The Ultimate Trumpet Podcast from TrumpetStudio

Two words half the brass world uses as a sentence and the other half uses as an excuse. This episode asks what song and wind actually was in the room where Jacobs said it.The phrase is true, and it was true in the room where Jacobs actually said it. Song carried most of the intellectual weight of playing and wind carried the rest. What the sentence stopped being is a description of the work. It is now an ending for a conversation that should have just started.The bench in Jacobs' studio was full of things that have nothing to do with music: a Voldyne reading vital capacity to about five liters, an Inspiron flipped for the exhale, a Breath Builder taking roughly fourteen ounces, air bags, a peak flow meter, and a compound gauge he bolted to a drilled pipe.Around 1960 Jacobs and a few Chicago Symphony colleagues sat through real pulmonary function testing at a University of Chicago hospital, and he wrote a long joint piece on respiration with Dr. David Cugell at Northwestern. In 1982 he put inexpensive versions into the world so a student could own it.He kept himself on the same scale he held everyone else to. His vital capacity ran close to five liters early in his career, dropped to about two point seven five liters after cancer surgery, and he worked it back to somewhere between three point eight and four point four.The load-bearing part the slogan dropped: Jacobs quarantined the mechanical work on purpose. The gauges came out away from the instrument. The split describes what should be in your head in the moment of performance, not how you spend the practice week.Strip the second half out and the phrase collapses into think musically and blow, which is not a philosophy, it is a permission slip. There is no baseline, no device, no number, and so there is no evidence that anything has improved.The Harold Hill / The Music Man caricature was named most clearly in a 2015 piece by Frank Byrne and Michael Grose, both Jacobs admirers, and they were writing the accusation back at its skeptics, not at Jacobs. His original critics accused him of having no mechanics. His followers now quote him as proof that mechanics do not matter.Resources Mentioned in the podcast:The Ultimate Warmup for TrumpetThe Ultimate Technical Study for TrumpetThe Ultimate Wedding Book for TrumpetAvailable at: https://TrumpetStudio.comTrumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

The label half the brass world uses and none of it can quite define. This episode asks what the Chicago School actually is, and what it never was.The word school implies a building, a faculty, a curriculum, a degree. None of those things exist, and the two men who give the label its name never wrote a method together and never agreed on a sequence of steps.Jacobs and Herseth did not even deliver in the same language. Jacobs was a talking teacher who sang through exercises, had students walk and stand on one foot, and kept a medical archive that ended up at DePaul. Herseth spoke in short, oracular fragments and spent most of his time demonstrating, letting the sound make the argument.Song and wind comes from a 1996 book by Brian Frederiksen, Jacobs assistant, and it is a student's book, written after the fact, not a syllabus Jacobs handed out. In the room where he said it, it was a corrective aimed at a specific over-analyzing student, not a universal law.Big sound is a description, not a prescription, and the moment you turn it into a prescription you skip the entire middle. The air is the engine, not the hammer, and the size was a by-product of the ease, not the goal. The player who hears big sound and thinks push more air has missed the whole point.The load-bearing aphorism is the least quoted one: think about what it sounds like, not what it feels like. The mechanics are in service of the sound, and if you put the sound in your head first, the mechanics tend to sort themselves out. That is a defensible claim, and it is the one that actually works in the practice room.What actually transmitted was a sound, heard repeatedly in a city where you could not avoid hearing it. The standard got into players' ears and started doing work that no syllabus could do. The small set of phrases that described the sound survived because they are short, memorable, and hard to argue with, and they traveled until the context dropped out and the sentences became slogans.The word school is a later invention, a name that players outside the city put on a sound they had heard on a recording. The lineage is real in the sense that a player at DePaul heard the CSO, went home, practiced, and taught a student who then heard the CSO. The school is not.Resources Mentioned in the podcast:The Ultimate Warmup for TrumpetThe Ultimate Technical Study for TrumpetThe Ultimate Wedding Book for TrumpetAvailable at: https://TrumpetStudio.comTrumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

The horn that gets a groan before anyone has even played it. This episode asks why brass players dismiss composite trumpets on sight, and what that contempt is actually protecting.The reflexive groan at a "plastic trumpet" comes from players who have never put one to their lips for longer than thirty seconds. They are reacting to a label, not an instrument, and that is why the contempt keeps winning arguments it has no reason to win.The horn people are laughing at is a real, working tool: the pTrumpet from UK maker pBone runs around one-ninety dollars at major retailers, and a metal-and-plastic hybrid sits in the two-seventy-nine range for players who want more traditional feel.The number that changes the argument is weight: roughly five hundred grams, about a third to a half of a standard Bb trumpet. Over two outdoor sets that is real, cumulative relief for the arm and posture.Durability is the quiet pitch: salt air, sweat, rain on an outdoor stage, and a horn that gets set on wet wood or concrete without a case. Brass collects all of it; composite does not, which matters for the working beach-bar and outdoor player.The most common complaint - "you will not win a Chicago Philharmonic audition on that" - is true and completely beside the point. Nobody buying a five-hundred-gram horn for an outdoor gig is trying to win that audition, and telling them so just keeps the conversation on your terms.Who actually buys these: a working session player who wants a light second horn to carry through an airport without checking it as baggage; the teacher at a no-budget school who needs something that survives a year of eighth-graders; and the kid small for the grade whose arms give out on a full brass horn.The parallel to the Chinese-horn question: for years "made in China" triggered the same skip-the-instrument reflex, and when four-hundred-dollar imports started playing open and in tune, the people who had never played one kept saying "it is just a Chinese trumpet." The material was never what you were evaluating; the playing experience was.Resources Mentioned in the podcast:The Ultimate Warmup for TrumpetThe Ultimate Technical Study for TrumpetThe Ultimate Wedding Book for TrumpetAvailable at: https://TrumpetStudio.comTrumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

"Stop using pressure" is the advice every brass player has heard, usually by twelve. This episode asks what that slogan actually does to your playing - and why pressure is a variable to manage, not a sin to eliminate.The "no pressure" rule has no measurement behind it. There is no agreed-on yardstick for how much mouthpiece pressure is too much on a given player, at a given dynamic, in a given register - and no clean study has pinned down a safe number. An idea you cannot measure is easy to over-correct against, and most players push all the way toward zero.You cannot actually play at zero. The seal that keeps air in the horn has to be made by something, and on a small trumpet rim that is a real, measurable amount of lip-to-cup contact.The research quietly broke the myth: players with pressure sensors under their mouths use more mouthpiece force than anyone in the room expects, and researchers were so surprised by the numbers they first assumed their equipment was broken.Teachers could not reliably tell from photographs which players were using more pressure - what they thought they were reading was how relaxed a face looked, which is not force at all. The most common way people judge "too much pressure?" is a guess dressed up as expertise.Pressure is not static, and that breaks "no pressure" as a universal command. It has to rise when you go higher or louder and fall on a soft pedal tone; a tired face needs more at the end of a night than it did at the start. You cannot tell someone to use less of something that has to move.A small trumpet rim concentrates the same force over less area than a trombone or tuba mouthpiece, which is why trumpet players notice pressure more acutely - but "concentrated" is not the same as "damaging."The real damage comes from an imbalance, and pressure is usually a symptom, not the cause. A face with collapsed air support or locked corners reaches for pressure to compensate; the squeezing becomes a habit, and that habit is what finally does the damage.Secure players rarely notice their own pressure because their mechanics are doing the work. Beginners feel every bit of it because their face has not yet learned to distribute and absorb it - which is why telling a beginner "lighten up" without fixing what is upstream just adds shame to a normal developmental stage.Resources Mentioned in the podcast:The Ultimate Warmup for TrumpetThe Ultimate Technical Study for TrumpetThe Ultimate Wedding Book for TrumpetAvailable at: https://TrumpetStudio.comTrumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014Now go practice!!

A range book sells you a number. This episode asks what that number actually costs you when the note on the page is beyond your range.A range book gives you a measurable number - a letter, an octave, a line on the staff. That measurability is why the genre sells so well, and it is also why it is dangerous: tone, endurance, and ease of playing have no number to point at, so the top note goes up while the rest quietly gets worse.Forcing a note beyond your range makes the body invent new ways to get it - jaw locks down, corners harden inward on purpose, tongue squeezes the air, and mouthpiece pressure climbs. Done once it is fine; done daily for weeks it becomes the new normal, and you start to believe that is what a high note feels like.The damage is usually slow, not sudden: a mouthpiece that only works in one place, an upper register that now takes three tries, a face that has forgotten how to relax. Experienced players warn about this because they have watched it shorten careers - and sometimes their own.The "37 weeks" promise is marketing, not physics. It assumes you play every day, that your embouchure is not already compromised, and that range behaves the same way for everyone. Some players hit a double C on schedule; others hit the same wall in four weeks because their limit is structural, not a training problem. The book cannot tell you which player you are.The genre keeps selling because a teacher who says "your range will grow as a side effect of getting better" is harder to market than a book that gives you an end date. You are buying a plan with a finish line, not vague encouragement.Many of these books come from gifted high-range players sharing what works for them - a generous impulse, but the specific thing that built their range is often not the part they are handing to a stranger with a different face. The convention circuit rewards the screaming-note demo over the "do not chase it" explanation, so the books with the biggest promise get made and sold.The alternative is not "never work on range" - it is "work the range you have, and let the rest grow out of it." Find your real ceiling (the highest note that comes out cleanly, in tune, and matching your middle register), make it boring before adding the next half step.Resources Mentioned in the podcast:The Ultimate Warmup for TrumpetThe Ultimate Technical Study for TrumpetThe Ultimate Wedding Book for TrumpetAvailable at: https://TrumpetStudio.comTrumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014