Can You Play Trumpet with Big Lips? | Advice from Curtis Taylor

What would you tell someone, you know, because we have full lips, what would you tell someone who's afraid to play the trumpet because of their anatomy, their lip size? Does it matter? First of all, it's been done. It's been done. So look at examples of it being done. You know, unfortunately last year, you know, and then last year we just lost Roy Hargrove, you know, but Roy had some big chops, you know what I'm saying? So, and he was killing. So, I mean, who I mentioned earlier, one of my former teachers, Derek Gardner, another cat that's got some like big chops, you know, it definitely can be done. Trumpet is very personal. And that's one of the things that I learned from Sean Jones, man. I mean, it's like simple, but it's profound. Yeah. And he just always says, it's like trumpet is personal. So whatever your personal experience is with the instrument, don't completely disregard that for something that somebody is telling you that you're studying. You got to be like a sifter and you take the information that they're giving you and you try to apply it to your playing. And then you got to sift through things that kind of work for you and there's things that don't. You know, when I'm studying with people is I completely like, it's one of my good traits and bad is like, I completely go over into whatever they're talking about and kind of disregard what I know to be true for me, you know, up until, you know, all these years I've been playing trumpet and I think that you can get into trouble doing things like that. But definitely if you have large chops or large lips, you can, but it's not going to be picture perfect. It's not going to look like, you know, you know, you look at some of those embouchures and then you're half in, half of the top lip in, half of the bottom lip in, it's not going to look like that. And so you just got to know that going in and you just got to go for the place that's comfortable and that has the best sound through the arrangement of the instrument, you know. And that's what's so great about the lead pipe exercises and the Bill Adams routine in general, because it focuses on the sound and the blowing. So if you go after the sound and blowing, you know, the embouchure will kind of take care of itself.