Daily Practice

Table of Contents

Habit: Frequency, Duration, and Intensity

Remember: practicing is a form of training… of your body and your mind, but the mind comes first. You need clarity of purpose — what are you trying to accomplish? You need focus — to be constantly listening and evaluating yourself, and striving to play perfectly. You need discipline to stick with it in order to overcome challenges, but the self-awareness to recognize when it’s time to rest. 

Physically, you are training muscles, including:

  • breathing apparatus (your torso)
  • fingers
  • tongue
  • lip and facial muscles

When you learn scales, arpeggios, fingering and tonguing patterns, rhythms, etc., you are building blocks of muscle memory that can be called upon during sight-reading or a performance.

But most importantly, YOU ARE TRAINING YOUR BRAIN… to recognize patterns, to recognize stylistic cues, to solve technical and musical challenges, and to apply your imagination to making music. 

Practicing is not an event; it is a habit. While you can start with as little as 30 minutes per day (which could be 3×10 minutes, or 2×15 minutes), you should expect to increase the number of times your play each day to two or three (for a serious high-school player), or more (for a pro), and to increase the the duration and/or intensity of each session from 10 to as much as 60 minutes, each. Always be sure to maintain proper form — posture, embouchure, breathing. When you start to lose form, stop practicing and take a rest. 

Young players can skip a day or two each week (but never 2 in a row), but professionals rarely skip a day, and then only to rest after a hard period of playing.

  • At first, you practice to generate a beautiful tone quality, learn basic technical skills, and begin building your strength and endurance.
  • As you progress, you focus on refining those skills… faster tongue (including double and triple tonguing), faster fingers and more complex finger patterns, greater flexibility, expanded high range, etc. You also begin learning music that demands the use of these skills. 
  • As you approach your peak, practicing becomes more like sharpening a sword that gets a little dull every night, and you spend more time on the very specific demands of your performances.

In all cases, there are basic skills and routines that must be covered that address the full spectrum of demands on the performer. Remember: Frequency, then Duration, then Intensity.

What to Practice

Part 1: Fundamentals

  • Warm-up, including:
    • Breathing exercises
    • Lip buzzing
    • Mouthpiece buzzing
    • Long tones
      • You might take a short break at this point.
  • Flexibility exercises (lip slurs)
  • Technical studies (fingers, tongue)
      • Once your fingers and tongue are warmed up and challenged, your lips may be tired. Time to take a break.

Part 2: Music

Start with a quick warm-up just to get the blood flowing, then proceed with some combination of the following:

  • Etudes
  • Solos
  • Band and orchestra music
  • Improvisation

Part 3: Endurance and Range

Lip flexibilities and long melodic studies are excellent for building endurance. Endurance forms a strong foundation for Range, and should be the main focus until well developed.

Two or three days a week, you should test and push your limits of range and endurance, but always be sure to maintain a good embouchure. Do not crush your lips in search of higher notes! And try to keep your throat open. Higher range should be achieved by a combination of greater dynamic tension between your lip and facial muscles, the position and shaping of your tongue higher and more forward, and a faster airstream. But it is not just strength… there is technique to it that you learn by trial.

One way to learn to play high is to play songs and etudes that take you to the upper register. Maynard Ferguson claims he learned to play musically in the high range by playing the simple Arban songs in chapter VII. “The Art of Phrasing” in the Complete Conservatory Method — up an octave!

Such a day should always be followed by one or two relatively light days, in which you may not even practice 3 times. Always be conscious of Load and Fatigue. 

Below are just a few of the many exercises that will increase lip strength for endurance and range. See Trumpet Literature / Methods and Solos for more material.

  • Arban Complete Conservatory Method: “Studies on the Slur” (endurance)
  • Gordon Quinque Method
  • Schlossberg
  • Smith: Top Tones for the Trumpeter
  • Vizzutti
  • Marsalis rising triads
  • André: arpeggio+scales

Example Practice Sessions

Session 1 (35-40 minutes)

  • Stamp: Warm-ups + Studies
    • Breathing exercises (2 min)
    • break (1 min)
    • Lip buzzing (1-3 min)
    • break (1 min)
    • Mouthpiece buzzing (2-5 min)
    • break (1 min)
    • Exercise 3 (6 min)
    • break (1 min)
    • Exercise 4 (5 min)
    • break (1 min)
  • Irons: 27 Groups of Exercises
    • Exercise #7 (3 min)
    • break (1 min)
    • Exercise #8 (3 min)
    • break (1 min)
  • Vizzutti: Method, Book 1, Technical Studies, Exercise #1, p.32 only (6 minutes)
    • or Clarke: Technical Studies
    • or Plog: Fingering Studies, Book 1 or 2)
  • BREAK

You’ve just practiced 35-40 minutes, depending on how much your worked on the exercises and how fast you play them. During that time, you managed to exercise your breathing, lips, and fingers. Unless you have tongued some of the fingering exercises, you still need to work on tonguing, but that can happen in your next session.

Note that the greatest stress on your lips thus far has been with the later part of Stamp, which is stretching your range from pedal C to high C, and the Irons flexibility exercises, which test your endurance as well as your flexibility. 

Be sure to pay attention to the dynamic indications in the Stamp book, which ask you to stretch your dynamic range from mezzo-piano (mp) to forte (f). I actually work these from piano (p) or even pianissimo (pp) to double forte (ff). Then you got a bit of a “warm down” while pushing your fingers in the Vizzutti book.

Definitely use a metronome on all flexibility and finger exercises.  This challenges you to increase the speed (but be sure to maintain quality). And write down your personal record (PR) times in the book in pencil; you won’t know whether you are making progress unless you do. You might even consider marking the date of each PR time, to get a feel for how fast you are progressing (or not).