Building Endurance For Adult Trumpet Players
Let's talk about some strategies to help you build endurance for long passages of music.
As an adult trumpet player you may find that it's getting tougher to get through a set of music. Around the 45-50 minutes you may begin to get tired.
Sometimes a regular church hymn can really wear you out.
Don't worry. These things are perfectly normal. It happens to the best of us, even the pros.
In this blog post, I will share how to manage fatigue so that you may get through a set of music even though you're tired.
Identifying your limits
Identifying your limits will require you to be self-aware. Learn your limitations by paying attention to your patterns.
Begin with your personal practice time.
Take note.
Where in your practice do you start to get tired? Is it after a certain amount of time with the horn on the face? Or is it after playing a specific piece of music or a specific exercise?
You want to take notice of when you're starting to feel that stress in the chops.
So identify that.
That will help to determine how you practice to correct this problem. How you practice is everything.
You could practice one exercise two different ways and get two different results; be sure to know why you're practicing since this will determine how you practice.
Big deal.
Practice Strategies
There are two primary ways to promote endurance in your practice and they are contrary to each other.
Option 1
The first option is to keep the horn on your face in what I call, the style of Caruso. This is after Carmine Caruso.
He's someone who wrote a method, Calisthenics for Brass, that helped instrumentalists strengthen their face. His whole philosophy had to do with building coordination of the muscles we use to play trumpet. And this will help your endurance.
A lot of people disagree with this philosophy, and I understand why. For some reason, there's some confusion about how to do the exercises properly. However, when done properly, they work.
So what you want to do is follow the rules of Caruso:
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tap your foot (use a metronome)
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keep the mouthpiece in contact with the lips (while engaging the muscles)
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keep the blow steady
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breathe through your nose
Option 2
The second option for building endurance is contrary to the Caruso method, because it includes rest.
This is where the concept of, rest as much as you play, comes into effect.
Don't take that phrase so literally.
The main concept is that you're mindful of taking the horn off of your face.
To achieve this, you can play an exercise in its entirety, and then rest for the amount of time it took you to play (a couple of minutes). Alternatively, you can play one line of music, and then rest (a few seconds).
The main idea is that you have the horn off of your face for a deliberate amount of time. This requires patience since most people just want to play as much as they can. Practicing this way can feel like nothing is going on but know that things are working.
So with that in mind, I want to give you a few ideas of how you can... accomplish this during a practice session:
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analyze what you just played while the horn is off your face.
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record yourself playing a line, then immediately listen back and analyze before playing again.
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sing your music while fingering the passages.
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practice air patterns while fingering.
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play piano while singing the melody you're learning.
The trumpet doesn't need to be on your face a hundred percent of the time during the practice session.
As a matter of fact, that should never be the case. And believe it or not, practicing in this way promotes endurance.
Conditioning the Body for Trumpet Playing
One thing that every living person should do is exercise. That should already be a part of our daily habit. But if you're serious about playing the horn you especially need to spend some time exercising.
The good news is, that can be absolutely anything that you enjoy, as long as you're getting your heart rate up.
So if you like to ride a bike, do that. If you like to swim, do that. If you like to walk do that. If you like to run, do that. If you like to skate, do it. If you like to play basketball, do that.
The the form of exercise is almost irrelevant. You just need to get the heart rate up.
Now, Claude Gordon taught that we need to keep our chest up for trumpet playing and that has proven beneficial in my practice. Keeping the chest up is a great way to keep that airway open and free so that wind can flow.
This is something you can do to condition yourself to have better endurance because your body will take good form. Good form makes trumpet playing easier.
Speaking of good form, make sure that your embouchure is in good form too.
Good form in the embouchure helps to make playing that instrument easier too and that's going to allow you to have greater endurance.
Here's what you can practice to really help your endurance along
Double down on flexibility.
Flexibility is a wonderful thing. I call it the master key to trumpet playing because the only way to be flexible is if you have coordination between the wind and the tongue.
Those things must work well together. . . at the same moment in time.
In my opinion, a trumpet player cannot practice flexibility enough and there are so many ways to approach it that you can spend a lifetime doing it.
So practice your:
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slurs
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practice your lip bends
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practice your pedal tones
This is all flexibility and this all will help to improve your endurance on the horn.
Fueling the Body for Performance
Finally, I want to talk about fueling your performance and when I say fueling your performance I simply mean the food and drink that you choose put into your body.
The fuel that you put into your body will help promote endurance on your instrument so if you are someone who drinks a lot of coffee then you're drying out your reed, which is your lips.
I learned this lesson myself the hard way. When you drink too much caffeine, your lips dry out and your endurance is lower than it otherwise would be. This begins a cycle of bad habits that lead to pressing the horn against your face in a way that's not conducive for trumpet playing.
Instead, drink more water to keep yourself hydrated. This promotes endurance. Notice how these tips are tips that we should be doing to take care of ourselves anyway, independently of trumpet.
And in that same line of thinking, eating healthy meals can help you be at your best for trumpet playing. A lot of greens, vegetables, nuts and seeds, and oils. One of my favorite oils to consume before I teach or before I perform is MCT oil since it helps the brain to lock into focus.
Breathing techniques for efficiency
There are a lot of options when it comes to breathing techniques. There are certain breathing exercises that one can do that would help to expand your capacity.
There are different exercises that one could do that would help you to play longer phrases in music.
For this reason, whenever you choose a breathing exercise, be certain that you know the goal that you have before you so that you're practicing the right thing for you.
If you get into some of Claude Gordon's teachings you'll notice that he promotes breathing with the chest up. There are certain specific exercises that he has his students do for the purpose of keeping the chest up.
This is what I call, practicing good form. If you practice good form the other things will fall into place. My tip for you is to practice breathing exercises away from the trumpet with your chest up and with your shoulder blades squeeze together in the back while keeping your chin at an open angle so that your breath will not be restricted.
This will help your trumpet playing.
Bonus tip for you
If you have the luxury of having many months to prepare one piece of music and that piece of music is a long blow then I have a tip for you.
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Practice one line each day, slowly. Practice it backward and forward. In that order. This will help to make sure that you're accurate but it also will help you to build endurance.
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Add one line of music each day so that on the last day you will be playing the piece in its entirety. By the time you get there, you should have endurance for that piece of music.
In summary, when it comes to gaining endurance on trumpet, you have a lot of options. First, you want to identify when you get most fatigued. The answer to this question can determine how you choose to solve this problem. Some choices include practicing the Caruso Method, resting often during practice, regular daily exercise, doubling down on your flexibility studies, and even eating healthy meals. Just know that everything works together so be sure not to take short cuts.
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