The Ultimate Trumpet Podcast from TrumpetStudio

The engraving on the bell is not where the horn was made, and in 2026 the two have stopped meaning the same thing. Here is the honest answer for 20 brands.

• The shorthand, Bach American, Yamaha Japanese, the cheap unfamiliar name Chinese, no longer holds. Some build everything under one roof, some build different lines in different countries, and a few old American names now exist only in the used case.
• Bach pro trumpets never moved to China. The professional line is still made in Elkhart, Indiana, where Conn Selmer consolidated U.S. professional brass in July 2026; the student line is built overseas, which is where the myth started. The real debate is Bach versus Bach, and the advice is to play several.
• King is where the year changes the answer. Eastlake, Ohio closed in summer 2026 and production moved to Elkhart, but a page still says Eastlake, and by its final years Eastlake was mostly horns and tubas, not King trumpets.
• Kanstul really did close. It built in Anaheim from 1993 and stopped taking orders in 2019, so it is now a legacy American manufacturer, a real used-market category, not a brand making new horns.
• F.E. Olds: the classic horns were California instruments and the original company closed in 1979; the revived company sits in Mountainside, New Jersey, but that is the administrative office, not the factory.
• The clean American made in stories: Getzen (all trumpets, Elkhorn, Wisconsin), Edwards (same roof, Elkhorn), Monette (custom horns one at a time, Portland, Oregon), and Schilke (Melrose Park, Illinois).
• CarolBrass is made in Taiwan, in Chiayi County, one hundred percent Taiwan made, with factory tours, and the reflex of calling it Chinese is the stereotype the industry has outgrown. Jupiter is a KHS network in both Taiwan and China, so it depends on the model.
• The names that fool you: Adams is Dutch (Ittervoort), Stomvi is Spanish (Xirivella), Schagerl is Austrian (Hörsdorf), B&S and pro Besson are German (Markneukirchen), Shires Custom is Holliston, Massachusetts.
• Jean Paul is the opposite case, its own page says it makes all instruments in China and defends modern Chinese wind quality. Thomann is the purest misleading bell, a German retailer whose TR-800 page names no manufacturing country, so stencil claims stay forum information.

Read the full article, 20 Trumpet Brands and Where They Are Actually Made in 2026, at TrumpetStudio.com, and check out Trumpet Studio on the App Store.

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

• The Ultimate Warm Up Book
• The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

Trumpet Studio - Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

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Now go practice!!

Trumpet player, composer, and sound designer Tim Larkin joins The Ultimate Trumpet Podcast for a conversation about building a life in music, from Bay Area gigs and recording sessions to performing with Ella Fitzgerald and James Brown.

• Unforgettable moments from the bandstand, including being so moved by Ella's singing that he lowered his horn during rehearsal, and finding himself soloing beside James Brown after Brown put a microphone into his trumpet bell.
• How persistence, networking, and preparation helped him establish himself as a professional musician.
• Studying with Claude Gordon, and the remarkable story behind the Selmer CG trumpet he has played since college.
• How his warm-up routine has evolved over the years.
• An early recording-session story that shows how understanding both the trumpet and the recording process can turn a difficult assignment into a career opportunity.

• Resources Mentioned in the podcast:
  • The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

  Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

  Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!

  Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

Two words half the brass world uses as a sentence and the other half uses as an excuse. This episode asks what song and wind actually was in the room where Jacobs said it.

• The phrase is true, and it was true in the room where Jacobs actually said it. Song carried most of the intellectual weight of playing and wind carried the rest. What the sentence stopped being is a description of the work. It is now an ending for a conversation that should have just started.
• The bench in Jacobs' studio was full of things that have nothing to do with music: a Voldyne reading vital capacity to about five liters, an Inspiron flipped for the exhale, a Breath Builder taking roughly fourteen ounces, air bags, a peak flow meter, and a compound gauge he bolted to a drilled pipe.
• Around 1960 Jacobs and a few Chicago Symphony colleagues sat through real pulmonary function testing at a University of Chicago hospital, and he wrote a long joint piece on respiration with Dr. David Cugell at Northwestern. In 1982 he put inexpensive versions into the world so a student could own it.
• He kept himself on the same scale he held everyone else to. His vital capacity ran close to five liters early in his career, dropped to about two point seven five liters after cancer surgery, and he worked it back to somewhere between three point eight and four point four.
• The load-bearing part the slogan dropped: Jacobs quarantined the mechanical work on purpose. The gauges came out away from the instrument. The split describes what should be in your head in the moment of performance, not how you spend the practice week.
• Strip the second half out and the phrase collapses into think musically and blow, which is not a philosophy, it is a permission slip. There is no baseline, no device, no number, and so there is no evidence that anything has improved.
• The Harold Hill / The Music Man caricature was named most clearly in a 2015 piece by Frank Byrne and Michael Grose, both Jacobs admirers, and they were writing the accusation back at its skeptics, not at Jacobs. His original critics accused him of having no mechanics. His followers now quote him as proof that mechanics do not matter.

• Resources Mentioned in the podcast:
  • The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

  Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

  Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!

  Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

The label half the brass world uses and none of it can quite define. This episode asks what the Chicago School actually is, and what it never was.

• The word school implies a building, a faculty, a curriculum, a degree. None of those things exist, and the two men who give the label its name never wrote a method together and never agreed on a sequence of steps.
• Jacobs and Herseth did not even deliver in the same language. Jacobs was a talking teacher who sang through exercises, had students walk and stand on one foot, and kept a medical archive that ended up at DePaul. Herseth spoke in short, oracular fragments and spent most of his time demonstrating, letting the sound make the argument.
• Song and wind comes from a 1996 book by Brian Frederiksen, Jacobs assistant, and it is a student's book, written after the fact, not a syllabus Jacobs handed out. In the room where he said it, it was a corrective aimed at a specific over-analyzing student, not a universal law.
• Big sound is a description, not a prescription, and the moment you turn it into a prescription you skip the entire middle. The air is the engine, not the hammer, and the size was a by-product of the ease, not the goal. The player who hears big sound and thinks push more air has missed the whole point.
• The load-bearing aphorism is the least quoted one: think about what it sounds like, not what it feels like. The mechanics are in service of the sound, and if you put the sound in your head first, the mechanics tend to sort themselves out. That is a defensible claim, and it is the one that actually works in the practice room.
• What actually transmitted was a sound, heard repeatedly in a city where you could not avoid hearing it. The standard got into players' ears and started doing work that no syllabus could do. The small set of phrases that described the sound survived because they are short, memorable, and hard to argue with, and they traveled until the context dropped out and the sentences became slogans.
• The word school is a later invention, a name that players outside the city put on a sound they had heard on a recording. The lineage is real in the sense that a player at DePaul heard the CSO, went home, practiced, and taught a student who then heard the CSO. The school is not.
• Resources Mentioned in the podcast:
  • The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

  Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

  Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!

  Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

The horn that gets a groan before anyone has even played it. This episode asks why brass players dismiss composite trumpets on sight, and what that contempt is actually protecting.

• The reflexive groan at a "plastic trumpet" comes from players who have never put one to their lips for longer than thirty seconds. They are reacting to a label, not an instrument, and that is why the contempt keeps winning arguments it has no reason to win.
• The horn people are laughing at is a real, working tool: the pTrumpet from UK maker pBone runs around one-ninety dollars at major retailers, and a metal-and-plastic hybrid sits in the two-seventy-nine range for players who want more traditional feel.
• The number that changes the argument is weight: roughly five hundred grams, about a third to a half of a standard Bb trumpet. Over two outdoor sets that is real, cumulative relief for the arm and posture.
• Durability is the quiet pitch: salt air, sweat, rain on an outdoor stage, and a horn that gets set on wet wood or concrete without a case. Brass collects all of it; composite does not, which matters for the working beach-bar and outdoor player.
• The most common complaint - "you will not win a Chicago Philharmonic audition on that" - is true and completely beside the point. Nobody buying a five-hundred-gram horn for an outdoor gig is trying to win that audition, and telling them so just keeps the conversation on your terms.
• Who actually buys these: a working session player who wants a light second horn to carry through an airport without checking it as baggage; the teacher at a no-budget school who needs something that survives a year of eighth-graders; and the kid small for the grade whose arms give out on a full brass horn.
• The parallel to the Chinese-horn question: for years "made in China" triggered the same skip-the-instrument reflex, and when four-hundred-dollar imports started playing open and in tune, the people who had never played one kept saying "it is just a Chinese trumpet." The material was never what you were evaluating; the playing experience was.
• Resources Mentioned in the podcast:
  • The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

  Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

  Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!

  Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

"Stop using pressure" is the advice every brass player has heard, usually by twelve. This episode asks what that slogan actually does to your playing - and why pressure is a variable to manage, not a sin to eliminate.

• The "no pressure" rule has no measurement behind it. There is no agreed-on yardstick for how much mouthpiece pressure is too much on a given player, at a given dynamic, in a given register - and no clean study has pinned down a safe number. An idea you cannot measure is easy to over-correct against, and most players push all the way toward zero.
• You cannot actually play at zero. The seal that keeps air in the horn has to be made by something, and on a small trumpet rim that is a real, measurable amount of lip-to-cup contact.
• The research quietly broke the myth: players with pressure sensors under their mouths use more mouthpiece force than anyone in the room expects, and researchers were so surprised by the numbers they first assumed their equipment was broken.
• Teachers could not reliably tell from photographs which players were using more pressure - what they thought they were reading was how relaxed a face looked, which is not force at all. The most common way people judge "too much pressure?" is a guess dressed up as expertise.
• Pressure is not static, and that breaks "no pressure" as a universal command. It has to rise when you go higher or louder and fall on a soft pedal tone; a tired face needs more at the end of a night than it did at the start. You cannot tell someone to use less of something that has to move.
• A small trumpet rim concentrates the same force over less area than a trombone or tuba mouthpiece, which is why trumpet players notice pressure more acutely - but "concentrated" is not the same as "damaging."
• The real damage comes from an imbalance, and pressure is usually a symptom, not the cause. A face with collapsed air support or locked corners reaches for pressure to compensate; the squeezing becomes a habit, and that habit is what finally does the damage.
• Secure players rarely notice their own pressure because their mechanics are doing the work. Beginners feel every bit of it because their face has not yet learned to distribute and absorb it - which is why telling a beginner "lighten up" without fixing what is upstream just adds shame to a normal developmental stage.

• Resources Mentioned in the podcast:
  • The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

  Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

  Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!

  Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014Now go practice!!

A range book sells you a number. This episode asks what that number actually costs you when the note on the page is beyond your range.

• A range book gives you a measurable number - a letter, an octave, a line on the staff. That measurability is why the genre sells so well, and it is also why it is dangerous: tone, endurance, and ease of playing have no number to point at, so the top note goes up while the rest quietly gets worse.
• Forcing a note beyond your range makes the body invent new ways to get it - jaw locks down, corners harden inward on purpose, tongue squeezes the air, and mouthpiece pressure climbs. Done once it is fine; done daily for weeks it becomes the new normal, and you start to believe that is what a high note feels like.
• The damage is usually slow, not sudden: a mouthpiece that only works in one place, an upper register that now takes three tries, a face that has forgotten how to relax. Experienced players warn about this because they have watched it shorten careers - and sometimes their own.
• The "37 weeks" promise is marketing, not physics. It assumes you play every day, that your embouchure is not already compromised, and that range behaves the same way for everyone. Some players hit a double C on schedule; others hit the same wall in four weeks because their limit is structural, not a training problem. The book cannot tell you which player you are.
• The genre keeps selling because a teacher who says "your range will grow as a side effect of getting better" is harder to market than a book that gives you an end date. You are buying a plan with a finish line, not vague encouragement.
• Many of these books come from gifted high-range players sharing what works for them - a generous impulse, but the specific thing that built their range is often not the part they are handing to a stranger with a different face. The convention circuit rewards the screaming-note demo over the "do not chase it" explanation, so the books with the biggest promise get made and sold.
• The alternative is not "never work on range" - it is "work the range you have, and let the rest grow out of it." Find your real ceiling (the highest note that comes out cleanly, in tune, and matching your middle register), make it boring before adding the next half step.

• Resources Mentioned in the podcast:
  • The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

  Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

  Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!

  Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

The four-fifty dollar trumpet that plays "so close to a Schilke B3 it is remarkable." That is the horn this episode is about, and the reason almost nobody in the industry will say it out loud.

• A four hundred dollar Chinese trumpet now genuinely plays - open, in tune, and responsive. The anchor is the Thomann TR-800 large bore at about four-fifteen to four-eighty-nine dollars, with a one piece hand hammered bell and Monel valves.
• The proof is independent: a working jazz educator called it "on par with professional horns" and "so close to my Schilke B3 it is remarkable." Nineteen percent of people viewing it compared the five-eleven dollar Yamaha YTR-2330, and many now pick the cheaper horn.
• Three real problems, named so the rest is believable. Valves still stick and need break in, oil, and warm up - that is the number one mechanical complaint.
• Quality control is a spectrum across dozens of factories, so the same model from the same plant can be excellent or a dud. Buying raw off AliExpress is a roll of the dice, not an informed choice.
• There is no service network behind most of these brands: no authorized tech, no spare parts. One buyer's guide notes local repair shops sometimes refuse to touch them. That support is what you are actually paying for at higher price points.
• US options if you do not want to ship from Germany: the Jean Paul USA TR-430 intermediate at three-ninety-nine-fifty, and the Wessex R30 student trumpet at four-fifty from a shop that plays and rejects every unit before it ships.
• The value hunt: Jinyin, a real Hebei manufacturer. The silver A510 runs about five-eighty-nine street and one player judged it played better above the staff than his Taiwanese horn; the A688 E-flat/D you can often find cheap and used.

• Resources Mentioned in the podcast:
  • The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

  Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

  Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!

  Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

The most repeated piece of music advice in the hobby world quietly fails the moment a check shows up. This episode asks what a working trumpet player actually does with a chart they never chose.

• Play what you love is right for the person playing after work on a Wednesday, when nobody is paying and the repertoire is theirs. It fails the instant someone hands you a check: the question becomes what the job requires and whether you can make it sound good.
• A working musician is hired to solve somebody else's musical problem. The bride, the church director, the conductor, and the funeral director are not auditing your artistic integrity. Someone needs a trumpet, and you said you had one.
• "Hobbyist" is not an insult. The International Trumpet Guild's Non-Pro Players program defines the non-pro as someone who does not earn most of their income performing or teaching, and adds they can still play at an extremely high level. Professional describes a relationship to the work, not a level of ability.
• The working player rarely picks the music: Friday a funk section, Saturday a wedding, Sunday church and a brass quintet, then a sub call, then a funeral. Berklee's session-player description lists technique, sight-reading, stylistic knowledge, versatility, and reliability. Only plays what he enjoys is not on that list.
• Weddings are where the romantic idea goes to die. Droste wrote The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet because weddings are real work: processionals, organists you have never met, last-minute changes, and a sound that dies in a cornfield.
• The skill Droste values most is making every chart sound intentional. Four whole notes behind a choir, make them beautiful. A horn stab, sit the articulation where it belongs. Pachelbel's Canon again, play the wedding.
• Nobody can even see the pit player, and the job is to support the stage, not behave like a soloist. Local 802's guide for Broadway substitutes stresses preparedness and conscientiousness. Do not walk into somebody else's chair thinking this is how I would play it.
• Reliability is a musical skill, because it changes how the music sounds. A reliable player knows the chart, has the mutes, notices the D.S., and brings the right horn. Gigs are less won than inherited for one evening, because somebody trusted you with their reputation.
• Nobody cares how hard the chart was, and style is not an effect you smear on top of the notes. A quarter note does not mean the same thing in Bach, Basie, Broadway, a Sousa march, a worship chart, and a Motown horn section. Be known for something, but do not be defeated by everything else.
• Resources Mentioned in the podcast:
  • The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

  Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

  Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!

  Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

A better horn is the one purchase most players quietly convince themselves they need. This episode asks where that money actually goes - and at what point buying stops paying you back in sound.

• The whole thing sits on a curve. Jumping from a cheap student horn to a solid professional model is a real, immediate upgrade - cleaner valves, better middle-horn intonation, resistance that makes sense. Past roughly $2,000 to $3,500 the slope flattens and each extra dollar buys less audible difference.
• Past that line you are not paying for a better trumpet, you are paying for a different one - a particular resistance, color, and feel that matches how your face and air work. The horn is still excellent; it just stops being a fix, because there was never anything to fix in the horn.
• Follow four thousand dollars and it lands in three buckets: labor, fit, and brand. Labor is the big one - a Monette has taken around 150 man-hours to build, so most of the price is a maker's time week after week, not more brass.
• Fit is where boutique makers earn their reputation: the horn is built to a spec and often adjusted for the player who ordered it, which is why a custom instrument can feel like it was made for you. Brand adds the waiting list, the endorsement, and the confidence of holding something scarce.
• The blind-test finding that should cool most gear arguments: hide which horn a skilled player is playing and the answers get messy. What players hear is dominated by how they are playing, not which horn is in the stand - the player is the instrument's amplifier.
• When you hear someone "sound expensive," what you are usually hearing is a player who spent the years that money could never have bought. Players can reliably tell a well-fitted horn from a poorly fitted one, but they cannot rank expensive against cheap once both are in the same quality band.
• Part of what a new horn does to you is in your head, and it is not all bad - you show up differently. The trick is to use that: buy the horn that makes you want to practice, at the price where the curve is still paying off, and do the work it will not do for you.
• The Monette question: a custom horn running roughly $10,000 to $20,000 with a waiting list past a year. For a player whose work is already done it can remove real friction; for everyone else it is an expensive way to learn that the horn was never the problem.
• The spending order, and it costs less than you think: first a teacher who can watch you play in person; then a solid professional horn chosen for fit, not the name on the bell; then a mouthpiece that suits your face, figured out slowly with help.Resources Mentioned in the podcast:
  • The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

  Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

  Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!

  Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

Pick six trumpet legends and you get six different faces. None of them is a template to imitate, and the reasons turn out to be more complicated than most players assume.

• Jerome Callet published the most specific embouchure instructions in the field: teeth almost closed, jaw pushed forward, lips curled inward, tongue tip pressed to the lower lip, and a tight "spit buzz." Yet slow-motion study of his recordings points to an ordinary medium high setup that barely resembles what he wrote down.
• A confession from Michael: as a lead player, he stumbled onto the inward lip roll on his own, long before anyone told him it had a name. It held up through three-hour gigs and kept his range at three octaves, which is also a reminder that one trick can work for the players it suits and still be a bad rule for everyone.
• Adolph Herseth's face was essentially rebuilt while he worked. In 1952, four years into what became a 53-year stretch as principal of the Chicago Symphony, he was in a car accident: fifteen stitches in his lip and several replacement teeth. He sat out, came back on a bigger mouthpiece, and was performing again within months.
• By Herseth's own telling of that return, he could not get past the F on the staff and felt uncertain, then once the concert got going everything was back to normal. The tone endured because it never depended on the embouchure alone.
• Doc Severinsen defies the classroom diagram. The rule traced to Farkas - two-thirds upper lip, centered, kept off the red line - simply does not fit him. He is documented among professionals who sit low, with noticeably more lower lip in the cup, company that also includes Freddie Hubbard and Dennis Brain.
• Maynard Ferguson kept changing hardware his whole career: a Rudy Muck 13C he sanded himself, then a custom Calicchio at .623", the Giardinelli MF1 at .590", Jack Bell FBL pieces, Holtons, Jet-Tones ranging from .593" to .656", the Schilke MF line, and Monettes at .636" toward the end. That spans sixty years with nearly a tenth of an inch of movement in both directions.
• Allen Vizzutti is the closest to the textbook picture, yet his setup still shifts. He plays medium high and downstream, with visible motion - the bell tilts a little down toward his left as he climbs. No book taught him that; it is simply what his anatomy does.
• Arturo Sandoval is where the evidence runs thin. There are thousands of hours of video and three volumes of his own studies, but almost no careful public account of how he actually sets up. What he wrote about covers articulation, flexibility, range and musicianship - not where his mouthpiece sits.

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

* The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet

* The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet

* The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

How many trumpet players graduate from college every year—and how many full-time orchestral trumpet chairs actually open?

That is the uncomfortable question at the center of this episode of The Ultimate Trumpet Podcast. Adam and Bella take an honest look at the numbers behind the music degree and the enormous gap between the number of musicians being trained for professional performance and the relatively small number of permanent orchestral positions available.

This isn't an argument against music school. In fact, it's the opposite. A music degree can be an extraordinary education. But young musicians need to understand what the degree can—and cannot—promise.

There may be hundreds of trumpet performance degrees awarded in a year, while the number of new professional trumpet positions is dramatically smaller. And when a chair opens, the competition isn't limited to that year's graduates. Musicians who graduated several years ago, established professionals looking for a new position, military musicians, freelancers, and other highly trained players may all be competing for the same opening.

The math can be discouraging if we think the purpose of a music degree is simply to produce an orchestral job.

But what if that's the wrong way to look at it?

Adam and Bella discuss why a music degree should be thought of as a foundation rather than a destination. The real value of a serious musical education isn't just the credential. It's what the musician can do because of that education: understand music, hear harmony, read scores, perform in different settings, practice intelligently, teach, rehearse, arrange, record, write, collaborate, and communicate.

The conversation also turns toward the modern musician's career. A trumpet player who can only do one thing is dependent on one particular kind of opportunity. A trumpet player who can teach, freelance, perform, arrange, record, write, create educational material, and use modern technology has many more ways to build a sustainable musical life.

That doesn't mean giving up on the orchestra.

If playing in a professional orchestra is your dream, pursue it. Learn the excerpts. Study the repertoire. Take mock auditions. Work with great teachers. Prepare seriously and give yourself a real chance.

But don't make the mistake of believing that an orchestral chair is the only legitimate measure of musical success.

The episode also offers practical advice for students choosing a music school. Look for the right teacher, not simply the biggest name. Find a school where you will actually play. Take theory and ear training seriously. Build relationships with other musicians. And learn something about the business side of being a musician before graduation.

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

• The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

In Episode 31 of The Ultimate Trumpet Podcast, Adam and Bella take on one of the most frustrating parts of a serious trumpet player's musical life: the orchestral audition.

Why does the audition process still look so much like it did decades ago? Why are musicians expected to prepare a handful of famous excerpts, walk into a room, play under enormous pressure, and somehow prove that they belong in an orchestra based on a few minutes of playing?

Adam and Bella dig into the problems with the traditional orchestral audition system and question whether it actually identifies the best musicians—or simply the people who are best at preparing for auditions.

They talk about the enormous amount of preparation that goes into an audition, the psychological pressure of playing excerpts without the context of an orchestra, and the strange reality that a great musician can have a bad audition while an excellent audition player may not necessarily be the strongest overall musician.

The conversation also looks at the way trumpet players prepare for orchestral excerpts. There is a difference between simply learning the notes and understanding what those notes are doing inside the music. Style, sound, phrasing, rhythm, articulation, musical direction, and the ability to imagine the orchestra around you all matter.

And then there is the pressure. One missed entrance, one cracked note, one moment of hesitation—and an audition can suddenly feel like everything you've worked toward has disappeared.

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

• The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

Arban's is the most famous trumpet book ever published — and the wrong thing to hand a beginner. Adam and Bella make the case, and then make the case for the book.

The scene that starts it

• A twelve-year-old arrives at the studio with a brand-new Arban's, spine uncracked
• Seven weeks into playing
• His band director told his mother it was the book every trumpet player needs
• Nobody did anything wrong — and it was still the wrong book

The history almost nobody knows

• Published in Paris, 1864, as Grande méthode complète pour cornet à pistons et de saxhorn
• The word "conservatory" appears nowhere in the original title
• That came later, from Carl Fischer, in translation, for the American market
• Arban wasn't a Paris Conservatoire professor yet — that appointment came in 1869
• The book came first, the institution followed
• Students who reached him already played, usually after years in a military band
• He wrote for people who could already make a sound

What's missing for a beginner

• Breathing: almost nothing, in a book that predates a century of work on wind
• Ear training: nothing on singing or hearing a pitch before producing it
• Tone as a primary concern: assumed to be handled already
• Long tones: essentially absent
• Rest ratios, practice length, weekly structure: not addressed
• Instructions are terse because a professor was meant to fill the gaps
• Result: a reference for a teacher to select from, not a curriculum to work through alone

The gradient problem

• Opening pages are musically inert — whole notes and scale fragments, no melodic reason to exist
• A twelve-year-old is bored by Thursday
• Then the difficulty goes vertical
• Beginners quit on flat stretches, and beginners quit on cliffs
• Arban delivers both inside the first month

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

• The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

Vocal pedagogy solved breath management a century and a half before brass playing caught up, and most trumpet teachers never went and borrowed it.

In this episode of The Ultimate Trumpet Podcast, Adam and Bella dig into appoggio, the Italian school's system for managing the breath, and make the case that it belongs in every trumpet practice room. Based on Michael Droste's Studio Notes article "What Opera Singers Know About Breathing That Trumpet Teachers Still Ignore" from TrumpetStudio.com, this episode traces the whole problem back to a translation error. Appoggio comes from the Italian verb meaning to lean, the way a beam leans against a wall, and English pedagogy rendered it as "support" — which got heard as effort. That single mistranslation sent generations of players down the road of bearing down, clamping the abdominals, and generating pressure, which is very nearly the opposite of what the Italians meant.

What We Cover in This Episode:

• The Word We Never Borrowed — Appoggio as a relationship rather than an effort, and why "support" was the wrong English word for a verb that means to lean.
• The Refusal to Collapse — In an untrained exhale the ribs fall, the sternum sinks, and the air leaves at a rate you cannot govern. Appoggio is the trained refusal to let that happen on schedule.
• The Lotta Vocale — Francesco Lamperti's balanced opposition, codified for English readers by Richard Miller in The Structure of Singing in 1986 and given measured science by Johan Sundberg the following year.
• The Diaphragm Instruction, One More Time — It contracts on the way in and relaxes on the way out, so you cannot push air out with it any more than you can push a door closed by pulling on it. Worse, you cannot feel it — what players call "feeling the diaphragm" is the abdominal wall moving and the lower ribs expanding.
• Maintained Inspiratory Posture — The single most transferable idea in the vocal literature and one that is almost absent from brass teaching. Watch a trumpet section on a long phrase and watch the sternums sink; watch a trained singer and the upper torso barely moves. That is not talent, it is a trained behavior that takes a few weeks to install.
• The Gasp Is a Report — Why an audible inhalation is a diagnostic about a throat you closed before you ever played a note.
• The Suspension at the Top of the Breath — Why it has to be held by the torso rather than the glottis, and what happens to your entrances when it isn't.

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

• The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

Nobody has ever walked into Michael Droste's studio and asked how to play a beautiful phrase. They ask about the high F.

In this episode of The Ultimate Trumpet Podcast, Adam and Bella take on the most persistent obsession in trumpet culture, making the case that chasing altissimo range wrecks more careers than it builds. Based on Michael Droste's Studio Notes article "The Cult of the High F: Why Screaming Range Is Overrated" from TrumpetStudio.com, this episode digs into why range is a symptom rather than a skill — what shows up on the outside when the air, the aperture, the tongue level, the ear, and the resonance of the instrument are all cooperating efficiently — and why you can't build it directly any more than you can build a fever directly.

What We Cover in This Episode:

• From Bandstand to Vertical Video — Why the high note used to be the climax of a four-minute arrangement, and what changed when it became a fourteen-second clip with no chart, no band, and no context.
• The Leaderboard, Not the Notes — Range as the only part of trumpet playing that can be scored like a video game, and why the leaderboard itself is the real cult.
• Song and Wind — Arnold Jacobs and the Chicago answer to the strength-contest model of playing.
• Three Shortcuts, One Bill — Mouthpiece pressure, global tension, and air pressure without airflow: the moves that produce a note today at the cost of the next forty years.
• Four Grades of Wreckage — From the six-year plateau to the perfectly healthy player with a double G who still can't get hired.
• The Real Hiring List — Sound, time, reading, intonation, blend, endurance in the middle register, being someone people want in the van — and range, somewhere down at the bottom.
• The Herseth Standard — Adolph Herseth and the difference between a note you can hit and a register you own.
• How Range Actually Builds — Ears first, long tones, flow studies, Clarke played softly, descending patterns, lip bends, Cat Anderson's soft top-line G, and resting as much as you play.
• The Sound as Governor — Letting the sound decide when a session is over, and adding notes by the month instead of by the day.

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

• The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

In this episode of The Ultimate Trumpet Podcast, Adam and Bella take on one of the most repeated "facts" in music education: the idea that it takes exactly ten thousand hours to become a master. Based on Michael Droste's Studio Notes article "10,000 Hours Is a Lie: What Actually Makes a Great Trumpet Player" from TrumpetStudio.com, this episode traces the number back to its actual source — a narrow 1990s study of Berlin violin students — and shows how one psychologist's research got flattened into a stopwatch-driven myth that's been quietly wasting practice sessions ever since.

Adam and Bella dig into what the hours were actually standing in for: deliberate practice, built on a target just past your current ability, honest feedback, and enough repetition to close one specific gap before moving to the next. They connect the idea directly to the Chicago brass tradition, contrasting hour-grinding with the fundamentals-first consistency of Adolph Herseth and the song-and-wind, ears-first philosophy of Arnold Jacobs — neither of whom built their playing by watching a clock.

Key Takeaways & Highlights:

• Where the Number Really Comes From — K. Anders Ericsson's original research measured one small group of violinists, not a universal law, and Ericsson later wrote an entire book pushing back on how his work got popularized.
• Deliberate Practice, Not Clock-Watching — The actual mechanism behind expert performance is a specific target, honest feedback, and focused repetition, not raw hours logged.
• Why Brass Players Fall for It Hardest — Visible endurance and practice-room bravado make hour-counting feel like proof of work, even when it's reinforcing bad habits just as efficiently as good ones.
• The Herseth and Jacobs Counter-Example — Neither the Chicago sound's fundamentals-first consistency nor Jacobs's song-and-wind approach was ever about grinding volume.
• Good News for Time-Strapped Players — Working pros, doublers, and comeback adults aren't behind just because they can't log marathon sessions — density of attention beats size of the block.
• What to Track Instead of Minutes — A practical reframe for ending every practice session by naming one specific thing that's now more reliable than when you sat down.

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

• The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music. One purchase - you get all three - iPhone, iPad and Mac!

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

This episode takes a detour from the usual Adam and Bella format for a special four-minute spot introducing Trumpet Studio - Practice Hub, narrated by Austin, a guest with a warm, storytelling style all his own.

The pitch is simple: most practice apps try to serve every instrument at once, and end up serving none of them well. Trumpet Studio - Practice Hub does the opposite. It was built for one instrument only, by Michael Droste, a trumpet player and teacher with more than fifty years behind the horn.

Inside, listeners hear about a full animated trumpet fingering chart, a library of trumpet method books and etudes, curated repertoire, and audition preparation material. The headline feature is a set of thirty-seven professionally remastered blues play-along tracks, ready to play and record along with right in the app.

The episode walks through the Practice Room - Record Yourself, Metronome, Practice Timer, and Practice Schedule - and the Practice Bar, which keeps quick access to those tools right on screen while you're reading music, so you never have to leave the page to hit record or check tempo. Blues tracks and personal recordings alike can be slowed down or sped up to match where a player is in learning a tune.

There's also a candid explanation for what's missing: a tuner. Practice Hub leaves it out on purpose, following the Chicago brass tradition of Arnold Jacobs and Adolph Herseth - teachers who built their approach around listening, not watching a needle. A tuner shows where a note is; your ears teach you where it belongs.

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

• The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music.

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

The pouch you bought to protect your mouthpiece may be the thing scratching it. In Episode 25, Adam and Bella take on the humble mouthpiece pouch and the two ways most of them quietly damage the gear they are supposed to protect.

First, the zipper problem. Silver plating on a trumpet mouthpiece is only a few ten-thousandths of an inch thick — a few microns of soft metal — and gold flash is thinner still. On most top-loading pouches the zipper coil sits directly across the opening, so the rim and cup edge drag across the teeth with every insertion and removal. Even molded plastic zippers are harder than the plating, and after months of gigging the coil carries embedded grit that works like fine sandpaper. Side-zip cases trade that for a different problem: every piece exposed at once, tumbling against the open zipper track.

Second, the isolation problem. Many multi-piece pouches are really one padded pocket with everything dropped in together — brass on brass every time the bag shifts. A ding on the shank taper changes how the piece seats in the receiver, altering gap and insertion depth. A nicked rim you feel instantly on your embouchure. And plating wear from pieces rubbing dulls the finish long before bare brass shows.

The fix: a velcro-only flap closure and complete isolation, with each mouthpiece in its own full-length sleeve. Adam and Bella walk through the five-point buying checklist — hook-and-loop closure, individual sleeves, soft velvet or nylex lining, a real leather body, and a velcro mounting strip to anchor the pouch inside your case lid — then review the pouches that get it right:

• Bob Reeves Brass leather pouch (double or quad, about $52) — individual sleeves plus extra short slots for underparts; ideal for screw-rim and Reeves sleeve players
• Gard/ACB CST-4 quad — water buffalo leather, velvet lining, the value pick of the category
• Gard/ACB CST-2 double — slim enough to live permanently in a gig bag pocket
• Leather Specialties Co. quad — up to seven pieces in seven individual pockets, built to last decades
• Gard Elite quad — the same protection in premium black-and-tan trim
• Protec A220 — the budget hook-and-loop option (avoid Protec's zippered N-series and ZIP-series models)

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

• The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music.

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

Based on the article by Michael Droste at TrumpetStudio.com.

Is precision valve alignment one of the most valuable services you can get for your trumpet, or the most sophisticated snake oil ever sold to brass players? In Episode 24, Adam and Bella dig into a question the trumpet world has argued about for fifty years and still hasn't settled.

They start with the mechanics. A piston valve has ports that must line up with matching ports in the casing, and what determines that alignment isn't the brass machining at all. It's the humble stack of felt, cork, rubber, or neoprene bumpers under the finger button. Yamaha's own technical data shows felt thickness can vary by up to twenty thousandths of an inch within a single batch, and it keeps compressing with oil and use. Put that against the three thousandths of an inch that separates a medium large from a large bore Bach, the difference players swear they can feel, and the case for alignment starts to sound compelling. Bob Reeves Brass says every horn they've ever measured, thousands over decades, arrived out of alignment.

But the skeptics have serious credentials too. Renold Schilke, the most measurement-obsessed maker of the twentieth century, considered alignment's importance modest and believed new felts settle into place on their own. A retired NASA physicist who repairs instruments concluded perfect alignment isn't as important as claimed. And the word "precision" itself hides a problem: even a flawless up-and-down alignment leaves the piston with substantial rotational play that no shim corrects.

Then there's the wrinkle nobody talks about. In 1976, inventor Donald Novy was granted a United States patent for a brass instrument with deliberately misaligned valve ports, arguing the discontinuities improve response, intonation, and range. He got a second patent in 1989. The same physics used to sell you a perfect alignment was used to patent intentional misalignment, and the patent office found it credible enough to grant twice.

At the center of it all sits a stunning gap: there is no controlled, blinded, peer-reviewed study anywhere that isolates valve alignment and measures its effect. Not one, in over fifty years. The forums fill the vacuum, and they read like a coin flip. Some horns improve, some get worse, some don't change, and nobody can predict which before paying.

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

• The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music.

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

Based on the article by Michael Droste at TrumpetStudio.com.

A trumpet stand sounds too simple to spend an episode on — but it's one of the few accessories Michael Droste actually endorses, and the reasons players give for skipping it are mostly myths. Adam and Bella break down why.

The reframe that drives the whole episode: the most dangerous place your trumpet can be is exactly where most players put it. A folding chair. The lip of an open case. The floor by your feet. A trumpet is round — built to roll — so one bump, one draft, one squeeze past in a tight pit, and it's on the ground. A stand doesn't add a thing to knock over. It replaces a high-risk resting spot with a low-risk one. That's the whole argument.

Adam and Bella also put the finish-damage myth to rest. Yes, bare metal on bare lacquer with trapped grit can wear a spot over years. But every decent stand wraps its contact points in velvet, neoprene, or felt, and the peg is sheathed so it never touches raw brass. The players who actually mar their finish are the ones without a stand — grinding the horn against a rough case or a chair seat. A good stand is gentler than the alternative, not harsher.

The most useful idea in the article: stop arguing about which stand is "best," because there are two completely different jobs a stand can do.

Camp one is the low, locked-down, in-bell stand — a peg that seats in the bell with legs fanning out wide and low. This is for the seated player who sets the horn down and leaves it: orchestra, church, big band. It's the style Michael uses himself — a König & Meyer five-leg — and his description says it all: it's almost impossible to tip over. You'd have to physically fall into it to put it on the ground. Shop for the design, not the brand: wide base, low weight, cushioned contact, peg-in-bell so the horn is captured.

Camp two is the tall, grab-and-go stand for the standing player — the upright Hercules with a height-adjustment column and swivel legs. Set the peg at standing height and grab the horn on the downbeat with no bending. The triple holds two trumpets and a flugelhorn on one base, which is the doubler's dream in a pop, rock, funk, or R&B horn section. The trade-off is honest: a higher horn is more exposed, so mind where you plant it.

Adam and Bella keep it real with the honest case against stands too. A stand is only as stable as the floor it's on — raked stages, wobbly risers, and cable tangles bring the tip-over risk right back. A stand guards against falling, not against getting knocked over, so in a jammed pit the case can be safer. And a stand is a between-tunes spot, never storage: playing means stand, done for the set means case.

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

• The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music.

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

Adam and Bella take on the most ignored purchase in your musical life: the case your horn lives in. Based on the latest article at TrumpetStudio.com by Michael Droste, this episode flips the usual logic on its head, because the expensive case is not automatically the protective one. The real question is never "is this a good case," it's "protective against what, for the way I actually travel."

You'll learn the three kinds of protection nobody explains, molded, suspended, and foam, and why each one wins in a completely different situation. The hosts dig into the variables that actually matter, weight, fit and security, and the hardware that quietly decides whether a case lasts three years or thirty. Then they walk the field, brand by brand: the pro-standard Marcus Bonna, the near-bulletproof Torpedo Bags Classic and the lighter Outlaw, the suspended fiberglass BAGS of Spain, the heirloom Glenn Cronkhite leather bags (and the surprising history that ties Cronkhite, Reunion Blues, and Torpedo together), the value-king ProTec Pro Pac, the underrated Gard, and the elusive Monette, including the story behind the email that never got answered.

Along the way they bust three stubborn myths, that a hard case is safe to check on a plane, that a gig bag spells doom for your horn, and that more foam always means more protection. The episode closes with quick buy-it-now picks by player type, from students to doublers to frequent flyers, plus a personal note on hunting down a replacement for a beloved discontinued case. Whatever you carry, the takeaway is simple: protect your horn like it cost what it actually cost.

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

• The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music.

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

n Episode 21 of The Ultimate Trumpet Podcast, Adam and Bella open up the gig bag and finally give mutes the respect they deserve. Based on Michael Droste's Studio Notes article "A Field Guide to Mutes: Straight, Cup, Harmon, and the Plunger Dark Arts" from TrumpetStudio.com, this episode reframes the mute as something most players completely misunderstand — not a volume knob, but an acoustic filter that reshapes your tone, your response, and your intonation.

This is a gear-and-expression episode with real depth. It's a practical field guide to the four mutes that actually matter, what each one does to your sound and your pitch, and how to stop fighting them on the gig.

What We Cover in This Episode:

• What a Mute Actually Does — The physics nobody explains. A mute changes the acoustic impedance of the horn, filters the overtone series, and almost always pushes your pitch sharp. It's not your chops failing — it's the mute shortening the effective length of the instrument.
• The Straight Mute — The workhorse everyone owns and nobody thinks about. Aluminum (Tom Crown, Denis Wick) for that bright cutting orchestral edge, copper for a warmer singing tone, and the fiber Humes & Berg Stonelined for a darker color that blends instead of screaming.
• The Cup Mute — The velvet. Why the adjustable cup gap is a real expressive tool, the classic big-band ballad sound, and the response trap that swallows your soft attacks down low.
• The Harmon — The sound that defined cool. Stem in versus stem out, the stemless Miles Davis sound and why it practically requires a microphone, the enormous back-pressure, and the copper-versus-aluminum voice difference.
• The Plunger Dark Arts — The least respectable, most human mute in the bag. The plus and circle markings, the Ellington growl tradition of Bubber Miley and Cootie Williams, the pixie-mute trick, and why this is the one mute you cannot buy your way into — it's pure left-hand technique.
• The Rest of the Drawer — A quick tour of the bucket mute, the solotone, and why practice mutes are a completely different animal that should never do your tone work.
• Intonation and the Survival Kit — The part everybody skips. Tune with the mute in, learn how far each one pushes you, and keep your corks maintained before they fail mid-gig.

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

• The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music.

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

In Episode 20 of The Ultimate Trumpet Podcast, Adam and Bella cut through the marketing noise around valve oil and get into the real chemistry, the manufacturer specs, and fifty years of playing experience behind the petroleum versus synthetic debate. Based on Michael Droste's Studio Notes article "Trumpet Valve Oil Showdown — What Actually Matters and What's Marketing" from TrumpetStudio.com, this episode covers everything from PAO molecular structure to cold-weather gig performance to the one universal recommendation that matters more than any product choice.

This is a gear episode with real depth — not a product review, but a chemistry-grounded framework for making smart decisions about what goes on your valves and why.

What We Cover in This Episode:

• The Six Oils Worth Knowing — Al Cass Fast, Blue Juice, Hetman #2, Ultra-Pure Regular, Yamaha Synthetic, and Roche Thomas Premium. What each one actually is, what it's designed to do, and who it's right for. Plus why per-ounce cost matters more than sticker price.
• The Chemistry: What's Actually Different — Petroleum vs. PAO synthetic is a real molecular difference, not marketing language. Two inherent limitations of petroleum — temperature sensitivity and oxidation — explained clearly, and why synthetic oils were engineered to solve both.
• What Manufacturer Specs Actually Tell Us — Hetman's viscosity grading system, Ultra-Pure's PAO base claim, Yamaha's tolerance-match formulation, and Blue Juice's cleaning agents — what each claim actually means versus what it sounds like.
• The Tolerance Variable That Changes Everything — The performance gap between synthetic and petroleum is not the same on every horn. Modern tight-tolerance instruments versus vintage looser-tolerance horns require a completely different calculation. This is the factor almost no valve oil review ever covers.
• The Cold Temperature Reality — The clearest, most chemistry-grounded advantage synthetic holds. If you've ever had sluggish valves at a cold outdoor gig and blamed yourself, there's a real chance the oil was the problem. Three specific playing situations where this matters most.
• The Residue and Maintenance Question — The "petroleum gums up valves" claim is true under specific conditions. Understanding the oxidation timeline changes the practical recommendation considerably — and honest self-assessment about cleaning frequency is the key variable.

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

• The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music.

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

In Episode 19 of The Ultimate Trumpet Podcast, Adam and Bella dig into one of the most legendary figures in orchestral brass history: Adolph "Bud" Herseth, principal trumpet of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 53 years. Based on Michael Droste's article "Adolph Herseth and the Chicago Sound: What Made His Tone Unmistakable" from TrumpetStudio.com, this episode goes well beyond the mythology to look at what Herseth actually did, what he actually taught, and what players at every level can take from his approach.

Michael Droste was part of the Chicago brass world during the years Herseth was still actively playing and attended a Herseth master class in person. What's in this episode isn't secondhand legend — it's the real story from someone who was there.

What We Cover in This Episode:

• What the Chicago Sound Actually Was — Not just loud. Core density, cross-register evenness, and command. The distinction between a sound defined by size and a sound defined by character — and why that difference matters.
• The Physical Foundation — Why Herseth was reluctant to talk mechanics, and what we can piece together anyway: a firm but non-rigid embouchure, no high-pressure squeezing in the upper register, and air use that connected directly to Arnold Jacobs' "Song and Wind" philosophy.
• Air as the Engine — The single most important technical principle behind Herseth's playing. The embouchure doesn't produce sound — the air does. Players who reverse that priority are working against the instrument.
• The Mouthpiece Story — Herseth's famous Bach 1C / Schilke hybrid, the "1CH" screw-rim design Michael Droste owns, and the crucial lesson about why hunting for a legendary player's mouthpiece is almost always the wrong move.
• What He Said at the Master Class — Thinking in phrases, not notes. Music telling the body what to do, not the other way around. Two ideas from one afternoon that are worth writing down.
• The Tuba Mouthpiece Warmdown — The post-concert practice Herseth recommended to new CSO players. The kind of practical knowledge that lives inside professional orchestras and doesn't make it into method books.
• The Larger Legacy — What a 53-year career at the highest level actually demonstrates about technique, musicianship, and what the trumpet can sound like when everything is working.

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

• The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music.

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

In Episode 18 of The Ultimate Trumpet Podcast, Adam and Bella take on one of the most sacred and most misunderstood names in brass pedagogy: Arnold Jacobs. Based on Michael Droste's article "What Arnold Jacobs Actually Said About Breathing — And What Got Distorted" from TrumpetStudio.com, this episode traces how a sophisticated, scientifically grounded body of teaching got reduced to a two-word slogan — and what players and teachers have been missing ever since.

What We Cover in This Episode:

• The Man Before the Myth — Forty-four years with the Chicago Symphony, scientific equipment in the teaching studio, and collaboration with pulmonologists. The real Jacobs was a rigorous empiricist, not a slogan-generator.
• "Song and Wind" Was a Corrective, Not a Prescription — Jacobs coined the concept to push back against players who over-analyzed mechanics. It was never meant as a universal teaching principle for every player in every situation.
• The Air Volume vs. Air Pressure Distinction Nobody Talks About — Jacobs was a proponent of a full reservoir, not high-pressure blowing. The garden hose vs. fire hose analogy explains exactly what he meant — and what the "use more air" crowd got backwards.
• The Embouchure Question — Jacobs was skeptical of embouchure-obsessive teaching, but he absolutely addressed real embouchure problems when they existed. The myth that he didn't believe in embouchure work has done genuine damage in studios.
• The Neurological Piece Nobody Mentions — The most underrepresented part of Jacobs' teaching: he understood habit formation at the level of the nervous system. Every repetition grooves a pattern. Sloppy repetition grooves the wrong one.
• What Jacobs Was Actually Like as a Teacher — Not one-size-fits-all. A master diagnostician who prescribed different things to different players based on precise observation. The players who benefited most walked away with something specific, not a phrase.

Key Takeaway:

The simplified version of Jacobs' teaching works for some players in some situations — but it was never meant to be universal. The full version is more nuanced, more demanding, and far more useful than the version that's been circulating for forty years.

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

• The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music.

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

Are long tones the sacred foundation of trumpet practice — or are most players just going through the motions? In this episode, Adam and Bella dig into one of the most talked-about and least-questioned exercises in brass playing. Based on the TrumpetStudio.com article by Michael Droste (“drah-stee”), this episode breaks down when long tones genuinely work, where they fall short, and the version almost nobody teaches that will completely change how you use them.

What’s Covered

The traditional case for long tones, and why the argument is only half the story. The real variable that determines whether long tones help or hurt your development — and it has nothing to do with how long you hold the note. Why most players are on full autopilot the moment they start a long tone, and what focused practice actually looks and sounds like. The four situations where long tones legitimately earn their place in a practice session: warming up cold chops, resetting a fatigued sound, intonation training with a drone or tuner, and dynamic control work. Why long tones can’t train the attack — the most important moment of any note. The full-range chromatic long tone exercise that exposes exactly where your tone breaks down and where your real development work needs to happen.

Key Takeaway

Ten minutes of focused, intentional long tones beats thirty minutes of distracted sustaining every time. The upgrade isn’t more long tones — it’s better ones.

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

• The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music.

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

In Episode 16 of The Ultimate Trumpet Podcast, Adam and Bella tackle one of the most high-stakes decisions a developing trumpet player faces: buying your first professional horn. Based on Michael Droste's article "Choosing Your First Pro Horn — What Specs Actually Matter" from TrumpetStudio.com, they cut through the noise of brand reputation, endorsements, and forum arguments to explain what the specs on the tag actually mean — and which ones will genuinely affect how you play.

The core message is simple and important: most players buy a pro horn without fully understanding what they're buying. This episode changes that.

What We Cover in This Episode:

• Bore Size: The real difference between medium-large (.459") and large (.462") bores — how resistance, slotting, air efficiency, and tone color each respond differently, and why bigger doesn't mean better.
• Bell Material & Construction: What yellow brass, gold brass, and rose brass actually do to your tone, plus why one-piece bell construction matters more than most buyers realize.
• The Leadpipe — The Most Underrated Component: Why this short, unremarkable section of tubing shapes how the horn responds from the first note, and why it's often the first variable to investigate when something feels off.
• Valve Action: What to look for in the shop — speed, consistency, and return — and why a great valve disappears during playing.
• Intonation Tendencies: How to test a horn's natural pitch center against your own, and which partials to check before you commit to a purchase.
• What To Ignore: Finish, weight, country of manufacture, and endorsements — and the appropriate level of analysis for each.

The Test That Actually Matters:

After all the spec analysis, Adam and Bella land on the only evaluation that counts: play the horn on real music, in real musical contexts, for an extended period of time. The horn that gets out of the way and lets you play is the right one.

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

• The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
• The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music.

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

In Episode 15 of The Ultimate Trumpet Podcast, Adam and Bella explore one of the most historically rich articles ever published on TrumpetStudio.com — Michael Droste's deep dive into the mouthpieces that have shaped his playing over decades. This is not a beginner's guide to mouthpiece selection. It's part history lesson, part masterclass, and part personal confession about the equipment, legends, and missed opportunities that define a serious trumpet life.

The episode covers a Bach 1C screw rim hybrid with a Schilke-machined 1CH rim reportedly built to Adolph Herseth's specifications — a piece that demands proper air, real support, and a commitment to sound that changes how you play even after you put it down. Adam and Bella discuss what made Herseth's fifty-three-year tenure as CSO principal trumpet so extraordinary, and what the 1C itself asks of any player who picks it up.

The conversation then turns to Arnold Jacobs — principal tubist of the Chicago Symphony from 1944 to 1988, and arguably the most influential brass pedagogue of the 20th century. Michael owns three items from Jacobs' personal collection: the Schilke Air Teaching Aid, the Mouthpiece Visualizer (full shank, no cup — a window into the embouchure that no standard mouthpiece can provide), and a wooden French horn mouthpiece. The episode explores Jacobs' "song and wind" methodology, why the Clarke Technical Studies could get you in trouble in his studio, and what it meant — and still means — to have the chance to study with someone like that and walk away from it.

Michael didn't take that lesson. Adam and Bella talk honestly about why that kind of regret matters, and what players can learn from it.

The episode then covers the GR Droste #4 — a custom mouthpiece built directly from Ronald Romm's documented program specifications (Program 1056, #1-7272 BB, GR Classic Blank), confirmed in writing by GR Mouthpieces. Rim 64ID, M cup, .078 volume, GR 27 bore, finished in gold plate. Not inspired by Romm's playing — built from the same geometric blueprint GR used when Romm himself ordered his piece. The episode also covers the Schilke Droste custom: a shallow body 10a4z with Zinger backbore, built for maximum upper register efficiency in the tradition of Bill Chase.

Throughout the conversation, a Chicago thread connects everything — Herseth and Jacobs both anchored at the CSO, Schilke operating in the same world, all of it concentrated in one city during the decades that defined American brass playing.

The episode closes on the article's central argument: equipment is information, not identity. Great players don't succeed because of their mouthpieces. What these pieces carry is context — the stories of the players connected to them, and what those stories still have to teach.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• The Ultimate Warm Up for Trumpet

• The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet

• The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music.

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014

In Episode 14 of The Ultimate Trumpet Podcast, Adam and Bella tackle one of the most damaging topics in brass playing culture: the myths that quietly sabotage trumpet players for years. Based on the article “Unraveling the Myths That Harm Trumpet Players” from TrumpetStudio.com by Michael Droste, this episode breaks down the false ideas surrounding lead trumpet playing, endurance, range, mouthpiece pressure, equipment obsession, and upper register development.

The discussion explores why “playing harder” often destroys efficiency, how excessive mouthpiece pressure creates short-term gains but long-term problems, and why many players mistakenly confuse suffering with progress. Adam and Bella also dive into myths about range testing, loud playing, aging as a trumpet player, and the dangerous belief that great lead players are simply “born” instead of trained through smart, consistent practice habits.

This episode offers a refreshing and realistic look at what actually builds strong lead trumpet playing: efficiency, coordination, recovery, resonance, and intelligent practice routines. Whether you’re a younger player chasing range or an experienced player trying to regain consistency, this conversation cuts through decades of misinformation with practical insight and humor.

Resources mentioned in this episode: The Ultimate Warm Up for Trumpet, The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet, and The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet by Michael Droste.

Trumpet Studio – Practice Hub app puts everything a serious trumpeter needs in one place: an animated fingering chart, a deep music library, Blues play-alongs, a metronome that counts out loud, and a Record Yourself studio to hear what your audience hears. Built by a Chicago-trained pro in the Jacobs and Herseth tradition of song and wind, it trains your ears instead of your eyes, so every practice session sounds more like music.

Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014