Trumpet Fundamentals | First Attacks

Hey everybody, how's it going? Welcome back to another video. I'm Ryan Beach and on this video we're going to be talking about how to set up things on the trumpet so that when we breathe and we release air we get more consistency with the first attacks when we play. To me this is one of the most valuable things we can spend our time doing because as we drive consistency into the way we start we will drive a lot more consistency into the way that we play overall and the way that we finish as well. We're going to discuss a few of the things that I think about when I'm playing as well as what I recommend to others when they're struggling with this and I'll share a few different drills with you that you can use to help implement this into your practice to get better at this if this is something you're struggling with. To begin we're going to take this outside of a brass player discussion for just a second and we're going to apply it to training in the gym. I've watched hundreds of videos on how to be more efficient with my squat and my deadlift technique and things like that and one of the things that you hear over and over and over again is how consistent great lifters are with their setup. If you take a squat for example you'll see lifters grab the bar the same exact way they'll get under the bar exactly the same way they'll dig their feet in the same way they'll lift up the bar the same way they'll descend the same way everything is exactly the same repetition after repetition after repetition so that they can be as consistent as possible between repetition attempts so that they can ingrain this motor pattern the way they want With brass playing everything related to the setup starts with the air and so what I recommend for people and what I often do in my own playing is I'm focusing on not only how I'm breathing being relaxed and things like that but actually trying to feel a physical sensation when I breathe to help make sure it's consistent as well. This is something I learned from an undergraduate teacher Michael Anderson who learned it from Arnold Jacobs he called this the point of resistance and that the point of resistance should be at the lips and so the way we talk about it is keeping the wind at the lips the way we would find this is I want you to have a nice open oral cavity and I want you to breathe in I want you to go and when you do that you should feel it get cold somewhere inside of your mouth for me it's kind of right there right about there on the tongue so that's the point of resistance where it gets cold and we want to try to get this as far forward as possible and get it on the lips once we felt wind on the lips like that we want to make sure every single time we breathe we feel the wind on the lips in addition to that when I release air I'm also trying to make sure that I feel the air passing my lips in exactly the same place what I just shared with you is about 95% of what I'm thinking about when I play the trumpet I'm really trying to make sure if I can get the wind on my lips and then I release like that I find a lot more consistency in my execution and a lot better sound and all that kind of stuff to practice this what I generally recommend is to practice scales or arpeggios except for instead of playing them nice and long what we're going to do is set the metronome for about 60 beats per minute and we're going to play one full quarter note rest three beats one full quarter note rest three beats and we're going to take the mouthpiece off of our face after every one and then reset what this is going to do is it's going to give us a ton of chances to be able to set breathe in and release air and figure out what you need to do and what you need to think to make that process as consistent as possible here's an example of the exercise with a g major scale ah once you master doing it on a major scale you might want to then move on to arpeggios which is going to just expand the interval making it slightly harder and this is what a g major arpeggio would sound like for this exercise if you want to challenge yourself even further you can do what I would call fifths and fourths or fourths and fifths however you want you're going to be playing g d g d g you're expanding the space between them trying to keep it feeling exactly the same as when you were playing these notes in the scale version of it when things were closer so we can kind of learn how to bring everything closer together when we play as I mentioned before I find in my own playing that there's a high level of correlation between starting with consistency and playing with consistency so if you're someone who's struggling with this I hope that this video has been helpful for you to give you a kind of a place to start trying to figure out what consistency looks like and how to practice it through scales arpeggios and beyond all right everybody that's going to be all for this video I hope you enjoyed it if you did enjoy it I would appreciate it if you would give it a like down below and don't forget to subscribe if you want to see more content like this on my channel if you have any questions about anything in this video feel free to click the link down below where you can schedule a free 30 minute call we can kind of discuss struggles that you're having in your practice and how I might be able to help and if you want to sign up for a lesson or something like that we can talk about that too I've got more trumpet fundamental videos on a playlist that I'm going to put on the screen so if you want more of my thoughts on how to play the trumpet and how to get better and set yourself up for success check that out