Taught by renowned trumpet player
Charlie Porter
Before we start thinking about taking enormous breaths on the trumpet, check in with your fundamentals. Can you take a relaxed inhale of sufficient capacity, exhale in time, play with flow, and keep your tongue engaged - all while playing musically? Charlie Porter provides exercises and strategies for these skills and more in his breathing basics course.
Breathing Fundamentals
In his first lesson, Charlie explores proper inhalation and exhalation, how to maintain good posture and form, and why our breathing should match the style of the music we're playing.
Flow
Everything that we play on the trumpet is a flow study. Our air has to remain moving with a sufficient degree of support throughout everything we play. For this lesson, Charlie works with a selection of etudes and explores how we can practice continuity and air support in a variety of contexts, both with and without the tongue. His famous "Straight Line Approach" makes an appearance here.
Capacity
Many of us might be shallow breathers in our daily lives. As Charlie demonstrates, brass playing requires a massive volume of air! In this lesson, he provides some exercises you can do in five minutes or less to improve your functional lung capacity without introducing further tension.
Compression
Playing in the extreme upper register can benefit from the idea of "spinning" the air through the trumpet. Charlie explains how we can practice this with the mouthpiece, what it feels like to engage the muscles of the abdomen and back, and some basics to keep in mind when it comes to equipment for high notes.
Click here to download the course workbook PDF and see the full syllabus →After studying at Juilliard with Wynton Marsalis, Charlie Porter has made a name for himself as one of the most virtuosic and exciting trumpeters in the classical and jazz spaces, teaching today at New York University.
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