The Ultimate Trumpet Podcast from TrumpetStudio

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1. Tim Larkin: From Ella and James Brown to Game Audio

   2 november 2026 · 45 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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

2. Song and Wind Has Become a Fig Leaf for Lazy Practice

   26 oktober 2026 · 16 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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 …

3. The Chicago School Is a Myth (Mostly)

   19 oktober 2026 · 17 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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.
   …

4. The Plastic Trumpet Deserves Better Than Your Contempt

   12 oktober 2026 · 15 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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 trum…

5. The No-Pressure Embouchure Was Always a Lie

   5 oktober 2026 · 16 min

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   "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. Lees meer

   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 i…

6. Double High C in 37 Weeks and the Range-Book Racket

   28 september 2026 · 16 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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 m…

7. Chinese Trumpets Got Good and the Industry Won't Say So

   21 september 2026 · 10 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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 eve…

8. Play What You Love Is Advice for Hobbyists

   21 september 2026 · 26 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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 somebo…

9. The Four Thousand Dollar Trumpet Won't Fix You

   7 september 2026 · 16 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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…

10. Six Great Trumpet Embouchures - And What They Actually Prove

    1 september 2026 · 14 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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…

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