How to be a cleaner, more accurate trumpet player:
It starts with your fundamental routine. Making sure that your very first notes of the day through the last notes of your day are made from a place of control, precision, and relaxation.
Making sure that you’re practicing with a metronome and that your practice mimics a performance situation is essential to applying practice room precision to performing. Many trumpet players practice without a metronome or a specific idea of time because it feels better than practicing with the constructs of time. Forcing themselves to be comfortable with specific parameters of time, tuning, and the music at hand will yield results that apply to the bandstand.
Being unforgiving of yourself when making mistakes is also necessary to build permanent habits of mistake-free playing.
One of the most significant contributors to excessive mistakes is the music being too tricky. You do want to challenge yourself in the practice room; however, if the music is too difficult, you will struggle and get comfortable playing with mistakes. When practicing, you should strive to improve; this means playing music within the tangible spectrum of your ability. If something is too difficult, you will make many mistakes. What do you do when music is so complicated that you must prepare for a musical endeavor? You need to make it easier for yourself. We can do this by slowing it down, adjusting the key, etc.. it is beyond challenging to get certain pieces of music up to speed and ready for performance when it is simply past our current abilities. If we spend too much time practicing things way above our abilities, we will create bad habits of playing in-accurately and forcing things to happen physically. The trick is to work gradually and progress consistently over time.
How do you keep the music fresh in your mind and body when preparing a long list of tunes? Run-throughs are highly effective. However, these are commonly riddled with mistakes that become bad habits. Putting run-throughs at the end of your practice sessions so that you are performing selections with minimal mistakes is a good approach. This should ensure a more accurate run-through. This also allows you to manage your energy, focusing all of your energy on the selected piece you’re working on at the beginning of the session.
Only running through the material that is genuinely ready for a run-through is also essential in ensuring mistake-free run-throughs. Being honest with yourself, and knowing that the focus you have when working on a new piece is essential to it being qualified for a run-through. Don’t let a piece move from one pile to another until it is ready. Continually work on the new piece daily until it is ready to be moved into the run-through list. If it gets moved to the run through pile prematurely, don’t hesitate to move it back.
Learning to stay in a place of accurate trumpet playing for as long as possible is essential for building good habits that will serve you when you are tired on the bandstand. When practicing at home, you can control your playing environment. Focus on maintaining effortless mistake free playing when you’re in control of what you play and how long you play. You ideally should walk away from the practice room feeling better than you went in. You ideally should feel like you have gas left in the tank.
