Monday, October 01, 2018

Tuning Slide 4.12- Don't Ignore the 10%

You have to, take a deep breath. and allow the music to flow through you. Revel in it, allow yourself to awe. When you play allow the music to break your heart with its beauty.
― Kelly White

Here’s where we started last week and then looked at the biggie- mental.

• Trumpet playing is
o 90% mental
o 9% air
o 1% physical

Now it’s time to move to the other two- the physical stuff- our instruments and our bodies.

Ever wonder how some truly excellent trumpet players can always use the same mouthpiece? Or how they can have a completely different tone in different parts of the same piece without changing the mouthpiece?

When I went to trade in my first trumpet my good friend and fellow trumpet player picked it up and played it. His comment was, “How can you play this thing in tune?” which I had been doing for 25 years at that point. “I don’t know,” I said, “it’s the only horn I ever had so I just played it.” Then I got my Bach Strad. Yes, it made an immediate difference! It was “easier” to play, more efficient a horn. I also could build some endurance when playing in a band since I wasn’t always lipping the notes to stay in tune.

Sadly, I didn’t become Doc or Maynard when I started playing it, though. I was a better player and the horn offered me the opportunity to have a better sound and style, but it didn’t turn me into a virtuoso. Let us not forget that in the end it is deliberate, efficient practice that makes us into better musicians. That takes the right attitude, of course, and the proper mental training as well as “equipment” that helps.

So, as I thought about this week’s post I made a list of what does the “physical” entail? Combining “air” and “physical”, what is the 10% that is not directly mental? My non-exhaustive list, in alphabetical order, along with my thoughts on how that may be something to be aware of:

◦ Articulation- These work together to keep us from getting tired as quickly. Efficient articulation styles can certainly help us as we continue to enhance our skills.
⁃ Learning effective tonguing techniques.
⁃ Double and triple tonguing
⁃ Goldman’s exercises and, as always, Arban’s.

◦ Body relaxation- This one takes both the physical and mental into account.
⁃ If I am stressed, I will not be relaxed and my sound will falter.
⁃ Learning how to tense and relax muscles in my arms and upper body will give me a better, brighter, clearer sound.
⁃ Even having tension in my legs and feet will translate into tension in how I play.
⁃ Developing relaxation thoughts and actions is important.
⁃ T’ai Chi and Qigong can be helpful here.

◦ Breath- It’s often all about the breath, the air, and how I use it efficiently.
⁃ Shallow vs. Deep slow breaths.
⁃ Learning to breathe from the depths of the diaphragm
⁃ Keep the air moving through, not at, the sound.
⁃ I have been told that at least an important part of my problems in endurance and sound come from not breathing effectively. It is what I am always working on.

◦ Dexterity- Ease of movement of fingers and lips, builds hand/eye coordination and wires the brain for many different actions. Dexterity- being nimble and agile- is a wonderful skill. You can’t play bebop without it!
⁃ Finger exercises- scales, chromatics, Clarke, Arban’s
⁃ Lip slurs- many ways to do these, but do them.
⁃ Pedal tones- the ability to really play those pedal tones is an important foundation for high register playing, I am told. Slurs and pedals; pedals and slurs.
⁃ Working on balance and agility of movement in the whole body can certainly have a positive impact as well. The movement of energy and oxygen through the whole body system can be quite helpful.

◦ Embouchure- the lips, facial muscles, tongue, and teeth in playing- yep, it is physical.
⁃ Sometimes (too many times?) we get stuck on this as the end-all and be-all of becoming a great trumpet player. It is one part of the physical, but the more I focus on it, the less I end up focusing on playing and getting the sound! I must never forget that the sound is what we are after. Embouchure helps, but it won’t do it alone.

◦ Endurance- All these physical things combine to give us the ability to do what we do for longer and more intense sessions.
⁃ Surprisingly most endurance is built in (relatively) short actions done smoothly and only to about 80% of full effort.
⁃ It is cumulative.
⁃ To build endurance, rest as much as you practice. This is appropriate balance of the physical and mental, for when we push too hard for too long we WILL lose our mental sharpness. It is built on endurance; endurance is not built on extreme will power.

◦ Posture-
⁃ How we sit and stand
⁃ A method called The Alexander Technique is finding an increased number of adherents. It works on posture as well as issues of breath and body relaxation.

There are some of the things I have personally discovered over the past 4 years of growing into a more advanced trumpet player. Most of us will wrestle with these on a regular basis. I for one always want to go one more exercise, one more song, five more minutes, thinking that this will truly push my endurance. Most of the time it won’t. It may only go so far as hurting. I learned this as a group fitness trainer, I learned it the hard way as a musician. Easy, steady, deliberate.

Of course, we can all name many musicians who are not in good physical shape, who don’t take as good a care of their bodies as would be helpful. In fact, that group would probably include most of us. Fortunately we don’t have to be in great physical shape to be great musicians. But I am coming to believe that it does help. As I have worked slowly on my physical conditioning again, I am finding that I do see benefits to my playing. When I have worked on my “core”, I find I can hold notes longer and have better breath control. With the weight/resistance training my arms don’t get as tired as quickly. Yes, these are small, but every little bit helps.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
By the way: Barry Green, author of Inner Game of Music and Mastery of Music also has a third book called Bringing Music to Life. In it he works with these ideas applied to breathing (air), pulse (rhythm), and movement (body). He addresses a number of these topics that fit in with what I have been writing about here. I will be doing some posts based on that book sometime in the new year. It’s an excellent resource!

Sidenote: This past Friday I ended an 18 month and one week stretch of not missing a single day of playing my trumpet! I had to have some minor eye surgery and the doctor said “No trumpet playing for a week.” I am a couple days into that right now- and it’s a bummer. As any (in)sane trumpet player would, I Googled whether it was true that I should not play. Maybe I could just play low notes or do long tones below “C” on the staff. “No!” said everything I read. It isn’t worth it. Ever. It is only a short period of time. Mess it up and I’m off for a longer time.

It’s still a bummer. But there is that part of playing that is physical and I have to respect it and take care of the physical. I will let you know what happens as it develops further in the next couple weeks.

No comments: