Over the past couple of years I’ve been dealing with some pain in my left thumb after holding my instrument for any length of time. I’ve got a similar issue in my right thumb and wrist that fortunately doesn’t bother my trombone playing, but it can become distracting at the end of playing a 3 hour gig.

There are contraptions that I know many players use to help hold the instrument for them, but I don’t feel that it’s quite necessary for me (yet) to go that far. In fact, I’m a little cautious about any change in how I’m holding my instrument because it is a very important part of playing technique. On trumpet and trombone, for example, the left hand pretty much holds the instrument by itself. The height and angle of the instrument as it contacts the lips is very much going to influence the embouchure technique (and in more ways than a lot of players seem to realize).

For most of my playing career I’ve been holding my trombone in the standard way, with my forefinger over the shank of the mouthpiece and my other fingers griping the instrument like this.

What I’m now finding is that that group keeps my thumb pulled away just enough to start hurting after a bit. But making a minor change by moving my middle finger on to the other side of the brace takes the pressure off my thumb.

It’s less of an issue when I play my symphonic horn with an F attachment. The nature of that grip is such that I can leave my second finger where it is standard or bring it on the other side of the brace like in the above photo, just with my thumb on the F trigger. It’s a little awkward that way because my 2nd finger might get a bit in the way of pressing the trigger down, so I tend to hold that horn traditionally. Both grips are close enough to each other that it’s not hard at all to keep my instrument at my lips correctly and consistently.

If you do an Internet search for “trumpet grips” you’ll find a lot more variations than you usually find with trombonists. Some teachers seem to make a bigger deal of holding the trumpet a particular way than others, but it of course depends a lot on the individual player’s hand size and, to a certain degree, the music that player performs. For example, a lead trumpet player specialist is not going to need to kick out the third valve slide as often as someone who plays more in the lower register, so you could argue that the former’s trumpet grip doesn’t need to concern that characteristic as much.

What I don’t advocate for is a grip or way of holding the instrument that is inconsistent. I believe it’s better in the long term for the musician to find a comfortable left hand grip that enables him or her to play everything that they may be asked to and keep it consistent. A consistent grip will go a long way to a consistent embouchure.

Lastly, for brass musicians who play tuba, horn, and euphonium/baritone horn you will need to do some experimentation to find a position of the instrument that is both comfortable for you to hold for long periods of time and also is ideal to match your physiology. Horn angles, mouthpiece placement, and other features of brass technique are personal. If a horn player, for example, rests his or her bell against her leg it may or may not put the mouthpiece on the lips at the right angle and height. He or she will also have some trouble performing standing up for a solo recital. It’s better to learn to play by holding the horn off the leg. Tubists and euphonium players might want to consider adjustable instrument stands to help hold the instrument at the correct height and angle to fit their body.

Want more on the left hand grip, but from the standpoint of a bass trombonist? I highly recommend you check out Doug Yeo’s article in his FAQ, “I’ve been experiencing pain in my left arm when playing trombone. What is causing it and how can I fix the problem?“

Here in the United States today is Memorial Day. This annual holiday honors the men and women who gave their lives in service to the country.

Here is the Asheville Jazz Orchestra’s recording of my arrangement of the armed forces marches in a big band style.

Brad Goode is a multi-instrumentalist (trumpet, bass, and drums) and teaches at the University of Colorado. Back when I was a grad student at DePaul University Brad lived in the Chicago area and I would go down to the Green Mill to hear his group play on Wednesday nights (my trombone teacher at the time was Paul McKee, who played in that group). Getting to sit up close and listen to some of the top jazz musicians in Chicago play on a regular basis was in many ways more important to my development as a musician than the studies I was doing at the time.

Brad recently went on the Trumpet Gurus Hang Podcast and talked trumpet. Along the way Brad discussed how Donald Reinhardt’s writing saved his career and how and why he teaches embouchure mechanics now. I’ve cued the following video right at that point.

Brad discusses at about 45:00 into the podcast his experiences struggling to learn to play trumpet that mirrors some of my own background struggling with trombone and how I currently teach.

Some of my early experiences with trying to understand the trumpet and figure it out, I didn’t get direct answers. I got philosophical treatises or theoretical responses. I didn’t get somebody to say, “I see what’s going on there. Change this, do this, and this will be fixed.” . . Because there aren’t a lot of people who are willing to go into the specifics of embouchure technique people who do what I do now are sometimes viewed with skepticism by the community of people who believe analysis is paralysis, which is a big movement in brass pedagogy right now. As a player I believe I can show an example of the opposite, somebody who analyzed his way out of many problems.

Podcast host Jose Johnson also recapped his own personal experiences with his own embouchure.

It wasn’t until I met Doug Elliott and Doug worked with me a little bit. And he was the one who kind of put things together for me. And he said, here’s your problem. . . The problem is that because of the problems that you got because from the embouchure change and how hard you worked at that your mind is fighting against itself. Because you know what you want to do but you’re reverting back to that habit that they had instilled with you. . . When I would do the things consciously that he would say, no problem. But I started to play music and I would immediately switch back to that old ingrained pattern. . . That’s where we get into trouble when we just let the subconscious go. . . If the subconscious has been programed wrong . . . then you’re in big trouble.

The whole interview is great and worth checking out.

Tomorrow is Christmas Day. Happy holidays to all readers of Wilktone.

Here’s a recording that the Asheville Jazz Orchestra made last year during lockdown. Everyone sent me their recorded tracks and I assembled them together and made this Christmas greeting video.

When I was an undergraduate student I bought my first Real Book. This was back in the day before the legal copy was published by Hal Leonard. There was a music store local to my college that carried them, but they weren’t on display. You had to ask for them and they would go in the back and bring one out for you. Later, in graduate school, the “Real Book guy” would swing through once every year or so and unload a bunch of books from his car and sell them off to music students. I still have copies of those books.

I had heard before that the Real Book was something put together by students at Berkley College of Music, but not learned the complete story behind them until recently.

In the mid-70s, Steve Swallow began teaching at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, an elite private music school that boasted one of the first jazz performance programs in the country. Swallow had only been teaching at Berklee for a few months when two students approached him about a secret project. “I keep referring them to them as ‘the two guys who wrote the book,’ because…they swore me to secrecy. They made me agree that I would not divulge their names,” explains Swallow. The “two guys” wanted to make a new fake book, one that actually catered to the needs of contemporary jazz musicians and reflected the current state of jazz. And they needed Swallow’s help.

That book is a double edged sword. It’s a good starting point for jazz students to learn tunes and it was the first popular fake book that updated the tunes to include contemporary jazz standards. But there are many mistakes in a lot of the tunes and often they don’t reflect how most jazz musicians perform the tunes. These days it’s more common to see jazz musicians carrying around a tablet with scans of fake books or the iRealB app instead.

Learn more about the Real Book and some of the history behind fake books on the 99% Invisible podcast, episode 438.

It’s Independence Day in the U.S. The Asheville Jazz Orchestra performed our annual Patriotic Big Band Concert last night after a 1 year hiatus. He’s a chart we performed honoring all the men and women who have served in the U.S. Armed Forces, a medley arrangement I wrote for the San Luis Big Band.

We recorded it last year during the pandemic by having everyone record their parts individually at home to a click track, and then I assembled each part in GarageBand. Some of us had nice microphones, some of us just used cell phones, so the sound is a little different on each player. All things considered, I think it came out OK.

Happy Independence Day to all my U.S. readers!