Learning the Trumpet

Hello!
I am going to talk about learning the trumpet. This is something that I really enjoy because I have a great teacher. In this blog entry, I will cover what things I do when I play the trumpet.

Playing the trumpet can be quite tedious because you can get tired but a good way to start off your practise is an excellent warm up. I do a mixture of notes and slurs that go to the lowest and highest notes of my range. Then, I practise some of my pieces. I found it really hard when I started but I soon got into it. I mostly struggled with putting my tongue in the correct place. Here is a labelled diagram of a trumpet.

Now I'm going to tell you how to hold the trumpet starting with your right hand. Your thumb hooks under the leadpipe, your middle three fingers go on the valves and your little finger goes in the hook next to the valves. For your left hand, your thumb rests in the hook on the medium sized valve slide, your middle three fingers rest against the side of the 3rd valve casing and your little finger in the circular loop on the longest valve slide.

Playing the trumpet seems quite hard because there are only three valves. For any finger arrangement on the valves, many different notes can be produced depending on how hard you blow and the pressure of your tongue. These notes are called harmonics. The original trumpet didn't have any valves so you could only get the harmonics with no valves pressed down. The harmonics get closer together as you play higher notes so in the olden days, trumpet pieces were had a very high pitch.

There are several variations on the trumpet, for example the cornet- a smaller, more squished trumpet- and the pocket trumpet- even tinier! But who knows, maybe in the future more types of trumpets will be invented!

Bye!