What to practise at home on the trumpet, and what you only get from playing with people

Practise at home only what practising at home can actually improve, and get the rest by playing with other people as much as you can.

I am still working this out

A player asked me about routine, and how much it should change with the job you have to do. In all honesty, I am still trying to work out the right routine for me, the one that gets me as close as I can to consistent, whatever that means.

If I am honest, the best thing I could do to keep things solid is to go and play in two rehearsal bands a week. I don't care how much you practise at home. The lack of context will mess everything up. You need to play with other people, a lot.

I am not at my best when I am on my own. I get angry with things when they don't work. I am much better when I am with people.

What home practice is good for

I think practice time is best spent on the things you can't do with other people.

• Diving into a transcription.
• Scales, your technical understanding of the instrument, and your ear.
• Learning pieces of music, or etudes.
• A little bit of sound production.

Sound production is going to be affected by adrenaline and circumstance anyway. Your ability to play scales isn't. Your ability to hear music in your mind isn't either, provided you practise it.

Sixty minutes of exercises is something I just can't do. I wouldn't play the trumpet for a living if that was what it took. I have tried so many times to be that person. It is not who I am.

So here is the advice, and I should take it myself. Limit what you practise at home to what practising at home is actually going to make better. Only do that, and have no other expectations.

The practice room is not the stage

Some players wouldn't try a double high C on a tune until they had played it in the practice room first. But the practice room isn't the stage anyway. You have to try it on stage, loads of times.

So go and get as many playing opportunities as you can, and get out of your own head.

Practise with someone else

The best practice sessions I ever had were with other people. Having a practice partner is four or five times faster than being on your own. It is not just twice as fast.

There are two reasons. That person is likely to be better than you at something, and you are likely to be better than them at something. And you get to listen while you rest. If you are not very good at resting, you now have to.

I don't mean duets. Duets are like practising on your own, but with someone else. I mean taking it in turns.

Most of my biggest realisations came this way. I was around amazing players, most of them older than me, and it was constant interaction. I remember sitting in a room with three other players, passing a book round. One played an exercise, then the next, then the next. Someone shows you something, you figure it out, and then you can do it. That doesn't tend to happen on an ordinary day on your own.

Fix problems, but don't live there

When something doesn't work, I think the way to practise is to figure out what you can't do and then build something that makes it better. Everyone wants the cheat, which is someone telling them to just do this exercise. You have to go a level deeper than that.

An octave leap from F to F is always a bit awkward for me. Just repeating it doesn't necessarily fix it. When I looked at why, it wasn't really the leap. I was getting louder on the low F, and that was upsetting the leap. So I changed the exercise to drill exactly that.

Then I test it. I look out of the window and say out loud what I am looking at and what colour it is. Then I go back and play it again. You have come out of thinking mode, so you find out whether the practice has actually gone in.

There is a time and a place for this. If you spend your whole life thinking about the thing that went wrong on the last gig, the trumpet becomes a problem to be solved. That is useful for diagnosing things. It is not a healthy place to live. The trumpet is an opportunity to use your musical voice through an instrument.

If you played one wrong note on a gig, you don't need to flog yourself for two weeks. Work on it for 15 minutes, not five hours. I am the worst for this. A double C doesn't come out twice in one week, I have ten tunes to play on Monday, and I go fix it, fix it, fix it. It gets worse and worse. You have to have some faith.

One thing to try this week

Go through what you practise at home and ask of each thing: is practising this at home actually going to make it better? Keep those. Then find one chance this week to play with someone else, even just one other trumpet player, taking it in turns.

More trumpet advice

• Double tonguing on the trumpet: it is usually an air problem
• Playing the trumpet in tune: use the slides, but it starts with your ears
• How to choose a trumpet mouthpiece: it should feel better straight away