How to Play Higher Notes on Trumpet for Beginners | Trumpet Lesson Part 1

In this video I'm going to talk about three things that really need to work together in order for you to play higher notes on the trumpet. If you're new to the channel my name is Aaron. Every week I post helpful trumpet tutorials to help folks learn how to play the trumpet so they can have more fun playing music on this instrument. Let's get started. The first thing I want to talk about is fast air. So simply think about it this way, the higher the note the faster the airstream needs to be. So let's pretend for a second that there's one candle across the room and you want to blow it out sitting or standing right where you are. Instinctively you're going to go ahead and take a nice breath and project that air forward really fast just like you're throwing a dart right across the room. Let's apply this idea of fast air to trumpet playing. First let's do it on wind patterns. On beat one I want you to blow, on beat two I want you to speed up that airstream, then rest on beats three and four. Let me demonstrate what I'm talking about. Also with this exercise make sure that your airstream is nice and continuous from slow to fast without any gaps in the airflow. For this exercise you can form your embouchure but if you don't know how to do that I do have a video just click it up top so you can learn how. Now if you have your mouthpiece let's try it with our mouthpieces. First let's do it with just air. The second time we do it we'll buzz from a lower pitch to a higher pitch. For each segment let's do four times each. So four times using wind patterns and then four times for buzzing a low pitch to a high pitch. Now you don't have to match my pitch exactly just focus on getting a higher pitch on beat two with faster air. For an added visual use your hand like you're about to throw a dart at the other side of the room. Although faster it will get you that higher note. Alone it won't allow you to play higher notes cleanly and efficiently. So the next thing I want to talk about is tongue arch. Since we only have three vowels and about seven different combinations for certain notes another main way that we control the pitch is by different tongue positions in the mouth. For trumpet playing or just brass playing in general I like to think of three main positions that we use in our mouths. So the first position is like a higher position which is E. The next one is a neutral position which is A and a lower position which is U. So practice saying E A U. Now when it comes to playing higher or lower notes just think about it this way. So the higher the note the higher the tongue position. The lower the note the lower the tongue position. One way to test this is to try to whistle. Now I'm a terrible whistler but it'll be something like this. Let's try like two notes. So there's going to be a lower note and then a higher note. You try that and see and notice how your tongue is moving inside the mouth. You should feel the middle part kind of the middle part of your tongue raise up a little bit to that higher note. So lower note to higher note. The third thing that you need in order to play higher notes is aperture control or what I like to call aperture awareness. Simply the aperture is the opening in the middle of your embouchure that lets air pass through. So instead of constantly thinking about how big or how small my aperture opening is I like to think about the airstream. What type of airstream am I using to get a certain note. So for a good visual I have two things here. I have some pasta some linguine pasta. I think that's the name of this pasta and then I have a pencil here. So if you notice the width of these two things how thin or thick these two things are you notice that this linguine is thinner right compared to this pencil. Let's say this pencil is for lower notes with a bigger airstream and then this pasta is for higher notes with a smaller airstream. Since we now have a more visual representation of a big airstream and a small airstream let's take a more kinesthetic approach by going back to wind patterns and using our hands. For a big airstream I want you to use your air to cover the entire palm of your hand. That's going to be your target. For a small airstream I want you to use your airstream as a laser beam that's pinpointing a small target in the middle of your palm. What I then encourage you to do is to practice transitioning gradually between the two airstreams. So start with a big one a big airstream and then transition to a small one and then right back to the bigger airstream. Doing this you might notice a couple things right so the first thing you should probably notice is when you transition from a bigger airstream to a smaller airstream the quantity of air kind of feels less even though it's the same speed you're not changing the speed you're just changing the width or the size of the airstream. The second thing you might notice is the actual sound of the air as you transition from a big airstream to a smaller airstream. As you get smaller and smaller you might notice that the sound of the airstream kind of resembles a hissing sound. The change in sound is somewhat of an indicator telling you that the air is actually speeding up without even you having to speed up the air yourself. So this is why aperture awareness or aperture control is one of the three elements. Most beginners don't realize that they're only using one of these elements to try to play higher notes. In order to have a smooth transition from note to note all of these elements have to work together. In part two of this series I'll go over the reasons why and how we can accomplish this. I would love to get your feedback let me know if this video has helped you or not by commenting below and hitting that like or that dislike button. And lastly I just want to say thank you for watching again my name is Aaron the Black Trumpeter and I'll see you in the next video.