Now, I can also play using the smaller mouthpieces. However, it is still more difficult to play using them. I have to make major adjustments in my embouchure to play as effectively as I would using a larger mouthpiece. I think I can play using the smaller mouthpiece now because I know what adjustments I need to make and for some reason, I couldn’t learn that until I was comfortable using a larger mouthpiece.

Musically, playing is pretty easy so far. I ordered sheet music from the Canadian Brass website and I just love learning it. The Canadian Brass can make such simple songs sound intricate. I look forward to playing along with my CB CD in the near future.

In my quest to develop the best embouchure I can, I came across the P.E.T.E. and BuzzMaster tools by Warburton Music. There isn’t much online about these tools by way of reviews and experiences but I thought I’d give them a try anyway.

The P.E.T.E. (Personal Embouchure Training Exerciser) is a pretty good tool. Although I can honestly say, you could definitely come up with something cheap or free that could used in substitution for this tool. Sometimes it is nice to have a tool designed specifically for what you need but for the sake of honesty, this isn’t one of those tools you just can’t substitute.

Does the P.E.T.E. Help? Absolutely! There, I said it. *Smile* It does indeed help you strengthen the muscles of your mouth and surrounding areas. The muscles of my mouth were definitely weaker before I started using the P.E.T.E. and I’ve since been using it nearly every day for just a few minutes. I can feel the difference. You can certainly achieve the same results without the tool by simply practicing and practicing. However, having and using the P.E.T.E. makes it a little easier and faster so you are less likely to get frustrated with your progress.

The Buzzmaster is a cylindrical tool in which you place your mouthpiece and buzz. It essentially creates more resistance than just buzzing through your mouthpiece. It does not, however, feel the same as blowing through your trumpet.

Is it useful? Absolutely! The reason I like the Buzzmaster is because it focuses your air stream a little more and it creates much better buzz pitches so you can do exercises that sound very similar when you switch to the horn. I’ve always thought buzzing the mouthpiece wasn’t very good for helping to develop a better ear for what you are playing. The buzz pitches produced while using a Buzzmaster is much better for exercises where you also want to concentrate on pitch.

So, what are the cons? Both tools are too expensive. The P.E.T.E. is $39.50 and the Buzzmaster is $49.95. I would price the P.E.T.E. at $12 and the Buzzmaster at $12-18. You could easily become a great trumpet player without them and the results of using them aren’t so remarkable as to command the kind of prices they are being sold for.

In addition, they are poorly shipped. When I received my package it was torn nearly in half and the case to the P.E.T.E. was crushed and broken. The items were shipped in a standard, cardboard, priority mail envelop which has no padding to protect its contents. A padded envelop at the least should have been used.

I hope in the future, the prices become more reasonable and the shipping is improved. At that time, I would highly recommend these tools.

Up until this point I was forcing myself to use the standard 7c because I figured I “should” be able to play well using it. I mean, it’s standard right? Maybe this is true, maybe not. I have a couple of Jet Tone mouthpieces. I’m not sure why I have them. I remember buying them but I don’t remember my reason for doing so. *Smile*

A couple of days ago, I pulled out the Jet Tone MF and Jet Tone DS. I couldn’t play at all on the MF but played better on the DS than I did on the 7c. But I still struggled to the point of frustration with just playing the notes I wanted consistently. I would pick up the horn with a note in mind and set my lips up to play it and something else would come out or nothing at all.

After reading the article today, I decided to bring out all the mouthpieces I have. I’d bought them years ago when I thought I was going to be diligent in learning the trumpet. *Smile* Among them was a red, plastic 3c mouthpiece (I also have a clear, plastic 5c I haven’t tried). I tossed the 3c into the Buzzmaster. It felt more comfortable but it didn’t really sound any different than the others. I decided to use it on my horn and like magic I was whizzing up and down the scales, hitting every note I wanted and that airy/brassy ugliness was gone and I was no longer jamming the horn hard against my lips. What an awesome moment!

Lesson of the day: Try different things! I should have been trying all of my mouthpieces and not being so rigid about forcing myself to learn on the 7c. My lips fit very nicely in the 3c. When I was using the 7c I found myself putting all of my bottom lip into the mouthpiece and only a tad bit of the top lip and of course this meant the top lip would slip out causing me to lose my buzz. I knew I couldn’t keep playing like that. I also found myself “playing the top part” of the mouthpiece. Where I was literally forcing air only across a very small surface area at the top of the mouthpiece. It felt as if I was developing some bad playing habits right at the start of my quest and I didn’t want that.

So now I’m excited. Now that I’m passed the hump of simply producing a clear steady repeatable tone, I feel I can move on to other important basics.

The Magic Article: http://www.trumpetstudio.com/mouthpieces.html

P.S. The 5c is even better. *Smile*

I think we were doing State comp. in Daytona, Florida. The music was great for this particular year. Just look at all the emotion in the front row. I’m the tuba player closest to the drum section. Fun times. I do miss playing in a symphonic band.

I was a Tuba player in this band back in 1990. For those unfamiliar with All-County bands, you basically send in an audition tape and hope for the best. The best players in the county were chosen for each instrument. Same principle for All-State bands. Auditioning was a part of our grade in our band class so we didn’t have a choice. Not that anyone minded. It meant getting out of school for three days. Three days was all the time we were given to learn all the music and the concert was on the third day in the evening. I thought that was a great way to help young players become better players. Also as a Tuba player this provided more challenging music. Typically the music chosen during Symphonic season during our normal band class may have been challenging for other sections but for the most part consisted of an obscene amount of whole notes, half notes and endless measures of rest for us Tuba players. *Smile* The third piece we played in this clip is my favorite of all time (Yes we were singing. How awesome is that!).

I loved its deep, brassy tones and the challenge of mastering such a large instrument with demanding physical and air flow requirements. However after college, it simply was not in my budget to purchase my own Tuba. I wouldn’t return to the world of brass until a mere 5 or 6 years ago when I purchased a Yamaha Trumpet off of Ebay.

Although I bought the trumpet, I only played it a couple of times and put it away. However within the last month, I’ve decided to give the trumpet a serious try. I love the sound of a trumpet as much as I love the low, mellow sound of the Tuba. I also found it somewhat comforting that because I played Tuba, switching to the trumpet (mechanically) was very easy. The trumpet is lighter and doesn’t require as much air as a Tuba (and the valves are much easier to manhandle). *Smile*

My biggest challenge right now is my embouchure. It is an area of difficulty for me. Switching from a large Tuba mouthpiece to a small Trumpet mouthpiece is very hard. What I needed for my Tuba embouchure of course does not work for a the Trumpet. I can play the trumpet however I’m having trouble getting the crystal clear, steady, mellow tone that I desire. Instead I’m getting a very airy, brassy, hard to manage tone.

So, what I’d like to do is just post some of my practices and in time hopefully be able to hear myself improve! I’ll be upfront about this now. I sound about as bad as a 7th grader just learning to play right now. I can accept that. No embarrassment here. *Smile* I know in time I will get better and better.

If you have the talent to produce good musical compositions, and are capable of creating crystal clear recordings of each track, you must learn how to create a stereo mix and then master the audio. This is what creates what you hear on a CD. These skills can be learned by almost anyone or if you don’t have the time, you can always record everything yourself, mix the audio and take it to a studio to be mastered. For some change, you can have a studio engineer who is quick and proficient in what he or she does, create the final sound.

**For those of you who are unfamiliar with Mastering it is just the process of taking the stereo mix and putting it in the final album-ready form; in other words, getting all the audio at a consistent volume level and feel throughout the album.

What Gravity Groove does is just that. We produce crystal clear audio recordings and do our own mixing. Once we have things the way we want them, we spend a small amount ($60-120) to have the project mastered (sometimes we do it ourselves).

How complicated your music is depends on your personal preferences. Here we use a variety of musical styles but we do like to keep it simple. This is partly due to the fact that we are more geared toward live performance so we try not to do too much outside of natural talent. You have to do what you have to do to get a good recording but we try not to change it so much that it gives listeners a false sense of what natural talent we actually have. We have all been to concerts just to find that the artists can’t even sing!

Our Equipment:

$300 Yamaha DGX202 Portable Grand
$120 Behringer UB1204 Pro Eurorack 12 Input Mixer
$60 MXL 990 Cardioid Condenser Mic with Shockmount
$140 Edirol MA-10DBK Digital Stereo Micro Monitor Pair
*New* $1000 Computer running windows Vista (this pc is also used for video production and graphics design which is why we kicked out so much loot for it).
*New* $300 Epiphone Dot Studio Semi-Hollow Body Electric Guitar (cherry)
*New* $400 Yamaha Trumpet (I’ll be getting rid of this soon and hopefully replacing it with an Eclipse or Bach-Strad).

We use Adobe Audition to record and mix our tracks. That’s right! We use Adobe Audition and not Cakewalk or Pro Tools. Why? Because we wanted a program that records the audio tracks, allows you to do the same mixing you can with a professional mixing board and it needed to be easy to use.

The most expensive equipment we use so far is a Voice Prism harmonizer we bought for $400. It has many impressive features but we are still waiting to be convinced that it was worth the money. **We have resold this hardware because it was never worth the money and all it could do was create ugly unrealistic harmonies.

Still think we are crazy, cheap, and low budget and that these few pieces of cheap equipment can’t do the job? Check out the sound samples on this site and listen to what we made with this cheap equipment. And trust me, I’ve heard phenomenal music made with less and cheaper equipment than this so try to steer clear of trying to “play” producer; that’s when you have all the expensive gear just to say you have it and you think you sound impressive rattling off what you have, but your tracks sound like they were made in the 80s.

If you would also like to use nice, cheap royalty-free sound samples/loops, use Sony Pictures Sound Series products. They are wonderful and affordable. Another good company to buy sound sample/loop CDs from is Ilio, www.ilio.com. Their CDs are more expensive but they do have a product line of CDs for $49 each at www.soundscan2.com.

We also combine, samples/loops with real musicians. I can’t stress enough the importance of using live musicians and also you the producer, learning to play and instrument(s) yourself. Our producers are proficient on many brass instruments and keyboard/piano to name a few. When it comes down to it, we like to only use samples/loops sparingly with our musicians.

To get great audio, you have to produce music not tracks. The moment musical compositions turned into just “beats” and “tracks” was the dawn of the surge of all the mediocre, substandard music we hear today. Hey, the O’Jays didn’t sing over beats, they sung over instrumentals. If you don’t know nothing about the O’Jays, you don’t need to be reading this article anyway. *Smile*

This well cultivated collection of sensual sounds intends to create a richer experience while you read. It’s unique version of Jazz and spoken word will set the mood right as you soak in the erotically exhilarating stories within “Black Erotica Is… Loving Black”.

Q: How does it feel to be making music again?

A: I can’t say enough how necessary it is for me to be doing this. Music was everything to me. I was in limbo for a long time and a good friend of mine kept telling me I needed to do my art or I would never be happy. His thoughts were that everyone has a gift or gifts and if you are doing anything other than that, you will really end up playing yourself in life. So now I’m doing my art and things are clear and much much better.

Q: So what was your experience learning to play instruments and being in band?

A: *Laughs* Well I feel like I had a very unique experience in that I was constantly around band teachers who really didn’t care who played what. If they needed someone on one instrument and you wanted to learn it, that was that. No one ever told me I couldn’t play something. So I learned every instrument I had the opportunity to learn. I also had to the fortunate experience of playing with some of the best young people during that time. We were all very good. When I was in high school we were playing music written for professionals and college students. *Smile* At the time, we bitched and moaned about it but learned the music anyway. For the most part our band director could get away with doing that because we were good. Our drumline was so good, they did a professional recording and sold tapes of it. They called themselves “Death Row”. *Laughing*

Q: What was the hardest thing you ever had to play?

A: I remember one time, our band director was really in a fantasy world and decided we should play “Rhapsody In Blue”… one written for a professional symphonic band. When we first got the music, there were pages and pages of sheet music first of all and we had never seen that. We were used to maybe 4 pages at the most, front and back. This was well over 15 pages, front and back. There were symbols and notes in that music we had never seen in our lives. The panic on everyone’s faces was a trip! Now, Tubas normally play notes that are of course pretty low but there were notes several lines below the staff we’d never seen. So I just laughed. I thought it was amusing. I always thought it was funny when we got something crazy to play. Well we were to play that piece at the performing arts center in front of a lot of people and we did learn the music but the director still ended up having to hire professionals in each section to come play with us. He would never admit he had no business having high school kids play something like that. *Laughing*

Q: So you stopped playing for a while and then decided to get back into it. Tell us about that.

A: Yes. It was a shame really. We had some of the best players in the state and not one of us was still playing. And I went through a time where I was restless. I couldn’t write or create anything. I was in touch with a lot of my friends from band but we weren’t doing anything. We were all doing the “adult” thing and it didn’t include pursuing our gifts. This society isn’t geared towards that. It’s geared towards production and neo slavery. Anything creative is an after thought…a hobby. I was in college double majoring in Biology and Chemistry. Don’t get me wrong, I love those subjects and they came easy for me but did I really want to be a Biologist or Chemist doing the same experiments over and over or not at all? Eventually I realized that’s not what I wanted to do. But I stopped playing music to study those things. But eventually I realized there is a big difference between learning and absorbing information for your own personal growth and doing what you are gifted to do which is what’s good for your life and soul. So I’m focusing on what I’m gifted to do and that’s writing and music. But I still learn things for my personal growth and enjoyment. I enjoyed learning things realted to the natural world, quantum physics, biology, etc. I can share those things with my kids in the future.

Q: Wonderful! Now you know everyone is wondering about “The Black Experience CD”… You wrote and produced that…

A: Yes. *Smile* This was my first real attempt at producing a whole album from start to finish. It was hard. Hard because I’m an Aries and it’s hard for us to finish anything. *Laughs* So I had to really force myself to see the project to the end. I had written all of the poetry originally for my website. When I decided to take the stories I also wrote for that site and make them into a book, I thought it would be a good idea to include a CD with the book as well. Something to listen to while you are reading…put you in the mood. *Smile*

Q: Why erotica?

A: It’s one of the many areas black people are having trouble with today. It’s necessary. Our relationships are in trouble no matter what your sexuality is. We can’t always only deal with one aspect of our lives. We focus a lot on things that really aren’t the root issues we need to focus on. I decided to address this one. Erotica is a broad term. I really like to focus on how black people relate to each other on a sexual level and to just paint a picture of various scenarios. I don’t like to point out what’s wrong. I like to show how it could be. It’s time we stopped wasting time by ONLY pointing out what’s wrong and start showing people a different reality.

Q: On “The Black Experience” CD you also worked with multi-talented artist, Kanzi.

A: Yes! Kanzi is my most favorite person in the world. *Smile* We had a good time working in this project together. We didn’t really have time for her to do more on this CD but you will certainly hear more of her on the next project. She’s very fun to work with.

Q: Are you worried about negative feed back on your unique musical style or the subject matter of your work?

A: Not at all. It won’t be for everybody. I’m sure some people won’t like it but that’s cool. I’m writing and producing for myself and those who will enjoy it. I have unique gifts and abilities that go beyond music and writing that are on a very human level and it’s my responsibility to do what I’m doing. So I have no worries. I’ll be the first to admit my music is very different. If you are really into mainstream music and typical hip hop and R&B, my music will sound very strange to you and you may not like it. When I produce, I never know what’s going to be the end result. I don’t even know what key I’m in. *Laughs* But my music is not a mess, it’s just mine. As for the subject matter, everyone reading my work should be grown. We are adults so there should be no issue with the topic. Sex is natural and healthy and anyone who has a issue with that has just that…an issue. Sex and sexuality has never been a problem for me so either you feel me or you are out of sight. *Smile*