🎺 Mystery Revealed, 5 Solutions to Your Stuffy Trumpet Sound 🎺 

Which solution recommended in the video will you choose to apply first?

Played trumpet for over 30 years. Never once puckered. Studied under someone that used carmine caruso exercises to decrease pressure and improve airflow. My range shot up to the point that as a freshman in high school I wasn't even good to being 1st chair or lead trumpet in one year. Your channel is awesome

Great stuff. I have been playing since 1953 and I learned a bit from this vid. Kudos to Chris.

Thank you, Chris! Always you're welcome with your videos and practice tips. Go on, please

Thanks so much. Enjoyed it. Have typed up the seven steps to pin up next to the piano...

Hi Chris, great video, reminded me of all the things you had me doing when you started to rebuild my embouchure 18 months ago. Was well worth the effort as my trumpet playing has really come on. If you need a good trumpet teacher, then Chris is your man 👍 Reminds me I need to get in touch and book some more sessions to improve my jazz playing. Will be in touch shortly. Keep up the good work and videos 👏

Thank you so much for this video! l'm playing trumpet and l am always listening to your videos.

We had this conversation at Thornton my senior year while attending Roosevelt University I had to go through a embouchure change. This became really discouraging and ultimately lead to me stepping away from playing. I am currently back at it and will be attending University of Houston this fall finishing my degree in music, but the mental part of starting over is very defeating. I will win this time! Thanks for making these videos chris you are one of my trumpet heros bro!

I greatly appreciate these videos, Chris. I've been an amateur guitar player most of my life, but I'm now trying to get back into the trumpet. I love jazz, and that is why I took up the trumpet in the first place, when I was a kid. Unfortunately, I haven't played the trumpet since 1970. It's coming along, but I find it hard to divide my time between both instruments. But I'm working at it. :)

Chris, I am a professional trumpet player and you are a great teacher. Thanks for doing what you do

Another very helpful vid Chris. I find your vids very encouraging. Thanks mate, really.

THANK YOU!!

Great video!

I started playing with a puckered lip and this video actually saved from a lot of pain thank you

hey thank you for this video, as someone who wants to become an educator and who also plays trumpet I love having these vids as resources for addressing common playing problems, I learned some new stuff from this. Great video!

Great video! Another problem with band music teachers is they don't understand the impact of brass students' faces and bodies growing and changing over several years, and the students need nuanced corrections for that alone. This has more of an impact on wind instrument players, particularly brass.

Thanks Chris. Very informative. I’m 59 years old and I just picked up my horn 6 years ago, after not playing for 35 years. I love your teaching style. It’s very helpful to this old comeback horn player!

I really appreciate the content that you put out on your channel. Thank you for that! I'm a teacher and when my students are sounding stuffy have them blow through the shank of the mouthpiece. There's a ton of resistance through the shank. So we'll do a breathing exercise like breathe in four counts and push four counts. The exercise can go side ways of not implemented correctly. The students can get spread sounds. But I have noticed that this helps clear up some stuffiness in the sound because they're pushing past the resistance like you mentioned in the video.

Wow! It worked !! Night and day! Thanks!

Very nice lecture.

Played all thru school with nice clear tone but limited high range. Set it aside for years. Wanting now to sound like chet baker who is incredibly stuffy. Love the smoky jazz sound. Lots of air but can't figure out how to do it.

Picking up my axe after 43 years in the desert. You sir, are a godsend. Thank you for your videos.

@ChrisDavisTrumpet I played in the red for a while and i'm tryinig to get out of it right now. But I cant get my lips to roll in, if I roll them in they just get out and I cant hold it for long. Also after I played for a while with my new "technique" (how I place my mouthpiece now) I can still see a circle in the red. Do you have a solution?

Is it just me, or is the trumpet in this video have the lead pipe on the lefts side of the trumpet as opposed to the right? Is that a video thing or is it a left handed trumpet? Nice video though, thank you.

Please the link

What mouthpiece is that in the video? I ask because I've seen you play it in other videos and it looks like a great mouthpiece. The sound is equal to the Monette which I cannot afford. Thank you.

Hello Chris, what's the solution to farty low register sound?

I'm a band student In school. My trumpet sounds muffled when I play G. Is that because of puckering or not enough air? I need help!

Hi Chris, Thanks for the information. I just have a quick question. Whenever I play for a while I find out that I have an indent on my lips from the mouthpiece. It also starts to hurt the more I play and I find that my endurance is a lot weaker. Is there anything I can do to help prevent this from happening?

Just bought my first trumpet 🎺 don't plan to ever be a great player I just want to be able to play a few notes clearly

Please help me. I am looking for a tutorial on how to play small parts with a trumpet in an actual song with a band. If you understand I do not mean a solo but a supporting music just like chords in guitar.

I think there are more overblowers than underblowers.

You never showed how to get a good sound without buzzing. On Tuba, I need to buzz but my buzzing on trumpet is trash.

He should really🎺 play as much as he👅talks🙊!

why u look like roy jones?

What a buzz kill 😉

Sorry, this is extraordinarily long, but I started writing and it just came pouring out. You need to be very careful in using the term “puckered lips.” It’s going to mean different things to different people. You may know what you mean, but it’s a matter of degree, and others may understand it differently with results that don’t well serve them. We don’t pucker, but we do use our lips as a cushion to keep the mouthpiece from mashing them into our teeth. There are many accomplished trumpet players who know how to form and use a good embouchure, but they all describe what they do in how they understand it as it relates to them. So, what happens is you read a dozen players describe what they do and it sounds like a dozen different ways, when they are all describing essentially the same thing, as they understand it. The student then struggles to absorb what it is exactly that they are supposed to do. You don’t just mash the mouthpiece against your lips and pin them between the mouthpiece and the teeth. I’m also not a fan of free buzzing with your lips, because first, that’s not how you play, and second, it teaches you to press your lips too tightly together, which creates more compression than you need, and then it requires you to blow too hard to overcome the resistance you’ve created. If you say the classic “M” just lightly touching your lips together and gently blow air over your lips, you find they slightly (SLIGHTLY!) purse outward just a little from the force of the air passing over them. This isn’t a pucker, but a sort of flexing forward of the lips away from the teeth (and that’s a GOOD thing). When you add the mouthpiece and you have your corners firm, but the center aperture of your lips relaxed, you don’t need to TRY to make a buzz, as the air moving across your lips will vibrate them for you, if you are doing it correctly and gently enough (we’ve all seen the demonstration of forming an embouchure, putting the mouthpiece against it and just gently blowing air out through the mouthpiece, and there is no sound, only air, yet when the mouthpiece is inserted into the trumpet while continuing to blow air through the mouthpiece, because of the added resistance of the trumpet it begins to produce a sound). So, even mouthpiece buzzing has to be approached carefully. You can press the mouthpiece against your embouchure and MAKE your lips buzz, but that’s not correct. If you form your embouchure, have your corners supported, with a relaxed center aperture, merely gently exhaling air across your lips will make them vibrate and they will produce a buzz. It took me years (I must be a slow learner) to understand why teachers and pros alike said to practice softly, because if you don’t understand the concept of how to get the lips to PROPERLY vibrate in the first place, you will MAKE them vibrate, and you’ll limit your potential because you’ll always be fighting against the horn and the unnecessary resistance you have created, and playing will always be hard work. The problem is, and I agree with you, that band directors who aren’t trumpet players don’t understand how an embouchure is really supposed to work, so young students start out already handicapped with misinformation. One of the best videos I saw was Adam Rapa teaching his young nephew (I think it was his nephew) on how to produce a correct sound on the trumpet, and within minutes the nephew was actually able to play notes with a pretty decent sound because Adam is very patient and knows HOW to explain the concepts so that not just he, but the STUDENT, understands them. That is so critical to a developing student. An excellent authority on how to create a proper embouchure is Clint “Pops” McLaughlin, of the Bb Trumpet College web site. He talks about lip compression, lip curl, firm corners, and aperture control, and how they relate to each other, and how you DON’T use all of them at the same time, or you’ll be so tight that you’ll never get any air past your lips. Even with HIS excellent instruction, and watching videos of others like Charlie Porter, Chase Sanborn, Arturo Sandoval, Greg Spence, Bobby Spellman, you, and many many, more I can’t name right now, it still took me a long time to be able to internalize the information in order to understand how to make it work for me, and I’m an adult who can analyze and work through the concepts. Imagine how much more difficult it is for a beginning student. I studied for a time with Joe Morrissey of Chase, and I was playing with an incorrect embouchure at the time, but I was producing the notes so he didn’t say anything (and I believe he has an M.A. in Music Education, and he SHOULD have had me correct my embouchure). It wasn’t until I read the articles from Clint McLaughlin that I realized I was making playing a lot harder for myself (I was using a very open embouchure that required me to use much too much pressure to reach the high register), and I still couldn’t understand how the pros could so easily get around on their horns. I saw a demonstration by Charles Lazarus doing some ridiculously fast lip flexibility exercises and realized I could never achieve that kind of facility unless I changed how I approached the trumpet. I realized I had to learn how to better control my AIR, because there is no way you can make your lips adjust that quickly. So, I started searching for more information. You keep hearing trumpet players talking about taking a BiG breath and BLOWING lots of air. Air, MORE AIR. However, what that teaches the student is to take a bigger breath than needed for the musical passage, and overblow what is required to produce the sound and dynamics you want. I was blown away by the video of Jim Manley with the Airmen of Note trumpet section players, where he showed them how LITTLE air it actually takes to produce a sound, and how playing the way he did allowed him to make two octave interval leaps with ease. I started thinking about how I needed to learn how to play more EFFICIENTLY, and get the most use out of the air I was using. I finally found someone who could explain it in a way that I could understand it, on Mark Zauss’ web site. He explained WHY you practice softly. You need to learn how to produce the notes correctly with a balanced embouchure-and when I say balanced, I understand it to mean the balance between your embouchure tension and the air passing across your lips (and, of course, through your horn)-and then learn the coordination that it takes with your air and aperture before you add in any increase in dynamics, or you’ll revert to TRYING to play the notes, instead of allowing your air to vibrate your lips and produce them naturally for you. The coordination needs to become a habit so that you play all notes in all registers in this relaxed way, and to bring this full circle, by drawing in your corners ever so slightly, you create a cushion with your lips that will support the mouthpiece without hurting them (and that’s NOT a pucker). I have read that it’s a matter of physics. Where there is contact, there is pressure. You can’t avoid it. The idea is to make the pressure as gentle and minimal as possible. As long as the pressure of your air blowing out against your embouchure and the mouthpiece-like in vigorous lead playing-isn’t exceeded by the force of the mouthpiece against your embouchure to maintain it’s placement, you shouldn’t hurt your lips or endurance. Since I learned this, my chops never get sore or swollen. When I get tired, it’s my facial muscles from supporting my embouchure, and sometimes (depending on the playing) my core from supporting the air. I have come to the conclusion that we can go a long way in helping trumpet players understand the concept of how notes are created by discontinuing the use of the word “blow” in all its permutations. We should substitute the word EXHALE, because that is exactly what we are doing. When we want that dark, lush sound we exhale a lot of slow, warm air through a more relaxed aperture, and when we ascend we exhale faster, cooler air through a more controlled aperture. This made me understand that pretty much any of the technique books will help you get your playing ability under your belt, IF you know how to create the sound correctly, in the first place. That way, with your air supporting you and helping you play, you’ll learn the technical exercises much more quickly and easily. Therefore, I think educators should spend the bulk of their initial time with students in teaching them how to make a correct embouchure, how to control their breathing with the correct balance of exhalation to equal the resistance of their embouchure and their equipment (in this case, the trumpet) in order to produce a relaxed and controlled buzz, and how to maintain a coordinated approach to producing a sound. I think if this is accomplished before students concern themselves with technical exercises, students will develop much more quickly and playing will be more enjoyable. The embouchure and the proper use of air is the foundation upon which everything else is built.