Over a period of several weeks, I have been giving trumpet lessons to a classmate, Ollie. This portfolio will document this process, and I will discuss the reasonings for my decisions and explain some of the challenges I have faced and how I overcame them. According to Mitchell (n.d.) the trumpet is hard to learn, a large reason for this is because of the time and effort it takes to learn to form an embouchure. To do this you need to build up the muscles around your face that are involved in playing, so it can be very difficult to make meaningful progress in short lessons once a week. Instead, regular practice throughout the week for shorter amounts of time makes for much better practice for a beginner (Brown, 2020). As a fellow student, Ollie was not able to practice outside of our lessons, which were once every two weeks, however sometimes we were not able to complete a lesson for longer if one of us was ill or there wasn’t enough time in the session for both of us to teach. This made it harder for Ollie to build up the necessary muscles on the face and to develop an embouchure. Despite these interruptions I felt that Ollie was able to make good progress on the instrument however I believe he would have progressed further if we were able to have weekly lessons and if he had the time to practice by himself
This is my introduction to Ollie, normally I would formally introduce myself to a new student however as we already knew each other, I went straight to asking how his day has been. This is because starting to learn a new instrument can be quite intimidating at first so the friendly encounter can help to put the student at ease. It also allows me as the teacher to understand how the student is feeling that day and see if there is anything that might affect the lesson. According to Córdova et al. (2023) positive emotions are healthy and are good for optimal learning. Learning Ollie has had a difficult day could mean I should tailor the lesson to boost his mood first by doing a more fun exercise that then enables him to learn better. Additionally, he would find it more difficult to play. The trumpet is a very physically demanding instrument so a cold can reduce productivity, and a sore throat could mean you need to rest instead of practice.
By asking Ollie why he wanted to learn the trumpet and what he wanted to learn, I was able to formulate an idea of what I should be teaching him and what he would find engaging. Students sometimes have very different reasons for getting lessons which you should listen to so you can tailor the lessons to their needs. A student wanting to improve so they can join a brass band would have very different needs than a student playing just for fun or wanting to learn a different style such as jazz which ollie wanted to learn. As Ollie was a complete beginner, I let him know we would have to go over fundamentals of the trumpet like reading and blowing so he would understand that he had to learn these basics before doing more fun activities like playing jazz tunes. By setting these expectations early I hoped to avoid frustration from progressing slower than he may have assumed and by letting him know how difficult the trumpet is he would be able to recognise and celebrate smaller milestones that add up to large amounts of progress and keep him encouraged.
Ollie had already attempted playing trumpet before, so I didn’t have to tell him how to make a noise from the instrument. Before the lesson I wrote out a lesson plan to give me some direction for the lesson. I had planned to go through some lip flexibilities as a warmup to show Ollie the importance of warming up because he had mentioned to me before that he finds it difficult to play for long periods of time, an issue I knew could be resolved by correctly warming up. I also explained to him that warming up helps you play loner by physically preparing you for playing (Adamsons, 2024). I thought that he would be less likely to find warming up boring and be more likely to do it if he understood how it was directly benefitting him. In the lesson, Ollie was asking questions about airflow and his question about whether you should blow harder to get higher is what prompted me to use a visual demonstration. I demonstrated the movement of the lips and what causes the sound of the trumpet by using a piece of paper. By demonstrating visually, Ollie was able to understand the technical aspects of playing the trumpet more easily compared to if I was just telling him. This is because when using visual aids the brain is under less cognitive load and can understand concepts easier (lmunoz, 2020). I was very happy to go with a student led learning approach for this lesson because he was naturally inquisitive about many of the topics I knew he would need to cover, some of which I had already planned to go over. I had Ollie copy which valves I was playing so he wouldn’t have to think as much on what the notes were, and he could focus more on producing a sound. By setting him up for success, he would be more motivated to keep putting the effort in as he was already seeing the rewards. The lip flexibilities proved to be too difficult for Ollie at the stage he was at so I had to change the strategy and instead chose to slur between notes closer together and in the lower register which would still accomplish the warmup like I had planned.
During this lesson I also gave ollie a small reading exercises and was able to informally assess his reading skills to see what would benefit him the most. Ollie’s reading was slow which I initially had attributed to not being able to read treble clef very well however in hindsight I understand now that it was because he didn’t know which valves corresponded to which note. This has shown me the importance of not just assuming I can gloss over more simple aspects while teaching, like the valves which have become second nature to me due to how long I have been playing trumpet. Another example is when Ollie realised he should be taking a breath before playing. A point that once again sounded too obvious for me to need to point out but as a drummer, Ollie wouldn’t have had to focus on his breathing like this before, a fact I should have been aware of. Once he realised this his tine immediately improved showing that taking care of the very basics which seem obvious to experienced players can have a massive impact on beginner students.
I started the lesson with a warmup because this reinforces the idea that warming up is an essential part of practice. This also helps because it is easier to play after warming up so it naturally extended the amount of time he could play for allowing us to cover more in the lesson. Doing a warmup at the start of the lesson lets me see how well Ollie is able to play on the day, a useful thing to know because some days it physically feels easier to play than others. As we had been working on producing notes and breath control the previous lessons, I thought it would be a good idea to give Ollie something different to keep him engaged and to practice different technique, so I picked an easy standard called C-Jam Blues. It has a rhythmic based melody and uses only two notes so I thought it would be a good tune to use for teaching.
I started off by having Ollie to copy me buzzing the rhythm on the mouthpiece so he could get used to articulating the rhythm without worrying about his sound or the notes he needed to play. I now realise I could have engrained the melody even further by using words to represent the rhythm. By comparing something intangible to something you can see I may have been able to make it easier for Ollie to play these rhythms later as he would be thinking of the fruits as he was playing, for example using “melon” for two quavers and “mango” for a dotted-crotchet and a quaver, which is all the melody consists of. Using imaginative thinking here would have been useful because comparing an abstract concept to a concrete noun, something you can see and touch, Ollie would have been much more likely to remember the rhythms which would then make it easier for him to learn the notated form if I were to circle back to this lesson to go over music notation.
I wanted to give ollie a break from trying to learn using sheet music so I decided to teach this lesson aurally. Aural learning involves using your ears to develop skills like intonation, pitches and rhythm, which was the focus of this lesson (ECU, 2018). At first Ollie was struggling to play this on trumpet, partially because we had taken a few weeks break and also because he isn’t used to the delay from starting to blow to the production of sound that he doesn’t get from playing the drums. I decided to use some accelerated learning techniques to help him work through the challenge by constantly giving him encouragement and then joining in with him later in the lesson. By encouraging him he was more driven to keep going and when I played with him his intonation improved drastically and he was able to match my pitches showing that he just needed to hear how it was supposed to sound. I could have taken this further by using more multisensory techniques such as kinaesthetic learning and having him clap out the rhythms. After we had finished playing it through, I made sure to give lots of praise to Ollie to ensure he knew he did a good job and would feel as though he is progressing and want to come back for more lessons. I set him some homework of practicing it at home by staying on a note that was comfortable for him to play. This would benefit him because he would gain more familiarity with tonging, a technique which gives clear articulation and allows you to control rhythm with your tongue instead of your breath which gives a faster response and would give ollie greater control over the instrument.
This lesson I wanted to focus on Ollie’s reading which depended on coupling his knowledge of the stave to what valves played which note. According to a study conducted by Çoban, S. and Soykunt, N. (2021) colourstrngs is an effective method that engages students to learn in a fun way. They also discuss how it is an appropriate method for students of all levels and ages so I thought I would adapt the methodology from violin to fit a brass instrument and use colours to represent specific notes. Unfortunately as there are only three valves I couldn’t assign different colours to the valves like you can with keys on a keyboard so instead I created a diagram that shows the valve combinations, the name of the note, the colour of the note and where it places on the stave. My plan was to give this to Ollie and have him read a piece of music that I had written out using the colours of the chart to help him read the music. While writing out the music however I discovered I was learning which colours were corresponding to which notes so I decided I would get Ollie to finish copying out the music using the colouring pencils, giving him a tactile approach to learning the colours.
Using coloured notes led to the fastest I’ve ever seen Ollie read and play something, having the valve combinations on the notes in the chart let him overcome the usual frustration of being able to read what the note on the page was but not knowing what to press on the trumpet to produce the note. In future I now know to use this method so students can play a wider range of music to keep them engaged from the beginning of learning the trumpet and to start connecting the valves to the note names.
Ollie was quickly able to copy out the melody into the correct colours by using the chart and I noticed he was quickly able to recognise which colours represented which note after he started notating them down. This method also lets the student learn where on the stave the notes go and gives them a chance to practice notation, something that as a drummer Ollie may not have much experience with. Learning to write on the stave definitely aided Ollie with his reading as after this exercise he was able to read much faster although he then faced difficulty when playing the tune however this was unrelated to his reading and instead was because he was too worn out to be able to play properly. I believe I would have made more progress with Ollie I I had altered between the colourstrings methodology and an ear-based approach like the Suzuki method as this would have given Ollie a chance to develop both his reading and technical skills at the same time and would prevent him from progressing too fast in one area to be held back by the other, ultimately giving him a smoother and faster learning experience.
I initially created the lesson plans as a way to gather my thoughts and use as a way to decide what might be best for the lesson however, they are very inefficient. As I have written in continuous sentences and used multiple paragraphs it is difficult to read at a glance which makes it difficult to refer back to during the lesson. I could instead use something like this this lesson plan is much more clear in what is expected of the student and teacher during the lesson, and it makes it easier to remember any equipment you might need during the lesson as it has already been thought about and written down.
Over the weeks of teaching, there have been drastic improvements within Ollie’s playing ability and my teaching skills. I believe he would have made faster progress if he were able to practice more regularly and if I had spent more time earlier on trying to find which teaching styles and methodologies worked the best for him.
Reference list
- Adamsons, R. (2024). Warm Ups for Brass Players. [online] Denis Wick Products Ltd. Available at: https://www.deniswick.com/blog/warming-up-and-why-the-power-of-routine/.
- Brown, E. (2020). A Good Music Practice Schedule. [online] ed-brown-composer. Available at: https://www.edbrowncomposer.com/single-post/a-good-music-practice-schedule [Accessed 30 Apr. 2026].
- Córdova, A., Caballero-García, A., Drobnic, F., Roche, E. and Noriega, D.C. (2023). Influence of Stress and Emotions in the Learning Process: The Example of COVID-19 on University Students: A Narrative Review. Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland), [online] 11(12), p.1787. doi:https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare11121787.
- ECU (2018). Aural Skills – School of Music. [online] School of Music. Available at: https://music.ecu.edu/aural-skills/.
- lmunoz (2020). Do Visual Aids Assist Musical Training? [online] Cognitive Neuroscience Society. Available at: https://www.cogneurosociety.org/do-visual-aids-assist-musical-training/.
- Mitchell, P. (n.d.). Why Is The Trumpet So Hard To Play? [online] Sound Adventurer. Available at: https://soundadventurer.com/why-is-the-trumpet-so-hard-to-play/.
- Robert (2018). Playing Trumpet With A Cold – Sick Stuff! | My Best Trumpet. [online] My Best Trumpet | Helping The Web Find The Best Trumpet Stuff. Available at: https://mybesttrumpet.com/playing-trumpet-with-a-cold-sick-stuff/ [Accessed 1 May 2026].
