How to Play High Notes on the Trumpet (ft. Chris Coletti)

Brass players are actually not really aware of how we ascend in the range. And if you were to ask even many professionals, you would probably get a whole range of answers that are so incompatible with each other that either they're really thinking about it differently or they're just not really describing the process accurately. One thing that's important to note is that muscles only pull. So if I were to say, if somebody were to tell you to flex your bicep, for example, what they usually mean is for you to make your bicep hard and then to release it would be like this. So flex, not flex. But if you were actually to just flex your bicep, you would just close your elbow, right? That's flexing your bicep. Your bicep pulls and the arm closes. So when you're actually doing what most people are expecting you to do when you flex your bicep is to indeed flex your bicep, but you're also, again, subconsciously flexing the muscles that are in the opposing direction, like in your tricep and other places, so that the motion is, so that there's no motion, there's just muscles tensioning. So muscles loose, muscles tight. Muscles loose, muscles tight. But there's no motion, right? This is truly just flexing the biceps and this is flexing and resisting the motion change. And so this is important because that's actually how we play higher. Everything has its own natural frequency, right? You can, with a low note, your lips want, like a drum head, want to resonate. I'm saying the word want, of course lips don't want anything, but they have a natural resonant frequency when they're constrained by the rim of the mouthpiece and then the cup depth and all that. And a lower note generally is going to be pretty loose lips. And a higher note is going to resonate higher when the lip muscles are more flexed. Now, what I'm saying here can be confusing because I'm not saying that one should take this information and change how you play. Because what people usually do when they try to flex their lips to play higher, is they wind up closing them. What we're actually doing when we're playing well is we are flexing our lips, but maintaining more or less the same aperture size. So I've heard people say that they think that the air speed is what changes a note. And I've also heard people say that it's the tongue height that changes the note. And I've also heard that aperture size changes the note. And actually I found through my own experimentation, that it's really those things can be involved, but they're not the primary mechanism that changes a note to the next partial. What is the primary mechanism is the change in the tautness of the muscles that are within the mouthpiece to become a higher resonant frequency. So an analogy is a drum head, because a drum head that is tuned to let's say a C or something like that, you can speak into it or walk by it or tap it or blow on it, and it'll resonate a C every single time. You can get a flabby drum head and you can get it to speak, but you might have to hit it really hard to get it to ring. Before I go into any more of the anatomy of this, take your mouthpiece and just notice that when you change range, you're already doing exactly this. Your muscle, and by muscles I mean the muscles in your entire face, right? Not just your lips, not just your corners, nothing specifically, it's your entire face muscles, are actually alternating between being tense and loose. And the way you do that is that you resist the motion. So if you were to like actually open your mouth like that, and then resist that motion, but allow the flex to happen. So that's a high note, this is a low note. High note, low note, aperture, lips position are all pretty much the same. So just see if you can notice that that's actually what's going on already when you play. The mouthpiece is useful because again on trumpet, we often blow harder to go higher, which again is not skillful, but it does work. Pushing harder on the mouthpiece, again it's not a great way to do it, but it does work. But on the mouthpiece, pushing harder and blowing harder just doesn't help. It's a way of revealing to yourself how your chops actually change range. It is literally like, right? Your arm isn't changing, but your biceps getting hardened, softened. In the same way, it's very subtle. I'm not going that high, I'm not going that low. So in terms of what you do as a trumpet player, you're actually quite good at changing the tension of your lips without changing their position. Now you can also question some of the other things that you may have heard. Aren't you changing your aperture size? Aren't you making your aperture small when you go high? And again, maybe it's changing slightly, but it's not the mechanism that's changing the note. And here's an example. You could play a note and change your aperture size, and without much effort at all, not have the note change. And I'm making extreme aperture size changes. Tight, small, big and open. If that was the primary mechanism for changing partials, I would be blasting all over the harmonic series, and clearly that wasn't happening. Another thing with air speed, you can do an experiment yourself and change the air speed when you play, and notice that it doesn't change the range. The volume, right, but it doesn't change the note. Now when you do something like that, you'll notice there's a slight flexing of the lips and the face. And you probably also notice some motion in your tongue. Now in a lot of the old pedagogical books, Arbenz, I think Schlossberg gets into this, they talk about tongue position as relating to range. So a low tongue position relates to a low note, and a high tongue position relates to a high note. But with new fMRI data, you can see top players, somebody like Sarah Willis, who's in the Berlin Philharmonic horn section, unbelievable player. There's easily found YouTube videos of her playing, and you can see that her tongue is certainly involved in changing the partial, but it comes back down after the note changes. So it's not... It's more like... And what's interesting in that video where she does the whole range of the harmonic series, and on horn it's an even bigger range than on trumpet, she goes... and then takes a breath and starts with her tongue down again. So clearly the tongue is involved, but its position doesn't change the range. Its motion seems to bump the next partial up or down. I've also talked with trumpet players who, despite having long successful careers in their recent times, discovered that by not moving their tongue higher when they go higher, their range actually improves. This struck me because, of course, I remember the day my teacher told me to use my tongue to change partials, and it was like, oh wow, how come nobody ever told me this before? It's so helpful. And then here I had somebody, one of the top trumpet players, telling me that their recent discovery was that they didn't know any... that they no longer needed to use their tongue to change range. So what was I supposed to do with that? But I think that speaks to the fact that the tongue is involved, but that its position doesn't equal a note. So as a trumpet player, one of the most important things that we master is the harmonic series. In pre-Valve times, that was the only thing we had to work on. Intonation, but more importantly, mastering the harmonic series. All trills were lip trills. Now lip trills are almost like an extra thing. But I would structure your practice to prioritize figuring out how to lip trill consistently, and let that be the measure for that having figured it out. It can be useful musically. But I think it's helpful when you're hearing instruction from varying points of view about how we play the trumpet, to know what's actually going on anatomically, and in terms of physics, and even neurology, if you want to get into that. So one thing I like to look at is there's an app, there are many apps out there, or books where you can see the human anatomy, and just get a little bit more of a clear picture of what the muscles in our face looks like, if you're interested. And what I first was struck by is that the reason it feels, and we're often told to focus on strengthening, or flexing, or focusing on our corners, is because there's a muscle that's mounted on our cheekbone that actually wraps around one of the lip muscles, right? I don't know the terminologies for all these muscles, but the point is you could see it that there's a point there where one muscle pulls the cheeks away, and then the muscles that pretty much look like a lip shape can counter that. And just those two muscles alone can feel quite focused on the corners, but it really isn't just the corners. It's just that the corner is where these muscles lock in. Now there's also muscles that take the bottom lip muscle and are attached to your chin, and then other ones that are attached all along the way here, right? You're going to see a cool graphic, hopefully, of all the different muscles that are involved. It's way more complicated than you could ever consciously control, obviously. So all of this is to say that it's the resistance of two pulling muscles that creates tension. This is a low note. This is a high note. Low, high. And so there's no motion. There's no change in position. There is a change in tension, but again, tensioning and closing the aperture is common, and that's not helpful. So you basically want to isolate your aperture so that when it's at rest, that space doesn't change, regardless of how high or low you're playing in general.