How to Structure Your Practice Sessions:

First off, there are infinite ways to structure your practice sessions, and ultimately, the way that I judge a session of practice to be productive is in the following ways:

Fundamental Sessions:

• Helps me play the trumpet better (is balanced and ordered in a way that is conducive to my physical needs)

• Helps me play the trumpet more efficiently (it is focused on coordination and efficiency)

• I feel more relaxed and more in alignment with the trumpet afterward

• Helps to maintain balance in Trumpet playing

• Helps me to develop Trumpet skills

• Helps me be musically flexible

• Expands my musical skills

• Is influenced by my musical sessions that follow

• Teaches me to engage my brain while playing and be mindful of how things physically feel

• Repairs damage from yesterday

• Prepares me to have healthy Trumpet playing throughout the rest of my day

Sessions Covering Music:

• Have a specific goal with specific parameters to be achieved (Rhythm, Notes, Time, Tuning, Tone, Ease of Play)

• Build mental representations that are going to serve you during musical performance

• Having a specific aural model to follow (who are you listening to?)

• Have a method to check and inspect progress on specific goals and parameters that you are trying to improve (self-recording: perform, listen back, and problem solve)

• Practice with the urgency and focus of a pending audition

• Organized based on deadlines (work on what is next). If you don’t have deadlines, make them

• Organize based on level of incompetence (work on what you suck at most)

• Organized based on level of disinterest (work on what you don’t want to first)

• Helps to expand my technique on the trumpet

• Helps to expand my musical skills

• Is practiced in a way where accurate repetitions vastly outnumber inaccurate repetitions (confidence building)

Trumpet Fundamentals Should Include the Following Elements in Every Fundamentals Session:

• Warm up

• Tone/ sound development (in tune with self and tuner)

• Dynamics

• Flexibility

• Tonguing (various ways and articulation styles)

• Fingers

• Range

• Sight reading (transposition)

• Warm down

Practice sessions are highly personalized, and each person prefers specific ways to tackle the bullet points above. Taking time to reflect on what works best for you will result in a practice session that fulfills these benchmarks and also works with you, not against you. The order and duration of the elements of a fundamental session are very personal.

For example, I prefer warming up on the lead pipe, followed by Caruso's magic six notes, which take approximately 6 minutes, and then 30 minutes of flexibility. 15 minutes of multiple tonguing, five minutes of finger practice on various scale patterns, five minutes of range exercises that include shakes, and five minutes of sight-reading transposition, all concluded with a warm-down.

Organization is one of the main things we can all improve on. There are various applications and technologies that can help us with this organization. Spreadsheets and apps like Seconds Pro can keep us on track and help us manage our time, and apps like OneNote can organize our goals and progress. Practice journals are a good first step, but they simply do not provide enough organization for me. Think about how much organization is involved in a business. Your Trumpet playing is your business. Organize your practice sessions accordingly.

How much practice is enough practice? Unfortunately, there’s never gonna be enough time to practice. Our embouchure and focus will always limit how much we can play productively. We are always going to want more and wish for more. Two hours a day, which includes one hour of fundamentals and one hour of music practice, should be enough to get the job done. One additional hour of practice can be added if there are no additional rehearsals or gigs on a given day. That additional practice session should be as organized as any of the others.

When do we take a day off? This is both a scheduling issue and a chop repair issue. Never take a day off before an important performance. A day off will slightly impact your playing. Never take two days off unless you have a medical emergency. If you are constantly tearing down your chops, you will need more frequent days off. If you find that as you get towards the end of the week, you’re getting weaker and are in need of a day off. That is a sign that you need to examine your efficiency and thoughts on how to play the trumpet from a fundamental perspective. Examine time management, mouthpiece pressure management, and warm-down practices.

If this is all too much, try published practice routines like the Adams routine for starters, or even better, consult someone like me who can construct a customized, complete system for you.