The Key Ingredients to a Good Trumpet Warm-Up

Practice smart. You have to assess this. Go back to your fundamentals. Big breath. Nice easy flow. Another item that's really useful, especially if you've had a hard playing night or day before and you're a little stiff or you haven't practiced for a while or something, is to play with breath attacks. And they're not necessarily beautiful. They get more beautiful as you practice them as far as clarity. But you pop of air, but no tongue. So you can hear that there was no articulation there other than the air. Technical studies. Like Clark, Clark technical study number two is a very good one. Probably all know that one. It has its challenges technically, but the concept of blowing through the notes as if you're playing a long note is hugely important. So technical study number two in the Clark is one of our favorites. My books, Alan Vizzutti Trumpet Method, have a warm-up in each book. The books are not in levels. They are in sections. Harmonic, melodic, and technical. And I wrote quite a few exercises, studies like Clark technical study number two, just flipping the scale different ways. But I also added whole tone versions, minor, and some diminished as far as the scale involved, which is not in the Clark. Now most of the pro trumpet players I know and a lot of others have practiced Clark number two in major, minor, whole tone, even though it's not in the book. But I've written it out all for you and it's easy to see. Here's an example. You can repeat those as often as you want or not. Now something pops into my head that's important here, having said that. During the warm-up especially, but all of your practicing and playing really, you need to get your mouthpiece off and back on so the blood can flow through again. Your tissue can stay more flexible and warm and vibrant and supple. I've taught lessons that had quite high-level players, for instance, play a Charlier etude for me. And by the bottom of the first page, they're struggling with two things. One is they don't let air out that's when they have a moment of rest. They breathe deeply by piling more air in and they get winded kind of, you know, that feeling of and finally you have to, I just need to reset. And they think they're not playing well. The problem is not that, it's that you're not letting air out when you stop playing. So I'm on a little bit of a side trip here, but notice it's possible to go breathe air in and out when you're playing. And it doesn't always have to be in. So you can keep the air fresh, depending on the context of the music, of course. But imagine this. I'll start with almost no air, okay? Didn't quite get the last note. But I was going in, out, in, out, in, out, in, out. It's very helpful. And if you have a little more time, you let the air out and you lift your mouthpiece off. And it alleviates or at least it mitigates the problem of playing a long piece of music or an etude. And actually what's more difficult in a way than playing a long etude like a Charlier or an unaccompanied piece? Why? Because when you're playing with accompaniment, of course you rest for the interludes and the 2D sections in the band and orchestra, you don't play. That forces you to do what I'm suggesting when you practice. Take the mouthpiece down. There are playing methods and systems where they advocate leaving the mouthpiece up. This can be a problem from the way I think, because I think in some of the books and methods of this type, it's not explained that you should lighten up the touch and people just smash it in and hold it there. And with the concept or the notion that I have to keep my embouchure set or I won't be able to play the next bit. That's not the best way to think. You're going to have to take some of these ideas though and try them. See what works for you. Give them a good honest thought. And I'm totally in line with this idea works great for me and is really helping. This little idea makes me feel not good when I'm playing and I'm not going to do it. Because that's what I've done in my life. We would be naive to think that all of us should play the same way and have the same ability on any instrument. It's just not human. So that's a simple enough thing to talk about. Now the technical study, the mouthpiece playing, the warm-up, and then the technical study section, as I mentioned in the beginning, I compress that to a short time sometimes because if I'm feeling kind of good I will proceed to music. Because the technical studies are just showing us scales and arpeggios and things like that that are in the music. On the flip side, if I'm feeling a little beat up, which can happen, I mean, and as you get older you notice a little bit more to be honest with you. You play a big band concert as a soloist the night before and then you get up in the morning and you're going to practice a little bit and it's kind of stiff. What I will do is to warm up things a little longer and maybe even shorter bits as opposed to playing the... like I like to play the Clark technical studies six times through. Two times major, two times minor, two times whole tone in one breath. But not all the time if it doesn't feel like the right thing to do that day. So you can have counterproductive results, let's say in the in the micro version. In other words you're not really damaging yourself but you're not helping yourself to get back to that supple great response kind of feeling all the time. And it's going to vary from day to day. Again, I'm going to use the words practice smart. You have to assess this. A teacher can't and your brain can play tricks on you. Sometimes when you go to play your first high C of the day and you miss it, you psychologically go, oh no, I'm in trouble today. Oh man, I go through it too. Go back to fundamentals. Big breath, nice easy flow. Let me show you something that is not often used for a warm-up unless you're familiar with my books and that is mixed articulations that you can do in the same time period where you might do smooth tones or long tones. I tend to call them smooth tones because you can see my concept of lifting off the mouthpiece a lot is applied when I don't play super long tones. There is a value to that but I like to avoid them just practicing long long tones over and over and over in the sense of trying to stay supple. And so you have to balance that in your own practice design and thinking. But the mixed articulations are quite interesting because it's kinetic. In other words, there's movement when you tongue, especially down low. You know how you kind of bounce around a little bit when you're tonguing strongly down low. And so mixed articulations such as tu-tu-tu-tu-ta-ta-ta-ta like a marcato, legato to marcato as an example. It doesn't all have to be down that low but those feel really good and they get you supple loosely. I just wanted to mention that as a technique. You can mix up the actual articulations that you want to use which is great because you can actually practice more than one thing at a time. Meaning if you're working on your double tongue and you want to warm up and you want to do mixed articulations to get supple, you could do something like this. Now the actual form of that is not in my book. I just made it up. But that's the idea that I like is having a sense of taking the information from a book like mine and adding to it in your own way. Finding out what works for you. There may be, there will be an evolution of your warm-up for instance. The fundamentals that you always enjoyed and helped you, enjoyed doing and then helped you will continue but you may find that you do some periods of your life where you're doing a little less or a little more. Generally my warm-up though is 15 to 20 minutes and that is sort of a a good barometer. I'd like to mention a few thoughts about embouchure. When a beginner starts they establish an embouchure depending on how they're directed you know by the teacher that it becomes their default setting really quickly. I mean barely after starting it becomes a challenge to move or change an embouchure and the concept of the trumpet embouchure is sort of 50-50 as far as top and bottom lip and in the center. Well yeah okay that's the general concept but nobody is like that in terms of perfectly symmetrically structured either dentally or the jaw or the face itself. So the teeth are going to dictate a lot about where you put the mouthpiece side to side of course. I've seen players who were taught for some reason or they just did did it on their own way to the side which is for the most part impossible to play well but basically in the middle somewhere and then up or down it doesn't have to be 50-50 but generally speaking it's close to that and it should be a comfortable setting. You can actually experiment with that even as an established player to become a better teacher for instance by moving the mouthpiece up and down and listening to the different tone quality. I don't really advocate going for an embouchure change to try to change some aspect of your playing. If you look and feel fairly traditional and there's nothing obviously crazy about the embouchure you know way too high way too low plus we have so many different size of lips the old notion that big lips should play big mouthpieces and big instruments and small lips the opposite is not true. I know some fantastic tuba players that have almost no lips in terms of the red flesh so keep that in mind too.