The Warm-Up

Table of Contents

Why Warm Up?

Warming up accompllishes several objectives:

  1. It is an opportunity to remind yourself of foundational things like posture, hand position, embouchure and proper breathing before you launch into more intellectually demanding work
  2. It loosens and increases blood flow to the various muscles used when playing, including lip, face, fingers, tongue, and even abdomen. This allows the blood to deliver more sustainable energy to the muscles, increasing their endurance. These muscles will literally get warmer from this increased blood flow, hence the term. 
  3. It softens the skin of the lip, which tends to callous ever so slightly from playing trumpet. This is why your lips can get chapped if you stop playing… the excess skin is sloughing off.

So we are trying to warm up lips, tongue, fingers, and abdomen (breathing). I typically start with breathing, unless my facial muscles are tight from a hard day before. In that case, I start by stretching, then a few breathing exercises, then easy lip and mouthpiece buzzing before proceeding to the trumpet. 

A thorough begin-the-day warm-up takes 10-30 minutes, depending on your playing level and how hard you worked the day before (it may only take a minute if you are still warm from a recent playing session). The following are described below. I address the rest on another page.

  • Stretching
  • Breathing exercises
  • Lip buzzing
  • Mouthpiece buzzing
  • Long tones

After the above, your posture, breathing, and embouchure are fully warmed up. Let’s go through each of these in detail. 

Elements of the Warm-Up

Stretching

Especially as you practice longer and more intensely, your facial muscles will respond as all exercised muscles tend to do — by getting tight. It helps with both recovery and preparation to keep these muscles loose and flexible. Stretching also increases blood flow and speeds muscle recovery. Below are a few stretching exercises you can try.

"Why-You's"

Silently perform the action of saying “Why You” four times, in slow motion, with exaggerated facial expression, as in “OOWAAAHAAEEEEEYEEOOOOOO…” As you say “why”, open your eyes wide and open your mouth as wide as you can. You should feel the stretch in your lips and facial muscles. As you transition to “you”, allow your eyes to squint and push your lips forward as far as possible. 

"Meows"

This is basically a backward “Why-You” but requires a different order of coordination of the muscles… MEEEE—AHHHH—OOHHH—OOOW. You will feel the stretch particularly during the AHH and OOHH parts of the cycle.

Inflate Cheeks

Close the lips and inflate your cheeks. You can use your tongue to compress the air and increase the stretch. 

Tongue Circles

This is a kind of interior massage. Run the tip of your tongue around the inside of cheeks and lips in a circle, clockwise, then counterclockwise. This is also a good exercise for the tongue. It is a relatively subtle, quiet stretch that can be done during a performance when you start feeling fatigued.

Putters

This is the classic, noisy flapping of the cheeks and lips… Close and relax your lips and blow through them, allowing them to flap. Seal the front of the teeth with your tongue to direct air into the cheeks and around the teeth through the lips to add the cheeks to the flapping. Obviously, don’t do this during performances, as it makes an unmusical noise!

Exterior Facial Massage

With the fingers of both hands, gently massage your facial muscles — on either side of the nose, under the cheekbones, the chin, jaw, temples, even to the top of the head. 

Breathing

Breath control is the most fundamental skill in trumpet playing. You play a wind instrument; your breath — your wind — is the fuel of your playing. Most important is your concept of what you want to produce — the Song — but without wind, it will not happen. Breathing exercises should:

  • Increase (maximize) your total breathing capacity (i.e. expand your lungs to your physical limit)
  • Increase the percentage of your total capacity that you can use comfortably and with control
  • Teach you to inhale fully, quickly, quietly, and without tension
  • Improve your control over the speed and energy of your exhalation (wind) while playing the instrument
  • Embed all of this as “muscle memory” so that you do it automatically while playing

Because normally we do not need to breathe as for playing a brass instrument, most students have poor breathing posture and are inclined to breathe too shallowly, and from the chest. This prevents them from getting a full “tank of gas”, limits their ability to support the air column, and limits their ability to create a large, rich sound. Students must understand that tone production starts in their body, and that any constriction in the air column – in the lungs, in the throat, or in the oral cavity – makes a tight, inefficient tone production system.

As an important side benefit, breathing exercises are excellent for relaxation and for your health, and are part of most yoga and meditation routines. They oxygenate your blood, massage your internal organs, reduce blood pressure, and strengthen a basic life function.

The Mechanism of Breathing

Your body takes air into the lungs as a result of the vacuum created by one of both of two mechanisms:

  1. The contraction of the diaphragm, which is normally arched upward, toward the lungs, but flattens downward during inhalation. This action causes the lungs to expand downward, and compresses the internal organs below the diaphragm (stomach, liver, kidneys, intestines), which tends to cause your soft lower abdomen (stomach, sides, back) to expand outward.
  2. The contraction of the intercostal muscles between and surrounding the ribs, which cause the ribcage and chest (and therefore lungs) to expand outward and upward.Proper breathing for wind instruments requires both. Early on, it can help to practice one, then the other, alone, and then in different order. The penultimate technique is to breathe from bottom, up, which will remind you to sit up straight. Ultimately, you will active both mechanisms simultaneously, in order to get the fastest, fullest breath.

Normal exhalation is therefore created by the relaxation of the inhalation muscles.

But playing trumpet is not just about “normal exhalation”… it requires exceptional power and control. The power and control of the airstream (a.k.a. wind) comes not from the diaphragm or ribs, but from the contraction of the abdominal muscles and, to a lesser extent, the lats and obliques. 

First Breathing Exercises

The following exercises will teach you what it feels like to breathe properly. Once you learn this, you can go straight to applying these techniques using the Daily Breathing Exercises further below. 

  1. Diaphragmatic breathing: Sit or stand with good posture, put your hands on your belly, and close your eyes. Let all your air out, then, fill up slowly with air, from the bottom, as if pulling air in through your belly button, or as if filling a water balloon with water. Keep your chest relaxed. This activates the diaphragmatic breathing apparatus. You should feel your belly expand outward. Now, relax the diaphragm and push the air up and out of your mouth using your abdominal muscles. Repeat a few times.
  2. Chest breathing: Sit or stand with good posture. Keeping your stomach muscles tight and “flat”, expand your ribcage outward and upward, pulling air in through your mouth. Keep your shoulders relaxed — don’t raise them toward your ears using your neck muscles. Let them rest on the expanding ribcage. Now, relax the ribcage (the intercostal muscles) and push the air out from the bottom. Repeat a few times until you get a feel for it. 
  3. Bottom-up breathing: Sit or stand with good posture, put your hands on your belly, and close your eyes. Let all your air out, then fill up slowly from the bottom (as in exercise 1), then expanding your ribcage (as in exercise 2). This will feel almost like a wave — your belly will expand outward, then may flatten in a bit as the ribcage expands. Now, relax the diaphragm and push the air up and out of your mouth using your abdominal muscles, and keeping your ribcage elevated. Remember to keep your shoulders relaxed! Repeat a few times.
  4. Coordinated breathing: Using good posture, take a slow breath using both diaphragm and chest. You should have a sense of everything expanding outward at the same time. Exhale by tightening the abdominal muscles and relaxing the ribcage while keeping it elevated. Gradually increase the speed of your inhalations and exhalations, pausing between each to prevent hyperventilation. You are now ready for the daily exercises listed below.

During actual playing, you will rarely use 100% of your lung capacity. In fact, you should not try; there is tension at the upper and lower extremes of your capacity. And for some passages, you don’t need a full breath. However, it is important to get a feel for the range of 0% to 100%, to expand that range, and to increase your comfort and your ability to deliver energy at levels closer to both ends (say, 5% to 95%), in order to improve your ability to deliver longer phrases with control.  

There are many different exercises below and in the appendices. All of them are useful. Some are strictly to expand your capacity. Some teach you to take a full breath, quickly. Some help you get a feel for various levels of capacity. You certainly do not have to do all of them every day, but spend a few minutes every day on breathing exercises, to stretch your breathing muscles and remind yourself of proper technique. Expect it to take about a week to become proficient at each exercise, and up to a year before it becomes a natural, integrated element of your playing.

Breathing exercises should be performed breathing in and out through the mouth. When breathing in, I find it can help to touch the tip of your relaxed tongue lightly to the back of the upper front teeth. This will tend to keep the back of your tongue down and the back of your throat relaxed and wide open. Alternatively, open up wide as if yawning. 

When breathing out, lower the tip of the tongue to a position behind the lower front teeth. The counts should be slow — about 1 per second (metronome at 60). 

Pace your slow inhalations such that you are half-full at the halfway point in the count and entirely full at the end. Similarly for the slow exhalations. You can also think in thirds — inhale ⅓ and pause without closing your throat, considering what that feels like, then inhale another ⅓ and pause, then the remaining ⅓. 

When inhaling, your rib cage will rise, but keep your neck and shoulders relaxed; they are not involved in breathing. To learn how this feels, try standing up as you do the exercises and swing your arms gently to keep shoulders relaxed. When sitting, shrug and relax periodically to relax your neck and shoulders.

Keep your tongue relaxed and your throat open. Think of the feeling of yawning. It may help to “pant” a  tiny bit while “holding” at the top of the exercises, to remind you to keep your throat open.

Especially with the fast (1 count) inhalation, it can be difficult to keep your throat open. Try placing a short tube, about 3-5 cm in diameter, between your teeth. I take the lid off a standard film canister and cut the bottom off, but you can also use a cardboard tube left over from paper toweling or toilet tissue (see image).

To check and refine the steadiness of your gradual exhalation, take your mouthpiece off and exhale through your instrument. This will amplify variations in the airstream. You can also blow on the back of your hand to feel the variations. 

As you are breathing, think: 

  • Fill from the bottom-up, like filling a pitcher of water. Expand your lower abdomen (below your ribs) first and for half of your inhalation, then expand ribs outward. 
  • Expand outward in all directions when you inhale (think “out” not “up”). Expand in all directions: stomach, sides and back.
  • When you exhale, push the air up from the bottom, keeping your support muscles firm and your ribcage elevated until the very end.

Daily Breathing Exercises

I got these exercises from James Stamp: Warm-ups + Studies, which is quite comprehensive as a warm-up method, including breathing, lip buzz, mouthpiece buzz, warmup and range studies.

I do some or all of these exercises at the beginning of the first practice session of each day.

  1. Breathe in for 8 counts, hold for 8 counts, then breathe out for 8 counts. Repeat 4x.
  2. In for 8, out for 1, hold for 8. Repeat 4x.
  3. In for 1, hold for 8, out for 8. Repeat 4x.
  4. Take the biggest possible breath and then keep adding a sipping breath until no more can be taken.
  5. In for 1, sip 8 times, out for 8
  6. Sit in chair, knees about 6 inches apart, and bend head forward and as far down as possible.  Then, inhale to full capacity, expanding the lower back.  Repeat several times and the intercostal area will be developed.
  7. Sit in chair, knees about 6 inches apart, and bend head forward and as far down as possible. Sit up as you inhale for 8. Bend over as you exhale for 8.
  8. Take the mouthpiece off of your trumpet, and blow great gusts of air through it. Try to get all of your air through the instrument in one big block, rather than “trailing off” at the end. This requires breath support from your diaphragm and abdomen. Be careful… at first you might get dizzy.  8 to 10 times are plenty after you get used to the exercise. Listen, and try to make the air move smoothly through the horn.

As you improve, gradually increase the counts.  Keep slow counts.

For more about Breathing, see the exercises and reading material listed in the Appendices.

Lip Buzzing

First, a few words about lip buzzing

  1. Lip buzzing is different from playing the instrument. When lip buzzing, your lips are vibrating against each other; when playing, your lips are separated, creating a vibrating column of air.
  2. The purpose of lip buzzing is to warm up and strengthen many of the muscles you will use when playing, without the pressure of the mouthpiece. If you can lip buzz, you can play the trumpet.
  3. Lip buzzing in the right way is also a way to correct the overbite embouchure that many students fall into when playing (see Lip Buzz Setup, below).

Lip buzzing is something you can do at any time, away from the instrument, in the car, while walking down the street, while watching TV or playing video games. You don’t need to spend a lot of time at this; a little goes a long way. Make sure you are setting your embouchure and tongue position properly (see the page on Embouchure). 

Lip Buzzing Setup

  1. Push your lower jaw forward; touch your front teeth together so that they are aligned, then separate slightly. 
  2. Lower lip in front of the upper lip, blow air up, past your nose. If you feel the air blowing your bangs (hair) up, you are doing it correctly.
  3. Tighten your “corners”, keeping your upper lip firm, and tighten your lower lip against the upper lip until you get a buzz. Be sure the air is continuing to blow upward.
  4. Pick a middle range note and buzz it. Start with an “air attack”… no tongue. Hold the note.
  5. Vary the pitch smoothly up and down, using tongue position and lip tension against your lips. 
  6. See if you can play scales, carefully controlling the pitch of each note (see Stamp: Warm-ups+Studies).

Mouthpiece Buzzing

You can accomplish a LOT, even without your instrument, by buzzing your mouthpiece. In fact, it is a great way to practice and strengthen your embouchure, and to learn to play with a fat, focused sound. And a mouthpiece can be carried anywhere, in pocket or purse (there are mouthpiece cases that can protect it from scratches).

Hold the mouthpiece shank loosely between the thumb and forefinger of the left hand.

After creating the proper embouchure (see above), place the mouthpiece, and initiate a buzz using air. 

Apply only as much pressure as needed, after adding air. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT!

Review the chapter on Embouchure regarding mouthpiece position, and how you use your lip and facial muscles to change the pitch of the buzz. The lips, jaw, tongue, and airstream work in a coordinated way to change pitches: 

  • The lips increase and decrease the dynamic tension between the center and surrounding muscles. 
  • The jaw stays forward (teeth aligned) and loose, and can open and close slightly. 
  • The tongue stays up in the back, and varies the cavity as when whistling to get different pitches.
  • The airstream increases in speed to go higher.

Following are several exercises that can be done using only the mouthpiece.

Sirens

I do a bit of Sirens, at minimum, at the beginning of nearly every practice day. These not only warm up your lip, they teach you how to shape your tongue and oral cavity to “vocalize” the note.

Start with your best embouchure on a comfortable, middle-register note and gradually and smoothly change the pitch up and down, above and below that note, over and over, gradually increasing the range in both directions (imagine you are gradually stretching a rubber band in both directions). Make sure the sound is fat and consistent, and that the pitch changes smoothly, focusing on using your tongue and air to minimize the pressure and strain on your lips, and that there are no awkward “dead spots” where you have to shift your embouchure. Keep your teeth aligned, and maintain an aperture (don’t clamp down). 

Your lips will relax away from your teeth going down, and tighten against your teeth going up. 

Sirens teach your to use an embouchure that works across the entire register (pitch range) of your instrument, not unlike a singer who learns to transition smoothly between “chest voice” and “head voice” or “falsetto”.

Scale Segments

Starting on a low C, play a short scale (i.e. C to G), up and down, trying to play each scale degree (C to G, then D to A, then E to B, etc.) steadily and in tune. A tuner (such as a smartphone tuning app) can help. 

See Stamp: Warm-ups+Studies

Songs on the Mouthpiece

As you improve, you can have fun playing your lessons or your favorite songs on your mouthpiece.

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Long Tones

It’s finally time to pick up the instrument!

Start with long, held notes and slow lip slurs. Like mouthpiece sirens, you start in the middle range (usually a second-line G) and descend using consecutive fingerings 0 – 2 – 1 – 12 – 23 – 13 – 123, often into the pedal register (see chapter on Pedal Tones). Then you gradually expand your range upward. The purpose here is to really feel each note… where is the resonant center of the note that produces the best tone quality? How do you coordinate air, lip, and tongue to change notes smoothly? 

There are MANY books that contain excellent warm up studies.  My favorites are:

  • Stamp: Warm-ups + Studies
  • Plog: Method, book 1

See the chapter on Trumpet Literature for more.

Pedal Tones

Pedal tones are any note that lies below the F# (fingering 123) at the bottom of the normal range of your instrument. There are really two “types” of pedal tones:

  1. False Notes: The notes immediately below F#, down to C#. These notes are not really on the trumpet, rather, they are “bent” from the notes between low C and low F#. Fingerings for these notes is the same as for the notes an octave higher, i.e. F = 1, E = 12, Eb = 23, etc. But they are actually notes bent down the interval of a fourth (5 half-steps) from the notes below low C. 
  2. True Pedal Notes: these are notes that are actually the fundamental notes of each fingering combination of the instrument (see About Trumpets / How Trumpets Work / The Harmonic Series). The fingerings are the same as an octave higher, i.e. C = 0 (open), B = 2, Bb = 1, etc. 

Pedal tones are a hard to play! But I find them very valuable for loosening up the embouchure before, during and after playing.

They also require that you learn how to focus notes exactly where you want them. The False Notes are really not there, so you have to force the note down to the target pitch. The Pedal Notes are there, but they tend to be flat, so you have to sort of “hold them up”… focus on supporting them to the highest pitch they allow you to play. 

I have created a couple of exercises that teach you to bend notes. Note bending (almost always bending the note down) is valuable not only for pedal tones, but as a way to “find the focus” of notes. You might not that the further apart the harmonics are, the further you can bend the note before it breaks down to the next harmonic.