DaveLindgren

Hey Wilmer!

I hope you are well! I've always respected the heck out of you for how pro-music and anti-nonsense you are. At least that's how you've always come across to me since I began reading your posts on TPIN way back in the '90s. I had myself a pivotal moment the other day and feel compelled to share my epiphany with you and everyone else, and wanted to see if you had any input to share on this subject. I know that there's a lot of "potentially" bad information floating around about where to place pitches, and think discussing it could be of great help to the players who might be experiencing what I had been experiencing.

One week ago, I was a decent player, but had never felt that my fundamentals were where they should have been. My sound, tongue speed, and flexibility had always been passable, but not great. I had sort of made peace with not having a fast tongue or super-great flexibility. I had practiced them for endless hours over the years and not really done anything but wear myself out. I had enough technique within my prowess to perform most of the music that moved me, so that would have to be good enough.

I couldn't get over my sound issues, though. I had trouble practicing consistently because I just did not like my tone, and despite all the long tones and lip bends and lessons with this guy and that guy, I didn't seem to make any real headway. My lack of progress in this area made me realize that either there was something fundamentally wrong with the way I was playing, or for some reason my physique did not allow for a good sound.

Most people said "What do you mean? You sound fine to me. Practice more and play long tones every day if you want to improve your tone." The advice was to be expected, because I wasn't practicing with much consistency. It's what most of us would tell a student under any circumstance.

When I played for Kale Cumings, a Northwestern grad/former Cichowicz student, frequent sub with the San Francisco Symphony, great player, great teacher, and an all around great guy, he instantly heard that I was playing inefficiently. I've had 4 or 5 lessons with Kale, mostly working on flow studies and breathing, and every single lesson left me feeling like I was on cloud 9 and getting really close to a huge breakthrough, which turned out to be accurate.
Most helpful to me was his acknowledgement that I wasn't crazy, and that I was indeed playing and breathing with more effort than necessary. In hind sight, all of his breathing advice did have me playing higher on the pitches at every lesson, but unconsciously my mind was still telling my chops to aim low, thus negating some or even most of the benefits that better breathing should yield. Kale was extremely generous with his time for me, and we went over a lot of things, and I got a lot of extremely excellent advice that completely makes sense to me now that I didn't completely understand previously.

Here's where things changed for me....

Over the past week, the Atlantic Brass Quintet has been in town for a quintet seminar at Sonoma State University(it was the most fun I've had in years!), and I had the great fortune of being able to grab a quick 20 minute lesson with Andrew Sorg, a fantastic player from the Boston area who recently replaced Alex Holton who had left the quintet.

He asked what I wanted to work on, and I jumped right to my first concern: my tone quality. He asked me to play something easy and lyrical, so I played the slow 5/4 meter melody from one of the Ewald quintets(#1 maybe?). Right away he said "you're playing too low on the pitch center, lip it up to where the tone rings."

I thought to myself "Huh!? What in the heck is this guy talking about, better yet, what has he been smoking?"

So I played a C in the staff, and slowly lipped it up while he told me to just relax. I was lipping the note up and up and up. It was uncomfortably high and then I heard what I initially thought was a distortion in my tone and he said "stop right there, that's it. You got it. Do you hear how it just made the room ring? That's how you make a beautiful, professional sound. Now you sound just like me and Lou(Louis Hanzlik, the other ABQ trumpet). Take a deep breath, catch the air with your lips as you let out a sigh into the horn, and let the sound ride up to the top where it rings. That's how Lou and I play, that's how Bud Herseth and Phil Smith play. That's how all the best players play."

He then explained how he had been a good player, but found himself not advancing in his orchestra auditions for some reason. He then decided to go for a lesson with Jim Pandolfi(formerly of the Met). First thing Andrew did for Jim was lay out a nice Mahler 5 opening. He played the hell out of it and put down his horn. Jim put his hand up and yelled "You missed every f'n note! You didn't crack'em, but you need to play on the top of the pitch where it rings." I'm paraphrasing from memory of course, but that's the gist of it. I don't know if Jim actually yelled or swore at his new student, but it sure made for a great story!

From that first lesson with Jim Pandolfi, things took off for Andrew. His embouchure fixed itself, his playing became basically effortless, all the crud disappeared from his sound, and he went from not advancing to making final rounds in his auditions.

As for what it has done for me over the past few days... well, it has improved everything 1,000%.
I still have some tension in my breathing that I'm learning to let go of, but I'm really making epic strides forward.

Suddenly I can lip trill! I could almost lip trill before, but couldn't quite get enough speed to call it a trill. Today? Whoop, there it is.

My embouchure actually feels irrelevant now. It's simply a non-issue when my breathing is working correctly. Now this part is weird, but I feel like I can just about play anything equally well no matter where I put the mouthpiece(left, right, up, down) with the same beautiful sound. My favorite ITG Journal article immediately came to mind. In the Feb. '98 issue, Herseth said in his interview "If I'm tired, I just slip the mouthpiece over, if it's tired there too, I just slip it somewhere else." I read that in amazement, but now I get it. How cool is that!?

My sound now rings and projects. I used to feel like I had a round, clear sound up to a certain dynamic where it would suddenly hit a wall and turn into a brassy, laser-like sound. Now the only wall I hit is the one at the back of the hall! It just soars with a shimmering, ringing clarity all over the horn at all levels. I can't describe how strange it is for me to get used to this from my vantage point. I have to admit that from behind the horn, it sounds nothing like I thought it would. In a smaller room/practice room, it actually sounds like a hiss or something. Andrew said he went through the same thing when he first changed over to hitting the notes on top as well.

My tonguing is also taking off, which was really a great surprise for me. Kale had told me in my lessons that whenever we figured out what was holding me back from playing correctly, everything would fix itself, he was right and it is. Tonguing included. The way I had been playing, I could not tongue behind my front teeth with the horn on my face, probably because of some sort of weird tongue arch that I had unconsciously developed to compensate for the inefficiency of my set-up. I had to articulate through my teeth against my lips. It sounded fine, but I couldn't build up speed. I'm happy to report that this is no longer the case!

I guess I don't really have a specific question for you Wilmer, but I would like people who read this to do some experimenting to see if they are truly placing their pitch where they should, and to do so with a truly open mind. I would also encourage those who read this to try their experimentation while having somebody with a great set of ears listen and comment, ideally from a distance where they can really get a good picture of the sound. If you have anything to add, dispute, or elaborate on, please do.

I would also like to add that when I said "there's a lot of bad information out there," that it turned out to be bad for me, and it won't be the case for everyone. As my teacher Dan Norris said to me, for every piece of good information that's out there, there is somebody out there somewhere who completely over does it. I didn't know it, but I was one of those people.

I had always been of the thought that one of the best ways to achieve a great sound was to bend a pitch down and slowly bend it back up; when it sounds fattest, and that's your center, and you place all your notes there. Well, if you don't know what to listen for, this is not necessarily going to lead to a truly good sound. I can say with 100% confidence that if Andrew wasn't there coaching me as I played that C, telling my to play more gently and just let the pitch ride up, I would never have made the right sound. Even if I did make the sound, I would have dismissed it completely because it was not what I expected it to feel or sound like from my perspective!. In fact, I still have to be extremely careful because I've been so used to breathing with a lot of strength, just overpowering everything, that I have to remind myself to be more gentle in my approach. To quote Andrew and Jim "The tone is like the most delicate flower and can easily crushed."

I also think that there are some descriptions of tone qualities that are floating around that lead some people(read: me) away from getting a good sound. I had thought for years that I wanted to have a "fat, dark, orchestral sound." I now think that's just about the mother of all oxymorons.

When I think about a great orchestral sound today, the terms that come to mind are brilliant, clear, clean, compact, rich, shimmering, bright, silvery, ringing, maybe even complex. A good trumpet sound needs to be full of life and have vibrancy which I now feel is just not going to happen if the player(read: me) is thinking about dark, mellow sounds and aiming low.

I guess this post has been overly long winded, but I'm hoping I got some of you thinking. Maybe this is something you've never had hold you back, but maybe you will someday encounter a student with this problem, and now you will have this in the back of your head and give you a jumping off point.
Maybe "riding the top of the note" has been discussed before on TM, TH, or TPIN, but I sure didn't see it, and if I did I dismissed it.

I cannot convey how grateful I am to Andrew for telling me what I needed to hear. I just broke through the dreaded glass ceiling!

WOOHOO!

Dave

__________________
Dave Lindgren
2nd Trumpet, American Philharmonic Sonoma County
www.apsonoma.org
Trumpet Lessons
www.funmusiclessons.com
Mpc-Curry 1 1/4BC
Bb- Silver Bach 37/25, ML bore, MK Drawing nickelsilver semi-round unbraced tuning slide
C- Silver Bach 229/25H, L bore

deadicon

Sweet, good job...
thanks for posting

DaveLindgren

We have a good discussion going over on TH, too. Come chime in! Forum: trumpetherald.com

__________________
Dave Lindgren
2nd Trumpet, American Philharmonic Sonoma County
www.apsonoma.org
Trumpet Lessons
www.funmusiclessons.com
Mpc-Curry 1 1/4BC
Bb- Silver Bach 37/25, ML bore, MK Drawing nickelsilver semi-round unbraced tuning slide
C- Silver Bach 229/25H, L bore