Warming Up

[_trumpetgod_02]

Hey,

This is a post concerning the recent lessons with a Chichowitz student. Enjoy!

My philososophy of warming up prior to discussing this with Mr. Smith was this. That we need to prepare ourselves for playing. This should include plenty of long tones to get the lips buzzing effeciently through use of a continual buzz. Actually, about 10 min of different long tones. Then I would move into different warm up selections that I enjoy. Pretty much the Clarke technical studies. And then continue from there.

He liked what I wsa doing, aside from the long tones. He agreed that it is definitely a good idea to have the lips doing a continual buzzing, as with the long tones. But instead of just doing these on a single pitch, that they should move around and begin to expand the use of our range.
He also said that a warm up is exactly what I described it to be, getting ready to play. But that a warmup should take no longer than 15 minutes. This includes the whole register of the instrument. YES, all of it.
So this is the warm up that I believe he was describing.
1) Buzz into the mouthpiece, and try to hit all of the different registers, so that they are smoothly conected. (there shouldn't be any breaks in between). Do this, until you have worked through any real problem areas.
2) Then he would go to what he called "moving" long tones. Essentialy they were from Chichowitz's book "Flow Studies". He would play the arrangement of 2nd line G to ge above the staff and then back down to Low C. Then he would start expanding the range, go a little lower, and a little higher. Soon he was starting on G, going to high G and then way down into the pedal register. But this didn't take too long, and he didn't quite show me all of it, just a few here and there.
3) Then he would go back to the mouthpiece and work out any problems connecting the registers, if he was good there. He was done. Time to move on to bigger and better things.

He summed up the whole philosophy under this. Efficiency. That is the goal. The purpose of warming up, is to get ready to play. In other words, to excite the different surfaces of the lips that are required to play in the different registers. If you can train yourself to do that in no longer than 15, and do it correctly, why then should we take as much as an hour to do the same thing. Time is precious. Use it to get done what you need to do.

The next post will be about what he said about long tones. Hope this was interesting. Let me know what you guys think, I am really new to this forum and the ideas behind it.
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[_trumpetgod_02]

I should ad this. That he said he had two different big influences in his trumpet playing. And they both said the same thing about the warm up. That it should be as quick as possible. You should be ready to play at a moments notice. Even when "warming-up" you should still have the same feel as you are when performing. There is no time for garbage.

[_Don Herman]

Thanks, trumpetgod_02. Your lesson contained many of the same elements I hear from my teacher, especially warming up to play by playing as you warm up, and being ready to play at a moment's notice 9I'm still working on that one). I try to do a fairly simple warmup while focusing on the sound I need over the range I need, thinking about the music I'm to play. This seems to help me focus on the end result (the sound I want) rather than mindlessly doing some rote exercises with no real goal in mind.

Great stuff! - Don
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Don Herman/Monument, CO
"After silence, that which best expresses the inexpressible, is music." - Aldous Huxley