High Notes
My thoughts on high notes have changed so much throughout the years, and while with most topics I feel confident saying “I’ve figured this out” or at least can say “I know a lot more about this than I did 10 years ago”, I feel like I haven’t made much progress in my understanding as to how high notes work. Naturally, I think most people who say they understand how they work are either lying or are horribly overconfident idiots, to put it very nicely. I have yet to find a single person who I agree with even a decent amount of what they say regarding high notes, but there are still some people who I will mention by name because they have said some things that I’ve found rather interesting and useful.
If you’re interested in increasing your upper range, the best advice I can give you is to just try out anything and see if it works. I’m a big fan of the saying “Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks,” and I’m not sure if there’s anything that applies to more in brass playing than figuring out the upper register. I’ll start with a list of things that I [currently] recommend to people to help with high notes:
When trying to play higher notes, you (generally) should:
Raise your tongue up in your mouth; many people will say “like you’re saying the letter ‘E’” or like you’re trying to hiss
Some will say you should raise your jaw up; some people say that your tongue and jaw movements are connected
Roll your lips inward while you ascend
Firm up the muscles of your face (your embouchure) to hold everything together
These are what I tell people to do for when they’re trying to play higher. However, there is one more piece of advice that I also tell people that is a bit weird; I would say that this advice only applies to the extreme upper register:
Think about closing down your teeth (typically your top teeth) against your lip (normally your bottom lip); for some people, it would be reversed, but I would say 80% of people are going to have their top teeth close down against their bottom lip
If you’re just interested in the actual advice and don’t care for the explanations, stop reading here and give these things a try if you haven’t already. For practicing high notes, I like to separate it into 4 different categories:
Scales
Arpeggios
Partial Lip Slurs
Octave Lip Slurs
These four categories represent how you’ll commonly see high notes in music, hence the distinction. There are a few other ways you’ll see high notes in music (such as large leaps), but they won’t be common, so you’ll be ready in most scenarios if you’re regularly practicing high notes in the above 4 ways. Any exercise that you find online should be just fine as long as you’re actively pushing the upper limits of your range. I don’t think the exact exercise you use matters all that much, but there’s a little bit of nuance to it. This isn’t meant to spell out all my thoughts on how to practice high notes, though I’ll likely write about that at a later date.
I want to focus on that last piece of advice I said: “Think about closing down your teeth against your lip.” It’s really strange advice, but I firmly believe in it, and I got it from a guy on YouTube named Paul Mayes, and his channel name is “The Trumpet Prof”. There are definitely some things he says that I don’t agree with, but he has a very interesting take on high notes that I hadn’t heard of before I watched his videos. He argues that depending on the shape of your teeth, you can form a secondary aperture using your teeth and your lip that is a lot smaller than a normal aperture (if you were to only use your lips) which will help you play higher. I’m not even sure if I agree with that explanation as to why the method works, but I definitely think it works regardless.
In one of his videos, he puts his mouthpiece in several different spots and manages to play decently high in each spot. He shows each gap in his teeth before playing. Here’s the link to that clip: https://youtu.be/r9Edle8ygd8?si=qD6poJV1e2Nkl5kL&t=191
If you have the time for it, I’d also recommend watching this video; this is the first video of his that I watched: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmAmXpLOuRU
This is taking too long to finish up, so I’ll likely write some more at a later date. To be continued…
