It is not what makes
me so hot, but I am a long-time student of Dr. Donald S. Reinhardt in Philadelphia, from 1978 until 1986 (last time I went to Philly before he died).
I am a guy who started on trumpet (in 1966), had many years of satisfactory trumpet playing, but started "falling apart" in 1978, the year I went to see Reinhardt. I was making great progress before suffering a lip injury in '79, which began a long period of unstable playing, a switch to valve trombone & bass trumpet, and finally back to trumpet successfully in 1995.
A couple of the moderators of other forums here know me and know my playing. I went to school with Tommy Hooten at University of South Florida (I was newly back on trumpet then), and I played in rehearsal bands in NYC with Tony Kadlek (I was a bass trumpet player then).
And as Nick said, yes, I toured with Maynard Ferguson in the fall of 2001 when Ernie Hammes couldn't get his passport through due to the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11/2001. I played 2nd trumpet, the jazz chair, and was recommended for the band by my good friend Jeff Rupert, a long-time tenor sax player for the Boss.
You can read my resume under the Rich Willey tab at
Boptism Music Publishing and you can listen to clips of me playing.
Now that all that has been said, back to this book which Nick risked so much to tout here: FocalPoint is a distillation of many of the concepts of Dr. Donald S. Reinhardt that have really helped me put my chops together, both as a trumpeter and as a valve trombonist/bass trumpeter.
This book tells you exactly how to gauge the amount of each section you ought to practice so you ought to never "hurt yourself" working out of this book. There have been many trumpet books written which don't require that you actually study with the guy who wrote it to make great progress.
There are 12 pages of technical studies that every trumpet player (including me) can benefit from. This book gives you a balanced "diet" of drills to work out the essentials of brass playing on a daily basis.
You can read about this book
here. I did not write this book to make money. I wrote it to pass along some great concepts that I learned from Reinhardt, concepts which are often confused because they appear in a book of text, not in a book of drills that implements them.