The newest teaching method to learn a brass instrument

the sound starts with PH

• Play a g1/ c2 /or e2 and hold it!
• Hold the mouthpiece with the thumb and index finger of your left hand while pushing the trumpet forward away from the mouthpiece with your right hand.
• Loosen the mouthpiece in the leadpipe first if it does not separate.
• Separate the mouthpiece and trumpet completely while still playing the note.
• If the tone is now higher on the mouthpiece than before on the instrument, you are building up too much tension in your body before starting the tone. The sequence ( inhale, close the lip, press to the lip, start the note ) must be optimized.
• If you start the given exercises in the Basebook for a few months on P, you will program yourself a more efficient sequence that will positively influence your entire trumpet playing.

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Nuanced exercises. Every day has different goals

Through differentiated exercises, good students are challenged and weaker ones are encouraged. This differentiation begins as early as the fourth week.

Every practice day is planned by me and so I always know what and how long the student is practicing. This gives me the opportunity to teach the student “proper” practice. The parents know what needs to be done each day and the student can check off each day and move on. He doesn’t have to repeat anything because the constant repetitions are incorporated into the concept in a varied form. This gives him the feeling that he is constantly progressing and learning something.

Relaxed cheeks

Every Trumpet Player who has found a technically correct blowing system for himself probably has his doubts with this statement, because he probably has the feeling that nothing at all changes in the embouchure from bottom to top. And ideally this is the case, but this is the final goal, which I can achieve via an intermediate step.

The beginner has 2 possibilities to slure downwards

• to fix outside; then the pressure from the instrument on the lip must become less and the lip in the mouthpiece becomes looser. This variant creates problems when it goes on again high after the deep passage, because the effort to close the lip is much too big. High losses in accuracy are the result.
• to fix inside; keep pressure on the lip when sluring down and relax cheeks. Some bass trombonists fill their cheeks with air when playing low notes. As long as the lip stays in position in the mouthpiece everything is fine.
  With bending and pedal tone exercises, there is the possibility of achieving an efficient setting of the lip that works in both the lower and upper register.

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Tongue/Tonguing

In the Basebook, the tounging (the tongue activity) is taught from fast to slow. By making the tongue work fast at the beginning, this minimizes the risk of blocking the air. In addition, these tounging exercises are done lying on the ground, as gravity helps to move the air along.

At this point 2 systems are meeting each other, and it is important to perceive them separately. While the air flows constantly, the tongue works mechanically (open, close, open, close). The closure (the “close”) is very important! Seen in slow motion, this moment when the tongue closes at the palate is used to prepare for the next sound (new grip and new tongue adjustment if necessary, while the air continues to push and just waits until the tongue releases everything again).To train this independence of the two levels is necessary to prevent the body from training itself a portioned and thrusting airflow.

2 thought pictures for tounging (Link)

Air control on a wind instrument is like bow control on a string instrument. The string player draws his bow evenly across his instrument until the end of the bow is reached. It doesn’t matter if the musician moves his left hand fast or slow, whether he plays high or low or makes an octave tie. With us wind players, it’s ideally the same. No matter whether I push, bind, play fast, slow, high or low – the air (the exhalation apparatus) essentially doesn’t care. The tongue, which is responsible for the tone length and pitch, works independently and decoupled from the air.
When I turn on the faucet, the water (in our case the air) flows out constantly. If I now use my index finger (tongue) to quickly cut the water jet from left to right, this will not affect the flow of water and thus my constant supply of water (air) is guaranteed. If I interrupt the air during short notes (often heard in marches in brass band music) the following happens: I interrupt the air supply at every bump as if I were constantly turning the faucet on and off. This means that I never build up a standing column of air and unfortunately get no support from this side. Problems with portioned segregated air is that I have to build each note from scratch. Losses in sound quality, accuracy, tuning and flexibility are the result. Constant air control is the best support and thus the best support a wind player can achieve. The prerequisite for this is the separation of the systems air/ fingers/ tongue

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Air/Finger/Tongue

If you manage to let these 3 areas work independently for you, you will not be able to understand many problems of worse trumpet players, because it “just” works for you. One such example would be the so-called “lip trills”.

It is often hard to explain something when you don’t know why it works. The best example of this can be found under relaxing cheeks.

Mouthpiece on buzzing

The vibrating lip is responsible for producing sound on a brass instrument. The mouthpiece or trumpet are only tools to transform these vibrations into a beautiful tone. In these exercises, the student is shown how the proper transition from buzzing to mouthpiece works. There are 3 rules to follow in this process.

Breathing with TES

Proper airflow is the most important thing on the wind instrument, but only professionals have figured out what proper airflow feels like. Everyone can improve their playing by learning to let the finger and air systems work separately. A beginner has to focus on a lot of things at the same time: proper fingering, proper pitch, proper tone length,…etc. My research has shown that a beginner stops the air flow briefly as soon as he has to think about one of these things. This also means that a false sense of correct airflow is stored in the body, making the idea of correct airflow a false one. With the TES, a correct airflow can be experienced. On the one hand the body is programmed with the correct airflow and on the other hand you control your airflow because you can hear the air.

The new concept in detail

The Basebook is not an attempt to reinvent trumpet playing. Many teachers and trumpet players have left in their textbooks for posterity all the exercises needed to play a brass instrument at the highest level. There are textbooks by Arban, Clarke, Colin, Stamp and many others, which leave no questions regarding perfect trumpet technique unanswered.

It is much more the attempt

• to understand the meaning of these exercises
• to close the gap from the first note on the instrument to the great exercises of the above mentioned people.
• to achieve the correct implementation of the exercises through specific instructions.
• to promote the building of a solid wind technique foundation on the instrument through a specific arrangement of varied practice programs.

Thus, the Basebook is THE complete technique school that fits perfectly with any other literature. For 9 weeks one uses this book exclusively. After that, the work can be considered a companion school, as the daily exercises do not exceed 15-20 minutes. At the same time, however, it can be seen as a complete method for learning a brass instrument.

chromatic from the beginning

The chromatic scale is the basis of this technique school. From a physical point of view, the semitone linkage offers the smallest resistance to overcome and must therefore be learned first. Bo Nilsson showed me how a semitone fixation must sound in order to be technically correct. The Basebook teaches semitones, whole tones, minor thirds, major thirds, and then natural tones. It is only when I make a natural note bond technically correct that the exercises of Colin,Walters, Irons, etc. help me.

In my work as a teacher, I have noticed that when preparing for exams, some students find it very difficult to work out the chromatic scale. I think that the main blame for this situation must be mine, as I have confronted the students with it much too late. If I use literature that is in C major for half a year, the student may find his first accidental ( new fingering ) difficult . If you look at it from a motor point of view, an F is equally easy to finger than an F#.

The chromatic scale in the Basebook starts on the first day!

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Instructions for doing it right

In my student days, the technical exercises by Colin, Stamp, Schlossberg,.. were a big topic along with etudes and concert literature. However, my playing hardly improved because it was Bo Nilsson who first showed me how to play the exercises so that they would support my development on the instrument. In the Basebook, the important exercises are presented with their sources of error in linked audio examples and videos. On the way to a good technique, it is a great advantage when I hear how the final result should sound.

The note c1 is no longer the first note

I use the tones des1 to g1 (all tones that can be reached from the natural tone g1). The natural tone c1 is not suitable for the beginning, because it does not provide a good basic setting of the lip, and it is therefore used much later. On this point, I had to learn a lot and be patient. Achieving the setting for the g1 may be a long road. Practicing around the g1 can be frustrating, as many students fail to achieve it. Is it better to give in to this and let the student play the notes from c1 down, or do I keep trying even if it takes months to achieve the desired result? I decided for the second, because in the first solution I have to hope for a miracle.

Finger positioning with TES

Finger position is often neglected because both the teacher and the student focus all their attention on tone production. Everything that is learned incorrectly at the beginning remains or can only be overwritten with a lot of effort. During the practice unit “Dry Training” there is the possibility to observe the posture of the instrument.

Automated processes

In this book, procedures are repeated until they are incorporated into the system, optimize it, become a system, and are thus automated: Why does a professional soccer player practice e.g. penalty kicks, free kicks and corner kicks at every training session? Not because he can’t do it yet! The procedure must be constantly repeated and trained so that the performance can be called up in any situation. This is exactly why good trumpet players practice exercises by Clarke, Stamp…. every day, even though they already know them.

Our starting note is g1

The lip tension of the natural tone g1 is ideal as output tension and is therefore worked out. You must know that this can often take months and years. Optimization of the embouchure is achieved in the Basebook by using bending exercises and pedal tones as early as the 15th week of lessons.Starting from the note g1, the range is extended chromatically upwards and downwards. The Basebook pushes the extremes. As mentioned, pedal tones are used very early in the low range, and the high range is exhausted with the mouthpiece exercises, since these are always played so high that no more notes come out of the mouthpiece.

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Buzzing

These exercises help to find an effective lip swing. The goal is a g1.