We all know how to breathe; we have been doing it naturally for our entire lives. As trumpet players, we want to learn how to transfer that natural breath into something we can use for the trumpet. 

Recall how taking a natural, easy breath feels, like when you yawn. That is the feeling of taking a deep, full breath that we need access to for playing the trumpet. 

When we take a yawning breath, we are not adding tension or lifting our shoulders. For trumpet playing, we need to take deep breaths quickly without even thinking about it.

When transferring the natural breath to the trumpet, aim to keep things normal. It’s not normal to raise your shoulders; just keep your shoulders down and don’t add unnatural tension. The second task is to keep your chest up and out, opening the cavity around your lungs and allowing them to take in the air they need. Think about good posture, not an artificially inflated chest. 

Without thinking about it too much, our goal is to keep our chest out and open and breathe with a relaxed breath. It also helps to ensure that your head stays on top of your body instead of in front and not squeeze in with your arms.

If you are sitting in a chair to play the trumpet, like we often do, it becomes even more important to sit with good posture and keep your head above your body. 

When sitting, it is super easy to become slouched, and then we can’t fill our lungs properly. Sitting on the edge of your seat will help with this, but most importantly, keeping everything in vertical alignment is the key to the success of good breathing.

Before we move on, be sure to watch this course trailer for Charlie Porter’s course on breathing basics for the trumpet, available on tonebase Trumpet:

You can watch this course and dozens more from the world’s leading trumpet players here, with a free 14-day trial.

Now that we have the dynamics of taking a good breath, we must figure out how to support the exhale. The universal problem with breathing is that, at first, we have good compression, but as we let it out, we lose that compression as we run out of air. This makes it difficult to maintain our airspeed and, therefore, our pitch.

Sustaining and Timing

Beyond the initial attack of the note, we also have to sustain for a certain amount of time. 

As such, we need to be able to parcel out the air so that it isn’t too loud at the beginning, and then we quickly run out for the rest of the note. The goal here is to have a steady and even exhalation of our air. Porter suggests working on this, at first, away from the trumpet.

Another way to create this relaxed syllable is to create an “o” shape with your hand, put it against your lips, and breathe in, artificially creating that open shape for your breath. 

After you breathe in on beat four, blow out for four beats. Then you can stretch it out to eight, sixteen, and eventually thirty-two. Make sure you have enough air to last the entire length of the exhale. You might have to back off the air or create a little more resistance with the syllable to make sure you can last all the way through the sustain.

Beyond exercises and etudes, we need to apply this to our music. 

Making a phrase sound musical is partially timing and partially flow. Still, despite the musicality of it, we need to make sure we apply the same timing considerations as we did with our long-tone exercises. The breath foreshadows hearing and seeing how you want the music to go. 

You need to hear more than the sound but also the energy and timing. It is best to set the embouchure before you play and take the breath with the same energy as the piece you are about to play.

Flow

Keeping air moving throughout a phrase is more difficult than starting a note. Maintaining support through the obstacle course of higher and lower notes, rhythm, and dynamics can be challenging for many people. It helps to think of everything essentially as a flow study. By working on flow, you can create better phrasing and music instead of letting the air dictate how you play.

Here are a couple of examples, first using Porter’s own Lyrical Etude No. 5 and then Charlier Etude No. 1:

Etude 5 from Porter’s Lyrical Studies

With an etude like this, you want to think about keeping the air moving. Any time a lower note precedes a higher note, you need to put more air into the lower note to ensure the higher note comes out. 

Porter calls this trick a “trampoline moment,” you want to lift the tongue to push up the air. It is more important to focus on the down than the up when the notes are all over the place. Flexibility is important here, but it is mostly airflow that will make this sound smooth and easy. 

This study has some huge leaps; in these key moments, Porter is paying attention to his trampolines. He keeps his air sustained throughout, and when he comes up to the leaps, he thinks about giving more air to the bottom notes rather than the top notes.

Charlier Transcendental Studies: Etude No. 1

This etude, which has a lot of articulation, needs steady airflow despite the tongue separating everything. It is the flow that will be essential to playing this etude successfully.

The Line Approach

Something we can do to practice this type of airflow is to take the mouthpiece out of the horn and play just the core element of the line. Play the flow that exists in that piece of music. Charlie Porter refers to this as “the line approach.”

If he were to play Etude No. 5 from Porter Lyrical Studies, he would play the outline of the phrase with just the flow and no breaks. When he puts it back on the trumpet, all the notes are slurred and pushed into each other. Although this is not our end goal for the sound, it shows us that the trumpet works as a connection machine rather than a chopping machine.

Porter uses the analogy of an elevator. Our air is like an elevator shaft; it goes up and down and has full access to every floor. The trumpet acts as the doorway where people get on and off, where the notes reside, but the air flows between all the doorways regardless of whether people selected the floor.

When practicing, we want to build things by the order of complexity. The first layer is to understand the flow. Once you have that with just the air, you can apply it to long tones and then the changing of notes. After that, you can put in all the other things like articulation and dynamics. It is important to build this gradually and not rush ahead so that you have a strong foundation of flow.

Another device that can be helpful with this is the Astra. You plug your mouthpiece in and try to get the ball to float in the air. There are different balls with different weights depending on the difficulty you want. When we add articulation, we want to ensure the ball doesn’t drop to the bottom. If it falls, our airflow will not be steady. If we add a piece of music to this exercise, we can visually see what it feels like and how our airflow is going through and moving with our tongue chopping it up. We need to ensure the ball stays somewhere in the middle.

Capacity

In everyday life, a lot of people are shallow breathers, which is not enough for brass playing. As wind players, we need bigger breaths than the status quo. One way we can work on this is by going back to The Paper Exercise from earlier.

Another way to not think about taking a deep breath is to imagine you are going to yell across the room at someone. Think of communicating across a room, not about the breath you need to project that far.

Charlie Porter also recommends The Vacuum Exercise from Sam Pilafian, a tuba player who did a lot of work with breathing. He was one of the creators of The Breathing Gym. 

It might feel strange, as you may not have felt the air move that quickly before, but that is our goal. You want to memorize this feeling so that in the spur of the moment, in a performance, you have access to this feeling and ability. 

The goal of using this exercise is to teach ourselves how to do that quick inhalation. The diaphragm will do the work, and everything will relax and invite the air in. It will become second nature for us.

Another helpful tool is a rebreathing bag. It is excellent for visually measuring how much air you have and your capacity, as well as observing how you fill up over time. When you wrap your lips around it, they form a shape that doesn’t offer resistance. You can also place tubing in the opening to take out even more resistance and breathe in with an “oh” or an “ah” syllable. This is a great tool for gaining more capacity.

The last exercise Charlier Porter suggests comes from Bobby Shew. It is a variation of his wedge breath concept.

Compression

Compression can be defined as adding support as the air diminishes in our lungs, which we already do when we breathe at a low level. When playing a lead trumpet part in the high range, or soaring over an orchestra, we need to create spin in the air.

One way we can create spin, or super compression, is to pay attention to our back muscles, abdominal muscles, and intercostal muscles. If you think of them as bellows, you need to make sure you have the strength to squeeze the air to expel it. This can be addressed as a calisthenics type of workout that we add to our routine. Some people do push-ups or crunches to help. Your weight also plays a role here; if you are super heavy, you will have more natural compression built in. That isn’t to say you need to be a specific size to have a spin on your sound but that it is a factor for compression.

Porter suggests another variation of The Paper Exercise from before to build compression.

Another strategy to assist with compression is the Astra device from before. This time, put in the heavier ball (in this case, it is red) and try to get the ball to stay at the top with your lips wrapped around the outside of the mouthpiece. You will need to engage your core muscles; otherwise, the ball will not reach the top.

You can also try this with just the mouthpiece. First, take a big breath and put your lips on the outside. Then blow as hard as possible and see if you can get it to whistle.

Final Thoughts

This type of super compression is needed to get the high notes out. Your equipment will change how the high notes sound, but they will not produce them for you.

In a performance setting, we want the work to be already done. We just want to be thinking about the music. Learning how to breathe with good posture, supporting airstream, and a relaxed throat should be done in the practice room. Once you are on stage, it should be second nature. Your breathing merely foreshadows how you want the music to sound.

Did you learn something new? 

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Happy playing!