“Trumpet for Old Guys.” Two Seasoned Veterans Introduce New Training Regimen Focused on the Physiology of Age featuring Paul Baron and Bobby Medina

It’s no secret that our bodies, our minds, our perspectives in life change as we age. Yet we often believe that what we learned about playing trumpet while we were in our teens and early twenties will continue to work as we get older.

Maybe it’s because we heard something in a masterclass and decided this is the way to do it. Or we attended a certain school where certain dogmas regarding trumpet playing prevailed, even overshadowing individual needs of the player.

This was more or less the impetus of Paul Baron and Bobby Medina beginning first a Facebook targeted at older players, and then eventually becoming a full-fledged training regimen called Trumpet Diagnostics. I wanted to pick the brains of the founders of the program about their experiences working with older players, and what they aim to achieve with their program.

Thankfully we were able to get all three of us on a Zoom call from various parts of the U.S. and talk about their program.

Enjoy the interview!

What you’ll hear in this episode:

-The founding origins of the Trumpet Diagnostics program…02:30

-The Facebook group becomes a webinar, which becomes the program…05:30

-What does “Body Mechanics Mastery” mean?…06:30

-Why certain methods we swear by are sometimes limited in their efficacy in teaching us how to play efficiently…08:40

-Learning “the method of no method”; becoming our own teachers…13:00

-Why have we moved beyond the various “schools” of thought regarding trumpet playing?…14:15

-Martial arts lessons applied to the physicality of trumpet…18:30

-Efficiency (i.e. minimal playing) is key to longevity as a trumpeter…23:00

-Don’t worry about aesthetics based on showmanship, worry about what works for you…27:30

-What is the biggest hurdles Paul and Bobby’s students need to overcome?…29:00

-Neuroplasticity and repetition over a long period of time is key to improving your playing…34:30

-What you’ll experience with the Trumpet Diagnostics program…38:05

Plus whatever your discerning ears deem worthy of your time and interest…

Resources mentioned:

Trumpet Diagnostics

Tips for Trumpeters 50 and Beyond! Facebook group

About the Guests:

Bobby Medina

Four solo recordings under his name along with world tours and live performances with legendary musical artists including Ray Charles, Frankie Valli, Wayne Newton, Mel Torme, Temptations, National Touring Broadway shows and more. Student of legendary teachers including James Stamp, Bobby Shew, Carmine Caruso, Charley Davis. Medina’s 40+ years experience has been presented at masterclasses in the USA, Europe, South America and Asia helping players of all levels overcome their playing deficiencies and frustrations through specialized mental and mechanical techniques.

Paul Baron

Paul’s professional career began 40 years ago. His lead trumpet can be heard on over 1,000 jingles, hundreds of albums, dozens of movie scores and he’s played, recorded and toured with Aerosmith, Lynrd Skynrd, Barry Manilow, Bob Hope, Wayne Newton, nearly twenty Broadway shows including Disney’s Newsies, Aladdin, Frozen and many more. Paul’s teaching has led him to give nearly 100 masterclasses and decades of private instruction teaching players how to repair and reprogram their playing to be the most efficient possible. 

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Transcript

 What a pleasure to bring onto the show. Paul Baron and Bobby Medina. Paul is a old friend of mine. I've interviewed him a couple of times when he came out with his book Trumpet voluntarily back in the day. And so he's well versed in the realm of publishing and sharing his knowledge with those with those of us who play trumpet.

Bobby Medina is someone that I just met. And we're just gonna get to know him right alongside myself as we gather rapport. But Paul and Bobby have joined forces to start a business called Trumpet Diagnostics. And I'm gonna warn y'all listening to this, that this might sound like just a blatant infomercial for trumpet diagnostics, but that's not my intent.

My intent is just to get to know the two founders of it. Understand the need that they saw as what prompted the creation of the program. So of course we're gonna be talking about their program 'cause that's what they're talking about right now. So it is what it is. Welcome to the show guys.

Thank you.

Thanks for having us on James. I.

Absolutely.

I, let's just cut to the chase 'cause, because I know that you two are very well versed, very well accomplished performers in your own right. And I'd just like to know what is the. Basic, the why of Trumpet Diagnostics and what are you looking to accomplish with it?

We just, we've seen what ha the way this whole thing came about. There's a quick story about it. And when my son was a an avid football, the soccer player as he grew up, he used to say, dad, you should be in a men's state. League, 40 and over 50 and over, whatever, and I never really did it.

And when Covid hit I decided to put together. A Facebook group, which is called Tips for Trumpeters 50 and Beyond.

Oh, you started that?

Yeah, and I just had realized that there was nothing in the music world really for that, had anything to do with age. Not that there. Really should be. But I just thought maybe there's this, I could start a little forum and just see what happens here.

Maybe people want to talk about things that have happened to themselves in as they get more mature. And Paul, I. Kind of joined up, had time on his hands as we all did. And we just went to town and just started inviting a lot of people. And boy, this thing really took off right away.

And it was amazing to see the myriad of issues and things that happened to people, players as they get older. And so that's how it started. I'll let Paul continue from there.

Sure. That was a great introduction. Yeah. One of the things that we started noticing on that page, and we subsequently started another page that was all ages that has really taken off as well, but not to the same degree as tips for trumpeters.

We noticed that there was a lot of questions about. Age related issues for playing the trumpet, be it dental hernias cataract surgery, heart attacks. Bobby always loves to say that we're not doctors and we don't play them on tv. No. How does that saying go,

Bobby? Yeah, we're not doctors, nor do we play them on tv.

We're not about to offer medical advice or guidance there. We always, Preemptively say, go see your doctor. But there's a lot of things and Bobby and I having been through the trenches for as many years as we have in. You name the type of musical idiom. We've been beaten up and we've lived to tell the tale and come back from it and and have developed this whole program based on those needs.

But also coming from our martial arts backgrounds, we, which we both have.

So the program I guess you, you said that the Facebook group was targeted towards older fellows or older people. Exactly. And then out of that springing how did the Facebook group become your program that you're that you've started?

We did a webinar some time ago, and we, so we built a whole program along with that whi, which is. We're proud to say the most comprehensive and extensive one out there for trumpet anywhere. It's huge. But not to be overwhelming. And what we wanted to do is design it in such a way that people could easily click on a topic that they're looking for.

Boom. A video opens up so they don't have to sit through somebody's webinar or masterclass for an hour or two hours to try and find that one thing that they're after that they wanna work on. So that's how it came about. But then we got approached by so many different people saying, yeah, this, it's good, but we want FaceTime with you.

Basically what we did is we created, the original program was a standalone program. It was an online training video training series. And in this series there's over 175 videos that we've created on all things trumpet plus some different.

Things outside of the norm, kind of trumpet technical related things things that are more about professionalism and gear and things like that. But where we really got together, I. Over the last three years of really building this thing is to create a program which we call Body Mechanics Mastery.

And just to give you a quick definition of it it's body Mechanics mastery. It's a system of body perception and analyzation. So we can make long-term corrections by organizing our mind body balance through this awareness and what really makes it different. Is that it focuses on figuring out exactly what works for the individual player and how to get your body completely working for you and not against you.

It. We find that lots there, all the great systems have a lot of merit. They have a lot of fine produced, a lot of fine musicians and trumpeters, whether it's stamp method. I studied with Jimmy Stamp for years. I knew guys that studied with Claude Gordon. I also happened to study a little bit with Carmine Caruso and Paul and I have both studied like the Adams method and all of that stuff.

And while those are all great methods we've found that. They were all based on a need for themselves to create a method that worked for them. And yes, it worked for other people, but we've also found that it does not work for other people. So we've. Taken our experience and experimented and done all this stuff so we can teach people how to analyze their own issues and help themselves as well.

And it's, I think it's really important to learn to troubleshoot problems that are specific to you. So we like to teach people how to dismantle 'em and put 'em back together and show how everything ticks, and in particular, how to find out what works for you. At that point in time I might add as well.

Exactly. Because the body is always changing, but 'cause I'm 47 and you two I know that you're both well over 50. My body was vastly different 10 years ago when I was 37 versus now when I'm 47. I can feel, begin to feel my age now that I'm over 45. And that's just gonna accelerate as I go on.

In life. Now I'm interested in knowing you, you talk about how the atom method and the Caruso method is effective for certain people, but it seems like it's efficacy is limited because as you said, it's just was. Caruso wrote it for himself. He wasn't

even a trumpet player. Caruso wasn't, he was a violinist and a saxophone player, so he came up with a whole kind of different thing.

So I'll have to have a little bit of an exception maybe for him.

Yeah, what I'm saying so you have the The Gordon Method or this method and that method, but it was created for that specific individual, for that specific body type. So what works for Claude Gordon may not work for yourself or myself.

That's exactly right. So you're teaching people how to be their own teachers?

That's a good portion of it is to teach them how to be aware. And what's been really a lot of fun is that on these Zoom sessions, we can see the light bulbs going off. I. Somebody just changes a slight thing, a little adjustment.

They go, oh my God, that's, I, wow, that feels great. So it can be that immediate. And as far as the different methods, just to touch on that, we've found that even those methods that work really great for us at a certain point in time may stop working. You said the efficacy may stop working and.

But they each have, a nugget of truth of beneficial Quality to it that we can take those things and go, okay, for this point in my, how I'm feeling, I should be doing maybe the six notes from Carmine Caruso, or, I need to do such and such to open up my sound.

I might do something else from a different method. So it's knowing, where those tools are, but I think what Bobby and I. Have that's unique is that we teach the why to use that tool and what that outcome expected outcome should be. So I think that's, I've always want wondered okay, so you tell me to do this.

Why? A lot of the methods don't even want to tell you why. Or maybe they don't even know why, but it just happened to work for that, composer of that version of the routine or

something. I had friends that studied with Claude Gordon, and I had some people say, man, this is like my playing has just gone through the roof, but Claude will always tell me, don't ask me why. Just do what I say to do and do it. And I had other, I had another close friend that studied with him for quite a while. And I remember him just telling me also, and this is in no way meant to slam the Claude Gordon system. But he said this was like the worst two years of my playing.

It just, it's not working for me. And Claude doesn't want me to ask any questions as to why things work. I studied with Stamp and Stamp was. He was, he liked to talk about why these things work, but he developed his method because he I think he had a, he had a heart attack and it was trumpet is very, it makes your heart really work hard, so he had to figure out an easier way to play and make the trumpet as easy as possible for himself.

And I learned so much from him. However, I will also say as my experience and I, Paul and I like to just talk about from our personal experience, not from everybody's. 'cause, your mileage may vary as they say. But for me as far as being able to learn how to play in the upper register with power and stuff it didn't seem to help me too much in those areas.

We both studied, like you said earlier, we both studied martial arts over the years, and from that we bring this physical awareness and an understanding that we're all built differently and we have different ways of approaching certain issues. One of our heroes as kids, of course, was Bruce Lee, our age group.

We all watch those movies and all that, but. Bruce wrote his method, which was K Kdo, and Bruce studied boxing and Chinese martial arts, Japanese martial arts grappling. He studied like everything. And Jean Jit Kdo, I believe literally means like the way of, no way. Yeah. And so this is for us, it's the method of no method.

We've. Taking ideas of course from all of our teachings, from all of our teachers and everything we've learned through various systems. But we've learned how to try to figure. How to apply them to different people, and I think what these other methods were all missing was this understanding and awareness of the physical mechanics of playing and how to integrate your mind and your full body.

And this completely varies from person to person.

Doing these interviews for going on what is seven, eight years? I've noticed a pattern of there, it seems to me, and you guys can correct me if I'm wrong 'cause you've been at this longer than I have, but it seems to me that there was certain dogmas that were just. Established, this is the way to do things.

Oh, man. You had the Chicago school. You had the New York school, you had this school, that school, and this is the way to do it. But my observation is that that students and the players, they don't necessarily think that way anymore. Not to the extent that they did, maybe in the sixties and seventies, eighties.

What is your observation on

that? I have a theory about that in the same way that you know, news sources we can get from all over the world. 24 7. A lot of things are homogenized as well. You may hear or notice less of the regional dialects, or accents around the country.

I, I think a lot of it is just the access to the information that's out there. And so now you've got YouTube with, A bazillion help videos. A lot of it is misinformation or bad information or even dangerous. But you've got all of that available. You've got everything else.

And like we're doing today on this zoom session, we can be in Virginia Beach and Bow Washington and all points around the globe and do this kind of thing, whereas, Back in the day, like you were talking, fifties, sixties, seventies, whatever those teachers there was, the Chicago school because people would go to Chicago and study with and Chitz and so on or they'd go to New York and study with, pen Delphi and ano and all that.

Or they go, To LA for Stamp and Magio and Claude Gordon. So I think that those schools came out of those areas regionally because you would have to travel there to study with those people. Now you can study, with people all over the world

anytime you want, but you're also right about them being a dogma, with a lot of people still.

And I would maybe, I think I would agree with you people that are, I. Maybe 50 or 60 plus in age. Some of 'em and a lot of 'em, not just some of 'em, but there's quite a few of 'em that just really believe this is the way, and it's almost like a religion, and it's it's something that I think keeps a lot of people stuck and they keep playing the same thing over and over the same routine, and they don't vary and they don't try new things and they just wonder why we have so many people that come to us that are stuck and frustrated, and they just don't understand why.

Because I've been doing this for so many years and it seemed to be working at one time, but it's not, and part of it is it. You need to make changes as your body changes and you need to, I think it's my opinion that you need to be try to be open-minded. At least I try to be open-minded.

We certainly don't claim to know anything everything, but we've come across things that are, that seem to help people and ourselves primarily adapt as we age and as we run into roadblocks. Yeah. And one of the things, just to get back to what you were talking about earlier, is that with people, we'll often say, we'll give some advice or prescribe a remedy, or whatever we wanna call it, to one person while, and another person may be having the same issue physically with they're playing, but we'll have them do something else.

And I think the thing that makes us different, We approach these issues with a lot of, we're able to hit them in a lot of different ways so that people can finally get something that clicks with them and it goes, oh yeah, now I get it. You have your aha moment. And those little things like Paul said earlier, can often just be, boy, that can just happen.

In a, in an instant, and sometimes it takes a while till you figure it out. I we don't claim to have a magic wand. I wish we did, but but that's how we approach it.

There's one thing in in Aikido a Japanese martial art that It is the one that I most loved and spent the most time doing.

This exercise is called Ron Dory, and what it is you as the defender, stand in the middle of the mat in the dojo, and you have, I. Three or sometimes more attackers coming at you, but from all different angles and at different times completely randomly. You have to adapt and change and make those quick decisions on the fly.

As opposed to really hard forms of martial arts where, you know, fist meets fists face meets fist, whatever. But you come at it like this and you keep hitting and you keep going in the same opposing directions until somebody. Loses, or gets hurt or whatever. But that's like banging your head against the wall, practicing the same thing on trumpet all the time.

So we've taken that philosophy of. Okay. You bang your head against the wall once, don't do it again. Come at the problem from a different angle and you may find a solution that's much simpler, much faster, much easier on the body and more lasting as well. I was

just interviewing a guy not a trumpet player, some completely different, but he does martial arts as well, jiujitsu and.

In his words, the juujitsu is more about the redirection of energy rather than just like you have just two opposing forces just coming together with juujitsu. You're taking the oncoming force and maybe just a little tweak or just a little something with your technique, you're taking that the opposing force.

And you're basically turning their energy against them. I don't know exactly what he said. It's a redirection. Redirection, yeah. Of It's the same in Aikido. Yeah, you're exactly right, James. Yeah so what he was explaining is if you just have two. Opposing forces, like two dump trucks going against each other or like slamming into each other at 60 miles an hour is gonna be a absolute catastrophe and it's gonna be, nobody's gonna win, everybody's gonna lose in that situation.

But if you know how to take that, the force from your opponent and use it against them, then you have the upper hand.

Exactly. Yep. Yeah, that's

a great explanation. And 'cause I, because I see people and they're older and they look like they're just working so hard and I feel so sorry for them because it, 'cause I know from personal experience, it doesn't have to be torture to play a sea above the staff.

It's actually easy if you know how to do it you can play it with marginal effort at best. Yeah, but he's just working so hard and he seems to enjoy it. It's like he's taking pleasure look how hard I'm working. Exactly.

I could play this. A lot of us, the scale, a lot of people like to wear that badge of honor and for us it's like we've tell told our, our group, it's like the trumpet.

Really the goal should be to make it as easy as possible, because once you understand how your body works and everything. It allows you the freedom to play music. There's a whole school of thought that that says, para analysis is paralysis. And we understand that and we have ways.

To overcome that. And there's another school of thought that says, just play in a musical way or just play music, play with a great sound all the time, and that'll take care of your problems. Again, for some that may very well work, that never particularly worked well for me. And I'm an analytical guy, so I like to understand what it is that makes things tick.

And I've had and Paul has too, I think if you're, I think if you're a. A true career long trumpet player. And you've been, you've had to play everything from, brutal salsa gigs or be on the road for, like right now, Paul, playing eight shows a week. I, I had times, and that's like kind of a abusive playing, that's brutal.

You have to learn how to. You've probably most trumpet players that have been in those situations understand that, wow, I need to figure something out here and figure out what makes me tick so I can keep going and have some longevity. In this game,

Necessity is the mother of invention.

I. So Paul, he's a, he's a great lead trumpeter and Bobby, I don't know as much about your background as I do, Paul, but I know that you're pretty well experienced. But if you guys were to be like the amateur, I. 70 years old who's just faces beat red playing a, a scale up to the sea above the staff.

If you guys were to take that approach, you wouldn't last longer than two weeks doing what you guys do. So it's like you had to find something that works, otherwise you're not gonna have a career in it.

I've always Wondered why people bragged about practicing six hours a day. And I'm the opposite way.

If I can get to from point A to point B and I can do that in an hour a day of practice, then I've got five hours left for myself to play music, to do, to grow more musically. It's not just like going to a gym and working out, but a lot of methods, they. Advocate, I guess spending hours and hours and hours.

Like eventually if you just hear it, your body will figure out how to make it happen and you'll just sound the way you want. But what if you don't know what tool to pick up to do it? That's a lot of the problem, I think with the dogmatic approaches

out there. We also like to feel like, if your car, if you got a flat on the side of the road or whatever, and you need to.

Do you wanna be stuck there and waiting, hours for somebody to come, AAA or whoever to come by and help you? Or do you want to know how to change it? Do you wanna know how to get yourself out of that situation? And boy, when you're on the road, I. There's nobody around to help you usually, to get out of those situations, and we've seen and heard about a lot of people just spi, spike going down in flames on a road gig because they just can't get it together anymore.

And sometimes the only, when you get like seriously injured or really beat up. You have to take a little bit of time off, or you have to really play smart, and we think it's important to really play smart every time you pick up the horn, that way you, you don't have these issues.

We have had comments and I'm glad you brought that up, Bobby, where somebody has been complaining about their chops and the first line of defense or the first bit of advice is, oh, we'll take five days off. Yeah, you had one heavy night of playing and you're tired the next day and somebody's saying Take five days off.

You're not gonna learn anything about what your body needs to do to recover to play well that, that second day. What if you have two days in a row of gigs? Or God forbid, I have six days a week. I gotta do it every, sometimes 52 weeks a year. And I'm not saying that to brag, but it, you can learn so much about your body if you really listen to it, and sure you get fatigued and you figure out how to get, your chops working the next day, that's a win.

You take three days off. You haven't learned anything. You come back and you're gonna do the same cycle again. You're gonna play probably too hard. You're gonna go, oh, I need to take some time off. You'll recover. You'll come back and you'll do it again and again. Groundhog Day,

constant process of discovery, and even using the rest, you're learning, you're always learning your body. And it's response to the. Let's face it very unnatural. It's not natural to put a piece of metal on your face and blow on it and make a buzzing sound. And it's great. I like it, but it's not natural.

You know what I mean? So there has to be we have to find effective ways to do it.

Yeah. It's not natural. There are people that are, for whatever reason, that are built. For it. I guess they're, I guess you could say they're anatomically gifted. And, but they also have a knack for doing it because for people that are not gifted, there's so many players that are just phenomenal players that don't have the perfect, what seems to look like the perfect body type or dental structure or whatever.

So there's, there is a way to get around to work around all that and figure out what works for you, and you can clearly see it by everybody. Not everybody's gonna look like, doc Severance. And we have a lot of people that say, I'm playing with my horn straight out and I'm standing up just like Doc and this and that, and why isn't it working?

Look at Sergei ov, he looks a little bit different. Yeah. And he sounds amazing, of course. Of course. So we always, we, one of the things we talk about is not, to not worry about the aesthetics of Yes. How you appear when you're playing. You have to worry about what's.

What, how to get your machine working, so to

speak. Yeah. And Doc Severson, he was, that, that could have been showmanship on his part. Not necessarily because it's good for trumpet playing. We don't know. But yeah it could it may not have been the primary factor in a certain stance, like a certain posture.

That's true with Maynard, with the whole breathing Yeah. Thing that he used to do, it was like, oh wow. That's how he breathes. That's how he does it. And that's a kind of a showmanship thing, yeah. That's how you work

a crowd. Exactly. Not necessarily how you play trumpet.

Yes. It,

speaking of Maynard, there was a, a. A little story that he pulled his trumpet section aside one night and he said, guys, you gotta make it look harder. You're making it look way too easy. Who's gonna wanna buy tickets and come to the show if you're just standing there looking like you're bored?

More backends and whatever,

showmanship. Now when you guys are Like the ratio of professionals to amateurs in your pro, like your Facebook group or your trumpet diagnostics. What do you think the ratio is?

That's a good question. I would say the ratio is probably a lot higher for comeback and amateur players, weekend warriors and players that are just coming back from long hiatus, I think.

That's our biggest demographic. Cool.

And what is the biggest hurdle that you experience? Is it a mental block of some sort or is it a mental block that leads to some sort of physical block? What is the biggest, maybe a couple of the biggest challenges that you guys encounter with people that you work with?

I think it's both. It depends on the person and some, and they're both connected. This is a thing. Our mind and bodies are completely connected and oftentimes people get in a little bit of a rutt playing and then they get a mental block because of it. I had something that Jimmy Stamp told me many years ago.

The story of how I even got as involved with Stamp is this, I was in high school at the time and I had some friends that graduated, they were a couple years older than me, and they went off to to study with him. And I kept asking him, Hey man, can you get me a lesson with him? Get me in.

And finally they bugged him enough and he called me one night. Or Yeah, no, I think he, he gave them my number and I called him one night and he just said, I never teach like high schoolers. So he says, I'll let you. I'll work with you for one month and if I don't see that you're improving and that you're serious about your playing, then I'm not going to I just don't have the time to waste.

'cause somebody else would, to have a, have this slot. And he was like the nicest guy in the world too. He was just such a sweetheart of a guy. So I went and I had my braces removed and I had the. Just this super unfocused, cloudy sound, had no range. Terrible flexibility, all those kind of things that you wish you didn't have.

And in my first lesson he just said why don't you play something for me? And I said what should I play? He says, just, play a couple of whole notes or play a scale or something. So I played a few notes and, being the kind of genius he was, he could just tell. In a, in an instant what you're doing wrong.

So he then asked me, have you ever buzzed on your mouth base? And I said, no, I've never tried that. So he had me start, I. No, he asked me if I buzzed on my lips first. That's what he did. And he buzzed his famous little scale pattern and I was like completely blown away. 'cause I'd never seen anybody buzz their lips and play, a pattern before.

So we spent, I don't know, maybe I. 5, 7, 8 minutes just trying for me to get a sound. I could barely play low C. And then when I got low C, I couldn't play the scale, C D E F G. So he just had me go up to C sharp and back down just a little bit, and it got things going. Then he moved me over to the mouthpiece.

I did that for a couple minutes, then he moved me onto the horn. After that, my tone just completely cleared up and I had a whole new feel and a whole new vibration going on. So it was just really uncanny how he taught. I'm sorry, I forgot where I was headed with this. What the, but but the question, getting back to your question about Mental and physical blocks.

So what I used to, at the time in high school, I played with this polka band, this Polish polka band. And it was loud. They would say, blaze, all your trumpet, play loud. There wasn't a lot of amplification. And we'd be playing these big dances and stuff and I would just get really damaged, really beat up.

And he would call. Later on I went to college, a Cal State full lieutenant host. Still playing with his band and he taught at Cal State Fullerton. So that was really the true reason why I went to that school. So he would call me his wounded soldier and my lessons would be like on Monday or Tuesday sometimes.

And he would say, how's my wounded soldier doing? And say, oh, I can't play, after that gig we did on Friday or Saturday night. And he would take me from my very worst. To feeling absolutely spot on again in just a matter of, again, five to 10 minutes. It was incredible how he did it. And he could hear things, see things.

So I would ask him, how do how do you do this? What is behind that? And he would explain it to me. And so the thing that he told me though, that was, this is where I was getting to, that I loved, is he said, remember, No matter how bad your chops get, You can always get back to home. You can always bring 'em back to where they were, and that was the thing that for me, just gave me, I don't know if it was whether it gave me a lot of hope, I guess I could say.

Whenever my chops would get messed up and the fact that he could fix 'em up was great. The problem back then for me was that I couldn't fix 'em up myself. And it wasn't until many years later studying with Bobby Shu and being around various colleagues and just starting to experiment and do some personal exploration that I realized I.

How Bobby Medina works. So I think it's, I think it's a co really. I don't even I wouldn't know what the ratio is of physical to mental issues, but that they are connected in a big way, is what I think.

We're talking about not necessarily like respecting the people who know the craft.

And the physicality of playing trumpet. And Bobby, you just gave a wonderful tribute to James Stamp and it was wonderful, but it was all part of you discovering what works for you. You don't do it just because Jimmy Stamp says, do it. You do it because this is what brings you back home in your words.

Yeah.

And that and in truth, I've studied with a lot of different teachers and I've always been able to take some kind of nugget from everybody. And there's always been things that people have told me that just didn't quite seem to work for me, no matter how much I did it. And I think sometimes people often expect a technique to work.

Instantaneously, or they'll do it for a week and then they go, this isn't working. I gotta move on to the next shiny object. Or they do it for a couple of practice sessions and that doesn't really give something a fair shake

either. Maybe it takes six months for your body to adjust to a certain something phy physically, like something that you're trying to incorporate.

Maybe not six months, but it's gonna take longer than a week.

Yeah. We talk about, one of the things we, we discuss. The program is neuroplasticity, and it's for those of you that may might not know what that is, it's the ability of neural networks in the brain to change through growth and reorganization and.

It's when the brain is rewired to function in some way that differs from how it previously function. And typically when you do something, a technique it really starts to take place. This rewiring starts to take place after 65 or 70 attempts, tries, but they also need to be like, correct. Attempts. If you have three out of five that are incorrect still, and you're going back to the old way, you have to stop and get back on track and do it correctly.

That's the pre proviso on it, at least my experience.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Unless you give something enough of a try. And with the proper intent like Bobby said, it has to be done correctly. Otherwise you're just reinforcing the incorrect way of doing things, it's in some ways it's similar giving something a fair shake, for enough time that you can make that evaluation.

It's like trying new gear, how many friends have we got that have boxes of mouthpiece? They're always looking for the new thing. I've got a friend that would buy some new $200 mouthpiece and he would play it for one day and on a gig, and if it didn't go, great. It must be a terrible mouthpiece that goes in the box and then he brings out the next one.

His body's never had a chance to actually learn what it needs to do to play that mouthpiece or what that mouthpiece can do for him. It, and if you're just, always chasing that shiny object, you never get there. Yeah I feel like that's the same way in trying new things, for your chops.

Don't just play the Carmine Caruso six notes for one day and go, nah, it doesn't work. Made me too tight. And then you do the bill Adam for one day and spend six hours doing that. And now I'm beat up. Nah, that doesn't work. I'll do the next thing I. How do you know that, whether that's gonna be a good thing for your body or not.

Fellas, we're sadly running a bit short on time and I feel like we've just got, just gotten to know each other and now it's time to part ways. Now's the time where I just want to give you guys an opportunity to share about your trumpet diagnostics program. If someone were to register or just check it out on the Facebook group, what's someone gonna.

Discover or what's the experience gonna be checking it out? First

of all, they should go over to trumpet diagnostics.com and in there we have a free training masterclass about body mechanics, about a few different things that are, it's very helpful. Totally no cost, totally free. And we've spent a lot of time putting it together and to, based on the needs of people, with their time and their chops and all the issues that go on.

So we've provided some valuable content there. And then after that, if. They should choose to want to learn more about our full program. Then they can contact us through this at an appointment and have a little chat with us and see if there might be a good fit. See if they, if we might, if we feel like we can help 'em, then we'll tell 'em more about it.

If we feel like we're unable to help you, then we're not gonna, Pitch anything to you either there if that's the case we're just out trying to help people and that's the best place. Trumpet diagnostics.com and just, it's a wonderful little video webinar that we've done.

And I think people, a lot of people have really written some nice things about it. And a lot of people have. It's gone through our course and seen our materials. A lot of really heavy players that have had some very nice things to say about it, which we're very proud of and very thankful for.

Paul Baron has been. My guest is along with his partner in crime, Bobby Medina. Trumpet diagnostics.com. I'm going to sign up for this masterclass and check it out for myself, and I hope that you guys listening in will do the same. Maybe we can touch base again. I. And maybe after a year or so, maybe you can just give us some up updates, how the program is going and we can just dive a little deeper into some of the things we just opened up just very briefly in our time together.

That sounds great, James would love to.

Alright, thanks everybody for listening and thank you to our guests, Paul and Bobby.

Thank you for having us.

Thanks James.

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