r Bon23083584 SHR5E019P~002
Tuition
For this assignment I was teaching Ethan Davenport the trumpet. My goal for these lessons was to give him the basics that he needed so that if he wanted to continue playing trumpet, he would not cause injury to himself, he would produce a full sound and have a basic knowledge of articulation and fingering. Having previously never played trumpet, I taught him these skills with him being able to apply it towards his first piece of music on the trumpet. Although he had not played the trumpet before, he is a piano player, so I did not have to teach him music theory on top of the trumpet.
The early stages of learning the trumpet can be incredibly frustrating for a student. Because you are using your lip muscles in this way for the first time, a new players’ lip will get tired extremely quickly and they will not be able to play many notes because their lips aren’t strong enough as well as other factors. Because of this one must be flexible and ready to cut certain sections short because a student needs to rest or their lips are tired. This can demoralize a student. They may consider their progress from lesson to lesson minimal, but they must be reminded that what they are doing is completely new to the body and it needs time to adapt. Not being able to play that high in the register does not make someone a bad player if they play with good technique. I did not want to rush results with Ethan and get him to squeeze out a high which would damage his lip if he did it too long for him to feel more satisfied. I had to make sure that the gains that he was making each time we met for a lesson were very good and to positively reinforce the progress.
Unfortunately, my first lesson with Ethan, the video that I took was corrupted so I cannot show any footage of the lesson but, it did follow the general plan of my lesson plan. We started off by learning how to buzz with proper technique then introducing the mouthpiece and finally near the end Ethan was able to play his first notes on the trumpet. He was egar to learn how to play the trumpet and was able to buzz with relative consistency. There were still one or two aspects of his playing that stood out to me as needed to work on in future lessons. The fact that I was able to pinpoint certain areas was very positive from Ethan. With him already producing a sound in the trumpet makes it so much easier to identify flaws in technique to if you were just using a mouthpiece. When Ethan was playing, I could tell that his lips were not vibrating quickly enough to make a full sound with the trumpet. I was able to plan in my next lesson to see what the cause of the problem was. There is only so much I can do in a first lesson in terms of playing because so much of the time is dedicated to teaching the basic technique that by the time I got to using the trumpet there was not much time left in the 20 minutes to play. This meant that although I could get an idea of what aspects to focus on in the next lesson, The amount of information that I have to go off is very limited. Although I think that the lesson progressed at a good pace, I think I could have improved my time management and attempted to push move on to incorporating the mouthpiece and trumpet. But I did not want to feel like this was a pressure environment with expectations of him to improve quickly. He is not doing the lessons to reach a goal this is for enjoyment and so having that more relaxed tempo to the lesson allowed Ethan to ease into the lesson and not to feel overwhelmed with the new information. I also think that because of the slower pace and the breaks in playing as I explained things allowed his lips to rest and fatigue only became a problem at the very end of the lesson. Fatigue setting in only when we had moved on to trying to play notes on the trumpet and not before allowed him to learn the technique and begin to transfer the sensation of the mouthpiece and his lips vibrating from his short to long-term memory.
Overall, as a first lesson I thought it was very successful. Ethan made good progress and seemed very positive about how his first experience of the trumpet went. I was able to establish what direction I wanted to take future lessons and how much I thought we could achieve.
For my second lesson (clips 1-4) my aim was to increase the playing. Ideally, I wanted to merely recap the previous lesson and then progress on learning the first few notes on the trumpet. I wanted to spend as much time with the trumpet in hand as possible so I could identify issues with his sound early and find ways to improve it. I had prepared worksheets that we would use in the lesson. One was the notes with their fingering above it as a guide for Ethan as he began learning the notes. I did not want to overuse and cause an overreliance on having the fingering above the note as this would slow down his ability to sightread in the future and limit his musical theory. Because of this I would only use this when teaching a new note or when teaching a new exercise as he has to consciously think about which fingers to press down before playing the note. Not having the fingerings written down would have meant he couldn’t focus on producing his sound to the best of his abilities.
We started the lesson with some mouthpiece buzzing before doing long tones. It was at this moment That I noticed that Ethan was building up too much pressure before the note making it split before finding the center. I therefore decided to go back a step and use just the mouthpiece and focus on a smooth release of air . Making sure that he doesn’t continue this habit is vital to his future playing as the amount of strain he will put on his body as the range goes higher, he will tense up more increasing the risk of injury. To transition from the mouthpiece back to trumpet I used a technique I had learned (shown in clip) which helps the student understand how much of creating a sound in the trumpet is just the air and how much they are pressing. New players will always gravitate to pressing hard to force out a sound as it creates quick results, but learning early that accelerating the air causes a lot less strain on the muscles is what I tried to do here.
After I felt like he was playing more relaxed, we moved on to the exercise that I had brought. These are Clarke studies. They are a range of exercises to help learn the fingerings to notes and work them into your muscle memory. I chose number 2 to bring to Ethan as I thought it was the easiest pattern to learn, and the range needed to do it was minimal. After demonstrating the study to Ethan, he attempted to do a section of the exercise. I did not what him to attempt the whole thing as it was out of his range at this stage. I could tell after a few attempts that he did not have the confidence in his decision making and was second guessing himself when picking the fingering for a note. This caused him not to put enough air through the instrument making the sound thin and cut out occasionally. To help with this I decided to play the section with him so that he could match the sound . I have always found this to be helpful when I am unsure of what to play because it feels less exposing. When you are playing on your own with someone watching you, there is pressure not to make a mistake, but when they are playing with you it does not feel like you are performing for them, it feels like you are playing together. I could instantly hear the difference in the sound with Ethan playing with more confidence and making a fuller sound.
In the final part of the lesson, I decided to start on the piece that I wanted Ethan to learn over the course of the lessons. This was The Jungle Book’s ‘I’m The King of the Jungle’. I chose this piece because it is recognizable and very playable. Learning something that you know previously can feel more rewarding as it already has a little bit of meaning to you outside of the trumpet and if you tell someone that you are learning that piece, they will understand what you are talking about. The range of the piece was very doable for Ethan with some notes being too high for him when we started learning and also some being too low. Playing low notes on the trumpet is a very deceptively hard thing to do on the trumpet, especially when you are new to the instrument. Your mouth must keep tense enough to retain structure but allow more vibration than normal as you relax to reach down to the note. With the habit I mentioned earlier about new players pushing against the mouthpiece means that they find it hard to keep the vibrations going and often have the note cut out completely. There was one note like this in the section we learned at the end of the lesson but It was not a worry to me as this was the first time Ethan had had to do this and I did not have much time to go into detail as to how to reach those notes because we were at the end of our time.
I was able to get a good Idea of what I wanted to do in the next lesson with more playing in the lesson I could see the weaknesses in Ethans playing. I think I could’ve tried different methods to help with the sound in the lesson but in the moment, I was unsure if I should dedicate more time to this and potentially make Ethan feel bored and lacking progression. I did think that he felt a slight bit of frustration at not being able to produce the sound he wanted to. This is a completely normal reaction as you are getting impatient to improve and the feeling of not having the lip strength to play the next note cleanly can be extremely frustrating especially when you don’t know how to fix it. But as the lesson progressed and we worked on improving the sound, I could see him become more positive in his playing as he progressed through the piece.
The Third lesson (Clips 5-10) that we did I wanted to focus on Ethan’s sound. I had given him the tools to be able to play multiple notes but him not fully release the air through the instrument was preventing him from increasing his range. I therefore prepared various exercises for us to go through to help him with his breathing and how he is using that air to create his sound.
I started the lesson by taking out the lead tuning slide of our trumpets. By doing this, the player has a lot more freedom to manipulate their tuning with their lips. It is therefore very good for helping a student gain more control over their lip and learn to create a constant tone without unintentional vibrato. The lead pipe has a certain frequency in which it resonates particularly well, and the overtones of the note can be heard. Focusing on hitting this resonant frequency gives the student an audible confirmation when they are doing it correctly. Unfortunately, the trumpet, the trumpet that I use, and the trumpet that Ethan was using are ever so slightly different. My trumpet has a reversed tuning slide; this means that our trumpets had different length lead pipes causing the notes we were aiming for to be different. I did not know the correct frequency of Ethan’s trumpet and could only do so much to help him find it. Having said that, Ethan was able to create a steady tone and reduce wobbles in his playing. For the circumstances Ethan understood very well what he needed to do and was able to work out how to steady the note without me playing the same note to help him.
After we had spent around 4 minutes on this, we went back to the Clarke study that we had started the previous lesson. I wanted to see if Ethan could translate the work that he had done into the study and create that consistent sound. I could instantly hear an improvement in Ethan’s sound with the notes coming out louder and more confidently than the previous lesson. The fingering had also improved with the note that he slipped on in his first attempt being a new note to his range. I think This gave a big confidence boost to Ethan and his playing as he was able to hear his improvement and tell that his lips were getting used to the sensation of playing the trumpet. We then attempted the whole passage together. for the first time even attempting his first G and was able to make a sound. After this I decided that we should take a short break as doing this much playing is extremely tiring for anyone in their 3rd lesson. We also did a short technique to help blood return to the lips.
Hearing the improvement that Ethan was making in the areas that we weren’t focusing on like increasing range and learning the fingerings to each not one by one but instead as we went was extremely nice and was a testament to Ethan’s ability as a musician. As a piano player, his brain has been through these types of learning experiences before. Learning how his fingers should move was second nature to him, so I was able to focus on the areas that were newer to him. If this had been a student that had never been around music before, I would have spent a lot more time at this stage teaching them about the notes and some basic music theory.
I wanted to end the lesson by just testing something out. I asked Ethan to slowly crescendo until he was playing as loud as he could. I wanted him to experience the full range of sounds that he could produce. This also allowed him to tell when his sound was starting to escape him and start to find a ceiling in which it was still in control.
This lesson was very productive for me. I thought Ethan made great improvements and was able to fix areas which had been troubling. One small thing that I noticed when watching back was that I was not observing enough. I was looking at the sheet music I had provided instead of Ethan. Because of this I could not spot that the reason that Ethan did not reach a note when we were doing some low notes was because ofncorrect fingering not technique, and he could’ve probably reached this note if I had seen.
The 4th lesson (Clips 11-14) took place after we returned from Easter break. This meant that there was a 3-week gap between our 3rd and 4th lessons. Having such a large gap when you are starting such a physical and muscle memory orientated instrument can be costly when building these basics up. It also means that Ethan had not worked his lip, making it weaker compared to the 3rd lesson. Going into this lesson I had failed to remember this. Having not taken into consideration how little Ethan had played I might have overworked his lip in the final lesson causing him to fatigue close to the end. I also probably rushed because I wanted us to complete our goal of doing the piece that I had brought knowing that this would likely be our final lesson with exams taking up much time in both our schedules.
But I thought that Ethan deserved to learn this piece as a marker for the improvement that he had made. We started off the lesson with a quick warmup before going into the piece. Ethan’s fingering had not gone, and he was able to identify and execute with little lag between notes. The only real trouble he had was reaching the lowest notes in the piece. This is a small issue and would be solved by more playing, but we had reached this at the end of the lesson, and his lips were starting to go at this stage. We did attempt the second halve but that section contained notes which he had only played once and seeing that Ethan was struggling to reach the note and not using proper technique I decided to stop and take a break Before returning to the first section.
Overall, I think this was a good lesson to show the progress that he had made and something that will mark the start of his trumpet journey. Unfortunately, the Easter break did cause some small issues, but I should have realized that Ethan would not have been able to maintain his practice and changed the lesson to fit.
Over the 4 weeks, Ethan went from never having played a note on the trumpet to playing in a controlled fashion with good technique. If Ethan wanted to casually play trumpet on his own, I would confidently say that he has the basic tools to be able to enjoy playing the trumpet. He has overcome the biggest technical challenges and seemed to enjoy his time doing it. I felt like I gave him the support that he needed emotionally and technically, although I think I could be more attentive visually, not just audibly. Other areas in which I could improve are time management and being able to notice certain aspects of a student’s playing, which would cause me to change a lesson plan to make up for it. Having not been in a situation where my lips get fatigued at that rate or do not have the structure for quite some time. I can sometimes forget the situation that the student is in and assume that they will understand it for the first time.
