staying inside don't let them get blown out the more you can keep that focus and place soft and a higher register then you can start to develop your range in a more natural and easy kind of manner also this is great exercise that I'm the fattest gave me at one point Jon Faddis plays a excellent Trump and I'm sure you've heard of them it's called the triad exercise you simply take a tribe like b-flat major you hold that top no doubt you'd a crescendo and focus keep the focus going up to that top note you hold it as long as you have in terms of your air so as you're going up and one thing that I do is as I go up by half steps I rest five seconds in between go up by half steps keep the same setting as the lower note don't reset your your embouchure if you reset then chances are you're getting tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter and that's going to cut you off eventually so if I started on b-flat then I'll keep on setting hold that note as long as I can wait five seconds alright so eventually say I get up here so I'm going to hold that as long as I can until it fades out and then I'll go up a half step and keep going once my sound stops then I know that I got a rest for like five minutes once that once I can't get the vibration anymore after that you do one more time you top it off right so after that doesn't matter how high you're going you top it off one time and then you're done with that exercise Maurice Andre has a very similar exercise that he gave some of the students is basically ah right so you just do a C and then you do the five chord G with the seven five seven borrowed auto duty and then start on the seven going down but uh then you just take this basically up in half steps as high as you can go same principle as the Jon Faddis exercise going softer keeping the focus as you go up higher don't let the lips get blown out if the lips get blown out then it's going to be a lot harder you're gonna have to press and you're gonna have to get a lot more air so anyway there we go I'm Charlie Porter and hopefully this helped you out a little bit in terms of expanding your range and practicing higher the right way and not hurting yourself alright good luck and yeah subscribe if you want to hear some more tips and tricks like this

Channel: Charlie Porter

Views: 786,541

Keywords: Trumpet, Charlie Porter, High Register, Jon Faddis, Maynard Furguson, Maurice Andre

Id: jn0GnOX4FwM

Length: 11min 20sec (680 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 20 2014