How I Gained An OCTAVE Of Range In No Time (and how you can too)

Maybe you've heard before it's the amount of air you put or the speed of the air that you're putting through to make your lips vibrate faster to make the frequency higher or maybe you've heard it's the tongue height but I think that the primary mechanism is that tightness in your lips which just like your vocal cords it it makes your face more ready to resonate at a higher frequency. The point of me playing that was not to be like hey look I can play this really weak double G and it doesn't even sound good. It was to say that nine months ago I could not play this note consistently. That was literally the top note that I could actually reliably hit and that's just a high Bb above the staff. So how did I go from can barely play a Bb above the staff to okay whatever being relatively comfortable uh playing up to high F and on piccolo even going up to Bb above uh above double G. How did I go from a high Bb on trumpet to double Bb on piccolo trumpet in literally nine months? Well in this video I'm going to tell you exactly what I did to get from point A to point B and how I plan on getting to point C which is actually mastering the thing and then I'll give you step by step what I think you should do to do that process faster than I did. So it started with me struggling really bad in school to play anything above the staff and embarrassing myself every time I had something that was above a G on top of the staff. So step one for me was realizing I desperately needed to make a change uh basically no matter what because this was going to be my career and you can only get so far if you can barely play a high C without like like I was literally clamping down barely getting any sound up sound out and now I'm able to at least have it there. So I realized I need to make a change but the problem was I didn't have the time. One of the big struggles with my journey is that I was always in school and playing in ensembles and preparing for auditions and stuff so I never had the time to really figure out exactly what my problem was and that's why the journey for me didn't start until summer when I had absolutely nothing to do. The first thing I did was try and look for these exercises and I was spamming these uh arpeggio type of exercises to see if I could increase my range somehow magically doing that. Well I got better at that exercise but I wasn't really adding any notes on top of that. At that point I remembered back in high school I had kind of a ridiculous range and I noticed that my horn angle in those old videos from high school used to go like this the higher I played so I started experimenting with that and for me that actually started to work a little bit but there was something still wrong. While I was starting to squeak out a little bit of higher notes I realized that the sound would just completely die. So after genuinely like three or four weeks of messing around with this concept I got the idea to bring my mouthpiece down a little bit while pulling my horn angle up. I still wasn't sounding right but that was the first time that I figured out how to get those notes to actually come out in like years. So that was my first step. It was experimentation with these little tiny factors in my playing to find what makes those extra higher notes come out for me. But before you grab your horn and try this don't do that because this is the first thing that I did and that does not mean it's the first that you should do because what I found out next was actually way more important. So I went through 80% of the next semester with this in mind and a bunch of other little tweaks I was making at the time and I had far less struggles than normal and then I stumbled across this Instagram reel where Chris Coletti said this. The change in the tautness of the muscles that are within the mouthpiece to become a higher resonant frequency. 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. Now this is the first time I've heard it worded quite like that and I was a little skeptical at first but after about five minutes of trying it out I realized what he said was perfect. I realized that Chris Coletti's explanation related your lips and facial muscles directly to your vocal cords and so I experimented with singing something and then playing it and instead of my vocal cords getting more tense and loose I just put that mechanism in my face and so I realized if I could combine this understanding of treating your lips and face just like vocal cords in that I use my sort of chest voice um the same way on the trumpet except instead of my vocal cords doing some of that work it's just my face if I could combine that with the understanding of the mouthpiece for me needs to stay lower on the face and for the higher notes the belt angle will come up a little bit. Those two simple understandings brought about so many more possibilities for me on this instrument and I'm going to teach you how you can apply that for yourself. So step one is understanding that tone comes first no matter what. I personally had to venture outside of the box of you know good tone for a little bit in order to discover what I needed to but I sincerely hope that you don't have to do that. So how do we maintain our tone? We maintain our vowel shape the entire time. For me it's always ah ah no matter what that whole time while it's still a serious work in progress for me I was trying to maintain I'm trying to maintain ah that entire time while changing basically the tension in my face and a little bit of my personalized horn angle that I need to change just a little bit it is what it is but otherwise the change in notes I'm trying to not let my jaw drop or come up that whole time it's just tension here and it's tension here so if you can sit here look in the mirror I'm not the same while tensing and sort of loosening those muscles so obviously I'm moving a lot more than I need to but on the horn it's a little bit easier because you know it keeps you there and that's the isolated primary variable that you're changing to make it happen. Maybe you've heard before it's the amount of air you put or the speed of the air that you're putting through to make your lips vibrate faster to make the frequency higher or maybe you've heard it's the tongue height but I think that the primary mechanism is that tightness in your lips which just like your vocal cords it it makes your face more ready to resonate at a higher frequency. Once you at least understand this concept of your facial muscles and your lip muscles inside of the cup become more and less tense to change the pitch without changing any of the shape in your face then I want you to start working on simple scales or arpeggios it doesn't matter what exercise you play while trying to apply this and maintaining your vowel shape and being aware of if your mouthpiece likes to go more up on your face or more down on your face and I think nine times out of ten if it tries to go one way if you simply hold it stationary and keep the sensation of the cup being sort of like in that middle comfortable spot no matter where you are in the register if you try and keep it in that same spot physically I think that that is most likely the answer for you. So for me if I don't do anything the cup will shift up on my face but if I simply apply the slightest amount of down pressure and just keep it in the same spot anchored in a very comfortable spot where I can play all the low notes and stuff if I keep it there when I go up the sound will for the most part maintain which in the past has just completely cut off for me. So for you this may or may not be an instant oh my gosh everything just clicked moment I think if I could go back in time and explain this to myself nine months ago or a year ago I would have pretty much instantly gotten a bit better and been able to play those more upper notes more easily but there's a chance that this concept of tightening and loosening your lip and face muscles doesn't quite click for you immediately so I would be as patient as you can be and understand that there is a high likelihood that that is a good thing for you to do but there's something else missing in your playing like for me it was this thing with mouthpiece down horn angle up a little bit such a weird little mechanical thing that I hated to have to find out but once I figured it out I was like oh that's like the exact opposite of how I've been playing so there's a chance that there's a small little tweak that you're going to have to find otherwise you will never you will never have access to anything above a high C and I think for 99% of people it's not really a genetic thing you can play these notes and you can sound good in general above the staff it is possible for almost everyone if you have even the smallest amount of talent it's there you just need to find it and it comes more naturally for some people little bonus tip for this video I spent the last nine years of playing the trumpet and I cannot do a lip trill to save my life and okay I'm not very good at it yet because I have literally spent almost probably under 30 minutes practicing this um but when I understood what Chris Coletti said I was suddenly able to pretty much do this by psychologically thinking now I don't think I'm doing any tongue motion there might be a small amount there um I used to try the tongue thing I could just not the next note would not slot it would do nothing for me it would just be well suddenly I that was not supposed to happen I literally only went oh scratch everything I okay that's not supposed to work well for the last like a million years I could not do that just by using my tongue but I was able to figure out for the first time by quickly tensing and loosening this and also you know doing like a little bit of vibrato at the same time and while while I'm doing that I'm thinking um and then I was suddenly able to do this really quick transition between intervals and just by understanding what we went over earlier in the video I was suddenly able to apply this in a much quicker fashion where it's very just like sporadic and so if you've never been able to do a lip trill after you figure out how to do what we went over earlier in the video I would recommend messing around uh with something slightly above the staff or in the staff just on the higher end it's easier on the higher end um just try and do it really fast and see if you can suddenly do a lip trill like what happened to me and so I have by no means mastered any of this yet this is all very new to me and like I spent like three years of my life having a high C just be like almost impossible for me and you know now there is that possibility and I hope that you can experience that but you have to understand I'm not consistent yet like I don't know if this note will come out like like I don't know like half of the time if it's gonna work because I'm I have like almost this trauma from the past of oh my gosh uh it's just so hard to play up there and I have to tense up so much and so it's an adjustment and you have to understand that the tension needs to come from the right place at the end of the day this is just what worked for me and I really hope it works for you um I've heard so many other stories of you know how people figured figured it out for themselves and none of it works for me um I think that this approach is a little bit more like holistic if that makes sense where I think it's more universal in that the primary mechanism I mean it almost feels obvious now that I know primary mechanism has to be the tension here um just like when I sing ah the only thing I'm really changing is the tension in my vocal cords and loosening and tightening like that's really the main thing changing try and keep the vowel shape the same and I hate to keep on saying the same things try and maintain your vowel shape we got to keep that sound at least good or decent um because nobody wants to hear you play high notes if it sounds like this if you're new to this channel hit the subscribe button if this video helped you at all hit the like button it helps so much and if you have any questions uh drop a comment and maybe I'll make a part two if everyone agrees that there's just something major missing in this video I hope you guys have a great day and I'll see you in the next one