199th day sober. I listed a bunch of Ebay stuff last night and have the trumpet all put back together, and have watched a few interviews with Bobby Shew by now.
The guy's really interesting - claims he never took a trumpet lesson in his life, yet it appears he went to college but I can't find anything on what degree etc. If he took a degree in music he certainly slogged through a lot more of the classical "Arbanized" material than he lets on, but after college he went right into the military and playing in the NORAD band, so who knows, maybe his degree was in English or something, something easy, and he was done with it once he could audition into the band.
It took me far too long to realized, getting an easy degree in something like Psychology would have served me better than trying to get an EE degree I had neither the mathematical background, the time, or the stamina to get, would have served me far better. Because once you have the degree, you can take a few courses in programming and hey presto you're a software engineer or an IT expert or any of a number of good-paying things, and you never have to pass thermodynamics or any of the hard-ass jobs they haze you with in engineering.
In any case, Bobby knew he was going to play trumpet anyway so that was that.
I've heard of "the wedge method" for a while but always avoided it because I thought it was some way of "wedging" your lips into the mouthpiece or some dumb thing like that, but it turns out it's a method of breathing that Bobby learned from Maynard Ferguson that originates from yoga. And all it means is training for really good abdominal support.
I think the idea with most trumpet training is the student will learn it on their own, intuitively. And if they don't, well, they just don't have "talent". That's why Claude Gordon advocated all those exercises aimed at beating the concept into you. And why another trumpet book I had advised that the student wrap a sort of band around their middle, if needed, at first.
I no longer feel so weird about being sour on teachers, thanks to Mr. Shew. He talks about the stuff teachers will have students drill and drill on, taking the fun and life out of music, and a lot of it not translating to actual playing of actual music. In Bobby's case, it was jazz. Those Claude Gordon exercises one teacher had me do, didn't really do any more than I'd have done on my own in the same time, and probably a bit less in the way of progress. And that particular teacher was big on teaching me to double-tongue and got a big kick out of it. "I've never taught any student over 30 how to double-tongue!" he said. I was through most of my 40s. It's nice to know, but so far I've not really used that skill.
Another, earlier, teacher was/is also a Claude Gordon nut and one day treated me to a listen of a record his mom had given him when he was about 12, of Maynard Farguson doing his thing. It was awful, it sounded like slaughtering day down at the ol' pig farm. This teacher raved manically about how it convinced him that trumpet is his life, etc. This guy was also big on yelling. I'm not naming names and I like to see enthusiasm, but there's a reason I'm not going back to him even though I could afford it these days. And I'm sure not a fan of Maynard and that whistling teakettle stuff.
With my back still screwed up, it hurts to do the "prana" breathing stuff but at least I know what to aim for. I think I happened across it on my own, years ago. But since I didn't have a clear concept of what I was trying to do, I lost it again. But now apparently it's 1000s of years of yoga to Maynard Ferguson to Bobby Shew to, well, me. And in a week or so my back will be fine and I'll be able to cough and sneeze properly again and can work on prana breathing with regard to playing the trumpet.
The theory behind this, according to Shew, is that without this technique, one plays "up in their chest and head" and uses too much tension in the lips and too small an aperture, leading to embouchure problems. Depending on the player and the style, this can work OK - for instance Chet Baker made a career out of playing softly and not too high. But for the average player, Why make things hard on yourself?
He also emphasizes concentrating on the music you want to play more than drills. That's starting to make a lot of sense to me these days. It's just too easy to get bored and frustrated.
Last night I also ordered a gun cleaning kit that I think might be really good for trumpet cleaning. It has flexible "rods" that are plastic coated that standard gun cleaning brushes etc screw into. One thing that really bugs me is that trumpet cleaning tools seem to be universally of "toy" quality. So if you have a Monette that costs as much as a good used car, you're still stuck using the same cleaning tools middle-schoolers use.
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