Practice Space - The Practice Routine

All of the blog posts I have written so far lead you to this. If you REALLY want to improve, there is no better tool than this simple practice routine. Saying it is simple is misleading as the discipline required to break old habits of mindless repetition is very difficult.

What I have written below expands on the basic practice routine that I got from Vince Penzerella. I give my endless thanks to Vince for giving me this tool for efficient and effective practice.

STOP! 

What do you want to accomplish?

Before we even begin to practice, it is important for us to have goals. Do not be afraid of dreaming big! In the words of 19th century American psychologist William James "people by and large become what they think of themselves." This quote came to me from golf psychologist Dr. Bob Rotella who also said "people with big dreams achieve great things."

You should have a series of goals beginning with grand long term goals and becoming ever more detailed as we approach shorter term and daily goals. Especially as we approach the most short term goals, they must be realistic and allow for small successes along the way to reaching those more lofty long term goals.

For example, I may have at one point had the following list of goals.

Long Term Goals

• Have a long career in a major symphony orchestra
• Win and retain a major symphony orchestra position. 

Medium Term Goals

• Conquer my fear of Brandenburg 2
• Gain better control of my softest dynamics
• Play more effortlessly
• Arrive at audition comfortable that I have prepared well

Short Term Goals

• Become more comfortable with my Eb trumpet (upcoming Haydn performance)
• Get a good audition tape ready for summer festivals

Daily Goals

• Clarify my articulation on Fetes and Pines Mvt 1
• Better intonation and sound on Promenade from Pictures at an Exhibition  
• Practice well: Thoughtfully and Efficiently

In order to achieve any goals, Vince's approach is as follows. I may discuss orchestral excerpts, but it works for anything.

1) Mental Practice - Create: Creating your ideal trumpeter: (The real creative process)

This is the most powerful part of the process and what most people skip. Take a moment and close your eyes. Imagine yourself in your favorite performance space. Feel yourself on the stage and really immerse yourself in that environment. Look out into the space and see it in as much detail as you can. (In my mind, I visualize Boston's Symphony Hall.) Understand the size of the space, see the colors etc.  (One wonderful upside to this is that because I imagined while practicing that I was in Symphony Hall, it was also easier to imagine I was in my practice room while auditioning at Symphony Hall!)

Hear yourself begin to play whatever you are working on with your ideal trumpet sound. (For example, let's say the Promenade of Pictures at an Exhibition.) Really put yourself in the space and hear your ideal sound in as much detail as you can. I often imagine it with a shape and color so that I can see it interact with the space. This sound is THE most important thing you have to give the world as an artist. Whatever that sound is, the goal of everything we do is to get it out of your head and into someone else's.

Continue to hear more and more detail as you listen to your ideal sound. Draw your attention to the connections between notes, the direction of the phrases, etc. Really perform! Interact with the audience if you have one and tell a story. Take chances and allow yourself to imagine all that it could be.

This is a wonderful confidence building part of the process as I have rarely had anyone report that they heard missed notes in their heads! This part of practice can be done anywhere and for me often yields better results than time on the face. Treasure this!

Once you have defined what you want to sound like, pat yourself on the back and know that you are already ahead of 90% of your peers.

2) Press Record - Perform: Bringing your creation to life.

Hit the record button on your recording device and just play along with that wonderful sound you created in your head. Start with short passages. Promenade is a great one. Turn up the volume on your mental recording as high as it will go. Your awareness of the actual sound you create out the bell should be merely peripheral. Your goal should be to completely lose yourself in the sound you have created in your mind embracing it entirely as a real performance.

In this part of the process it is important to remember these important points:

• The mind cannot create and criticize at the same time.
• You cannot hear your own sound as others do from behind the bell.
• Internal vibration and compression narrows what you do hear.
• Once you hear a miss, it is too late to do anything about it, so why bother. 

Therefore, just turn the sound up on your great recording in your head and play along!

3) Press Play - Listen: Changing hats from performer to critic.

Changing into listening mode will free that critic which you have drowned out with the excessively loud amplifier you turned up to 11 in the last segment. It is important to separate this from performance and analysis.

Press play on your recording. While listening to what you have done, ask yourself Vince's question:

"Is what I am hearing on the tape the same as what I heard in my imagination?" 

Listen critically for all the details you created above. You can answer yes, no or I'm not sure.

If your answer is YES: 

• Pat your self on the back and enjoy your accomplishment! 
• Keep trying for more YES answers!
• Start again with more details or new material.

If your answer is NO:

• Pat yourself on the back and be glad that you know what you are looking for!
• Make a list of what you wish to improve and go to the wood shed. (See below)
• Stay connected to your ideal goal.

If you answer is I'M NOT SURE:

• Pat yourself on the back for admitting it!
• Spend more time in your imagination defining what you want.

You may find that you have a combination of answers on any given passage. That is fine! Be sure to congratulate yourself for where you stack up well against your ideal. This is part of building confidence for the future.

4) Back to the wood shed: Refining the vehicle of expression.

This is practice in the traditional sense and normally what we feel most comfortable doing. However, your practice is now informed by a much more detailed idea of what you hope to achieve and where you need improvement. Here is where your short and mid term goals are formed.

Goals: From what you want to improve, set a few goals for that day’s practice.

• A few which you can definitely achieve
• A few which will be attainable only with real diligent and focused attention.

Setting clear and realistic goals is of vital importance. A goal for me to "play with the ease of Allen Vizzutti" in the course of one session will only set me up to fail and erode my confidence. Aiming for it in a short passage is something which can be built upon. 

While working out your issues, keep the following important points in mind

• Rest as much as you play. This was first preached to me by Frank Kaderabek in high school. We build muscle when it is at rest. Make sure not to constantly tear down muscle to the point of failure! If you follow this routine and listen to what you have recorded, you already have that taken care of above. 
• Revisit your warm-up. Stay focused on a good approach. Refer to this earlier blog post about The Warmup 
• Stay connected to the music. Never lose sight of the fact that you are an artist. The goal is not to "not miss notes" but to express something uniquely yours through your instrument. Spend some more time in your imaginary concert hall if you find yourself losing focus. 
• Find musical solutions to technical problems. Charlie Schlueter is absolutely brilliant with this. Instead of trying to find a physical way to get a clearer slur, he could help you change the inflection of the line to get the desired result. Better musical decisions usually cause fewer technical challenges!
• Separate the components: This is also majorly influenced by Vince. His words were "You learn more away from your instrument than with it". Connect to the ideal sound in your head and:
• Deal with pitch alone with singing and buzzing
• Deal with articulation with simple wind patterns
• Slam your fingers to be more definite
• Realize that everything that has to move needs to move at the same time. If you approach all of the above with great rhythm, coordinating them is simple. 
• Take breaks: A fresh mind and body work best

Repeat: Start the process over

Start the process again and remember to keep the music and your ideal in the front of your mind. This can be repeated endlessly allowing you to remain fresh for very long stretches of practicing. Be vigilant as your mind is what tires first. Don’t fall into the trap of judgement while performing.

Best wishes for incredibly efficient practice!

Practice Space - The Warm Up

Many clinicians used to come for masterclasses armed with a sheet of whole notes and arpeggios to distribute. The "Bob Smith" warmup works for Bob and may work for you if you are thinking with "Bob's brain". My teacher Vince Penzerella used to respond to the question "What do you do for a warm-up?" with

"What does my warm-up have to do with you?"

The notes of my warmup may have some similarities from day to day, but what remains constant is the intent behind them. What any given person needs to play to be ready to perform on a given day will vary and what notes you play is not nearly important as what you are thinking and whether you are intellectually engaged in the process. You will see that I will not give you any specific notes to play, but an insight into what motivates my choice of what and how to play. Use this as an outline to suit your own needs. Make sure to keep it fluid and flexible to address problems that arise from one day to the next. Beware of a “routine” as it can become just that, routine.

What is a warm up? The purpose of a warmup is to get your body and mind ready to perform. A good warmup will make the physical machine of your body work smoothly and efficiently and will strengthen connections from the mind to that machine. Both are important! My mentor, Charlie Schlueter used to call his warmup "checking the templates". Hearing him warm up backstage at Symphony Hall was very enlightening.

When I watch athletes of just about any sport before they play, I see common elements.

- Stretching and form (posture)

- Easy isolated function

- Calibration (for this we need a constant)

I believe that these three elements also apply to us as brass players.

Stretching

Anyone who has observed a sporting event would have seen athletes slowly stretching the different muscle groups needed for their specific sport. This is of course to gently prepare for activity and prevent injury. What are those muscles for a brass player? Immediately most people would think of the small facial muscles, however there is a much more basic function earlier in the chain. Before the lips can produce a vibration, there must be fuel provided to them. Delivering air to the lips in the most efficient way should be your first order of business.

During one of my first lessons, Charlie drew this diagram in the front of my Arutiunian Concerto.

This is a great illustration of how to most efficiently move air. When most people hear "use more air" they assume that it means to use more effort and blow harder. With a full breath, we create much more power by allowing the fully expanded torso muscles to simply come back to rest. Charlie’s solution to nearly every difficulty you encounter is TAKE A BIGGER BREATH! It always works for me…

There is no way to expand your lungs' capacity as they could already expand well beyond the boundaries of our bodies. However, we can make sure that they expand to their maximum by reducing muscular tension and using proper posture.

The easiest and most helpful stretch is simply bending over at the waist and trying to touch your toes. (Object of this stretch is not to touch your toes, but to stretch the muscles of your back. Even if you cannot touch your toes, you will receive much benefit from this exercise.) Make sure to let your head hang so that your chin touches your chest. See how far your fingertips are from your toes. Now begin breathing slowly with the sound OH and release when you are at capacity by saying TOH. Imagine the air filling the spaces between your ribs, the kidneys, and the area under your arms. Do this for a few minutes and be aware of the tension that you feel in your neck, back and shoulders etc. Direct the focus of the air to those places and see if you can feel them expand and release. You may notice that your fingers have moved closer to your toes as a result of this. This is an exercise that you should do every day and often throughout the day. Incorporate other stretches for the rest of your torso into this part of your warmup as well.

With your body prepared to expand, you will want to take full advantage of this added capacity. Proper posture is vital to allowing you to breathe with maximum efficiency and to allow your body to resonate fully while playing. The goal is to allow your skeleton to support itself so that the muscles of your body can relax. Think long and tall with little to no muscular tension.

While standing, place your feet shoulder width apart with the outsides parallel. Unlock your knees and move your hips forward and back until you feel your weight evenly distributed between the balls and heels of your feet. Now allow your head to gently lift off of your shoulders with your chin remaining down closer to your chest. While sitting, strive for this standing posture above. Your feet should be parallel and your knees should be directly above the feet.

I recommend studying Alexander Technique as a way to improve your muscular function in all aspects of your life. It has been extremely helpful to me. You can also find similar benefits with most types of yoga as well.

After all of that, we are ready to build good breathing habits for your day. Keep track of your body tension and stretch throughout your practice session. Also be vigilant about your posture. With proper posture, you will find an immediate increase in the size and resonance of your sound. These are new habits that must be reinforced with repetition.

Isolated Function

One of the best things that I learned from Vince Penzerella was the concept of isolating the different components of playing to more efficiently address issues. I break them up into these three.

a) Air - causes vibration

There is no shortage of discussion of breathing in brass pedagogy. I would recommend studying the teachings of Arnold Jacobs as the most influential teacher of wind instruments of the 20th century. There is a lot of great information on the website devoted to his teaching www.windsongpress.com. Check out the videos and try some of the breathing devices. You may also wish to check out a wonderful series called The Breathing Gym with Patrick Sheridan and Sam Pilafian.

Simple breathing exercises such as ladder breathing to a metronome is helpful and doing ANYTHING represents a significant advantage over nothing. Regardless how you get there, the goal of this part of your warm up is to get free flowing efficient air movement. Using the simple syllables "OH" for inhalation and "TOH" for exhalation is a great start. Remember that the inhalation is a mirror image of what you wish to exhale.

b) Tongue - defines the duration of the vibration (articulation)

I gained quite a bit of speed and clarity in my articulation merely by practicing in the car. No, I did not have my horn on my face, but just doing "wind patterns". I believe that this term originated with Vincent Cichowicz and it is great practice for airflow and to practice different types of articulation. My own priority with articulation is to make it as simple as possible. I want the vowel sound from a sustained pitch to always remain, even in notes of shortest duration. And I want the consonant T or D in the articulation to be clear and firm, and release to that vowel as quickly as possible.

With a full breath, just begin to articulate one of your favorite excerpts or etudes (without the instrument). For me, Ravel Piano Concerto in G or Charlier Etude #1 are two good examples. Remember that we are now isolating the articulation from pitch. Avoid trying to producing an audible contour, but rather make each note sound the same. Slurred and repeated pitches should sound like one longer note. This will encourage a consistent articulation when you bring it back to the horn.

c) Lips - change the pitch of the vibration

My approach to pitch is that we play a fretless string instrument. Our instrument is simply singing with the vocal chords on the wrong side of the mouth! As with a string instrument or the voice, we can produce every small microtone between pitches as we buzz the mouthpiece.

This part of my warmup can start a variety of ways, but usually, I do the opposite of what most of us have learned. I start high and work low. This may take a moment of explanation.

The low and middle registers of the trumpet have the largest margin for error to still allow successful tone production. (I illustrate this playing off to the side or using my tongue as my bottom lip.) As we learned as children to play a low C or G and then filled in the gaps and ascended, we often play in the lower register with a less refined embouchure and less attention to pitch. This also sets us up to make the upper register difficult for young players to attain.

Some players even develop a second set to play in the upper register. This is usually a smaller aperture than the low set. Using two sets often gives a break between registers, which is difficult to traverse. With my own practice and what I advocate for my students, I use a high register set and bring it into the low register.

Buzzing the mouthpiece is the best way to isolate pitch production from the rest of the functions and also addresses the final part of the total warm up process - calibration. To calibrate anything, we need to have one fixed constant. In this case, I want absolutely constant air flow to fuel the pitch mechanism.

Beginning on any easily produced higher register pitch, buzz slowly down two octaves (for example High G to Low G) in a glissando at a MP dynamic. The slower that you perform the glissando, the better as you will feel the "breaks" and be able to connect through them. One of my former colleagues and good friend Matt Gaunt called this "the stupid exercise". It is important to be able to again re-ascend to your starting pitch so take a big breath. If you find that you are unable, it is likely that the intensity of your air stream has decreased as you descended or that your embouchure has shifted to a more open set along the way. Stretch each end of the scale a bit but don't worry too much about buzzing up to high C. A little above the staff, the mouthpiece shank begins to act as its' own bugle and tries to force you into a fundamental making buzzing up here very difficult.

Once we have connected high and low registers with glissando, we can begin to calibrate by using real tunes. This is the purpose of all of this work anyway!

Calibration

Taking simple tunes such as those Arban's art of phrasing, buzz them without articulation. Be expressive and connect across the rests to keep constant air. Remember, this is isolating the pitch part of the process, so continue to glissando and don't worry about articulations. Think of a great singer as you do this.

What we are doing here is calibrating the muscles to move precisely in response to the pitch signal in our heads. Just as we sing with the voice, we need nothing more than the picture of a sound in our heads to sing with the lips. Once we put the trumpet on, most of us become less concerned with that primary image and worry about all of the physical feelings and external judgement. The more time we spend buzzing the string instrument without the "frets" of the horn, the more we reinforce a strong connection from song in the head to an automatic body response to it. Then the trumpet doesn't have to bully us into a slot, but rather merely amplify a pure signal. This results in faster response and a sound which is more pure in all registers.

These principles should be revisited throughout your session and will become problem solving tools as you
work.

Best wishes and happy practicing!

Practice Space - Mental Space

Now that you have a good place to practice, you need to have the right mental approach to get maximum results. It is vital to find the focus necessary for good work.

With our lives increasingly busy, we tend to cram practice in the midst of other stresses. Real practice takes a focus and clarity of thought that demands our complete attention. Finding the time is hard enough. Once you have scheduled it, make sure that you get the most out of it. Find a way to leave all other thoughts behind. It is often easier to find this focus when you have a regularly scheduled practice time within a well-budgeted calendar. Optimally, find several shorter intervals during the day to keep your mind sharp.

Once you have a good space with plenty of focused time to practice, you are ready to build the new trumpet player within you. My goal is to help my students become as physically efficient and musically informed trumpet players as possible. Help set the stage for great practice before you begin.

1) Have adequate fuel for the machine - make sure that you have eaten a meal to fuel the brain. A grumbling stomach will distract you from the task at hand.

2) Have a notepad with you. Should distractions of "to-dos" arise, you can jot them down and continue.

3) Turn off notifications on your smart phone. I am guilty of being tied to my email.

4) Get rid of any other possible distractions that you can. Life does intervene, but do your best.

Now you are ready to begin.

The purpose of practice for me is simple: I want to improve the process of getting the sound in my head out through my chosen tool, the trumpet, so that it can enter the listener's ears and we can share that sound together.

Arnold Palmer, the great golfer said, "Practice with INTENTION and ATTENTION." These are wise words from a master, which truly apply to us as trumpet players. Amateur golfers often hit the driving range and just hit balls and watch where they go. For Arnold, there was always a clear target in mind and a purpose for what he was doing. How many of us have gone through our lives practicing scales mindlessly in front of the television?

For a long time, I was concerned with "putting time in". There is no doubt that at some point in all of our lives, we need to spend time developing the muscles which help us produce a sound. However, if we are not careful, the incorrect muscle memory that we develop early on can remain a burden throughout our careers. In many ways, some of the repertoire that I learned first is the most challenging for me now. The haphazard practice of youth ingrained habits that remain difficult to re-program. As a sort of vaccine against these habits, Norman Bolter, the fantastic former trombonist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and educator counsels his students to approach everything like it is their first time, even if it is a solo or etude they have played for decades.

I do a fun exercise with my students every once in a while. Just as they are about to play, I pull the trumpet away and ask them to sing the first note. It is amazing to them when they actually play the note and hear how far off they are. So many players get in the habit of just blowing into the horn and waiting to see what the note sounds like. This is backwards!!!

Imagine for a moment the creative process of other artists. Don't forget, you ARE an artist. A painter doesn't wait to see what the brush does, nor does a poet wait to see what words come out of his pencil. The creative process must begin with the intention in your mind to communicate a sound, an image, a texture etc. Years ago, I asked a young student named Madeleine to define music. Her response has always stuck with me. Even as a 6th grader, she understood; "Music is talking without words." We must always have a clear image of what we are trying to communicate or we are just potters throwing our clay on the wheel and hoping for the best.

That sound in your head is the target that Arnold Palmer was always hitting to on the range and on the course. It is that INTENTION to communicate the sound in your head that begins to make the physical process work. The rest of practice is ATTENTION to the details of what you are trying to communicate as well as to your physical habits. More on both to come!