butxifxnot

Who here needs a warm-up to get out any sound? Who doesn't? What kind of warm-ups do both kinds need? How does it help? I've been experimenting for quite a while now and would appreciate suggestions on warm-ups (right now, I start at 100% and need to warm-up to keep it up there for as long as possible. If I don't warm-up, I go down from 100 fairly quickly. But some warm-ups, I've found, do more harm than good). Thoughts?

Derek Reaban

Every time I pick up the horn I do some type of warm-up. These warm-ups can vary significantly depending on what my playing activity will be and how I feel.

Maintenance Routine:
Let’s say I’m getting ready to do my standard maintenance routine for the day. If I’ve had a stressful day at work and my little boys are arguing with each other when I get home, I may be carrying more tension into this session than normal. I will target this during my warm-up.

1) Listen to some familiar music to get a strong concept of sound going in my head (I like Cecelia Bartoli or Renee Fleming). This is also very relaxing and helps to remind me how effortless music making should sound. About 3-5 minutes depending on the song.

2) Spend 2-3 minutes using a breathing bag. This is a great way to get the breathing mechanism going (relaxed inhale and exhale) as well as the secondary benefit of reducing accumulated daily tension.

3) Play the mouthpiece / leadpipe combination with the focus on immediacy of response. This is extremely important to assure sound production is working easily. Spend about a minute on this.

4) Play the Caruso 6-Note exercise using breath attacks at a comfortable dynamic and focusing on immediate response and ease of sound production. I may play this twice through if I feel I need it. This may take 2-3 minutes.

So that's about 10 minutes (and sometimes I'll just do 3 and 4 depending on how I feel).

Continue to my normal maintenance routine

Prior to a Lesson:
My weekly lessons are right after work and my first note of the day is at my instructor’s house. It’s about a 20-30 minute drive from work giving me time to listen to music as well as play the mouthpiece / leadpipe combination in the car (at traffic signals and on backed-up on ramps).

I will do a brief 6-Note exercise focusing on immediacy of response and ease of sound production (about 2 minutes) followed by a short rest. I will then do some single tonguing (about 1 minute) followed by some lip flexibilities and easy scales in the key of whatever I’m playing first in my lesson over my entire range (about 2 minutes). I’m ready to go in 5 minutes.

Prior to a Rehearsal or Concert:
Similar to a Lesson but I will arrive at least a half hour prior to the show and I go through about 15 minutes of playing and resting as described above and then look at the tricky passages or familiarize myself with the various transpositions on the concert.

trumpet blower88

Daily Practice:

Normaly I won't do to much of a warm up for just a half hour to an hour of practicing. I start by warming up my mouthpiece by just blowing through it for a minuet or so. Then I push the mouthpiece firmly on my lips and blow though as hard as I can, not a buzz, just air. (my instructors call that 'denting the chops') After that I'll buzz for about 10 seconds just to get the emboucher feeling right. Then to make sure I'm compleatly warmed up I play the C, D, E, F, and G scales one octive all in one breath.
(This usualy takes 3 to 5 minuets total)

Before I even begin to warm up I spend about twenty minuets doing breathing excersizes, I don't really include that in my "practicing" though because I do it at really any time during the day where I have nothing to do for 20 minuets.


Befor a Concert:

I get there about an hour early and just buzz some low pedal tones on my mouthpiece just to loosen up. I spend the next half hour or so just doing some mental excersizes to calm myself down, if I don't do this I get serious stage fright and freak out. Some of the things I do are just go and lay down somewhere quite (practice room, band office, ect), I breath in and out though my nose and visualize the numbers 1 and 2, 1 on the exhale, and 2 on the inhale. I visualize differant colors of numbers and differant colors of backgrounds, after doing this for about 10 minuets I feel compleatly relaxed. Another thing I do is take in a deep breath and imagine that I open up all my blood veins and everything and let the air flow out of my lungs, though my body, and out my fingertips and toes. The last thing I do is go though some of the difficult licks in my head and think about how someone like Wynton Marsalis would play it.
Once I'm ready mentaly I'll pick up the horn and play some nice soft low long tones focusing on finding the center of pitch and everything. Then I'll play the scales that are in each key of the pieces that we will be playing for the concert.


Marching Band:

We always warm up as a brass section for about half an hour. We start with long tones and chord flexibility things. We'll do differant scales and listen to how the differant intervals line up. We do all kinds of lip slurs and articulation patters, and then run though a bit of the tricky parts.

trumpetpimp

I find I need a warm up if I want to last the whole day or night. I can usually pick up the horn cold and get by if I have to but if I do that and play a church service I'm usually sweating by the end and I'm shot for the day.

Most days my warm up is 5-10 minutes.

MatthewMiller

I have about a 1 hour routine I go through at the beginning of each playing day that touches on all my basics. I should say I prefer to play that at the beginning of each day, but sometimes it's not possible (go from work to lesson, have to take up morning practice time to finish a paper that is due, etc.). I find that as long as I'm practicing on a consistent basis, I can get away with the one or two times this "no warmup" situation arises every month or so. Even then, I try to get to my lesson or ensemble early enough to at least play a flow study or 2. In my humble opinion, it seems that if you're playing a lot, it's kind of like you are always warmed up, and a warmup becomes more of a mental thing at that point. Again, that is just me; everyone is different.

butxifxnot

Woo...thanks for the books some of y'all gave me. I agree breathing and the mentality are actually the biggest things in warming up.

butxifxnot

Ever warm up badly? Where the bad warm-up just set the tone for your whole trumpet playing day? Does anyone have a remedy for resetting the trumpet-playing mode of the embouchure if, say, a bad warm-up (or bad playing for a few minutes to start) set you wrong?

trumpet blower88

If I ever have a few bad mins on the trumpet, I usualy just take a break and come back to it later. Or I'll practice my french horn, or the piano and then go back to the trumpet.

I'm the kind of guy that gets discouraged real easily, so if I keep playing when I'm not sounding to great it'll effect me for a few days, so I just have to take a break.

Another thing I'll try sometimes, is if its not working out on one mouth piece, I'll try another mouth piece for a while: 3C, or 7C, then if I get it to work out on that, I'll go back to the 1C.

MatthewMiller

Personally, when things aren't clicking, I find that the problem is rarely my chops. The problem is either that I'm not moving air very well, or that I don't have a desirable sound programmed in my head. Often a combination thereof.
If things aren't clicking, don't judge what's coming out of your bell. Just step back, re-program a good sound, and fire away again. More often than not, it will be much better. If things go badly for a while, sometimes it's better to just put the horn away for the rest of the day and not think about it. Hope that helps!

Castle Bravo

There is a guy I work with who goes by his own method ("ops chops"), and I believe he claims that warming up is a sign of weakness.

I disagree....