I don’t mean to discourage anyone from trying to improve their playing, but some things are not possible.
How many times have you heard lately “If you try hard enough, you can do anything”. That is a crock and it is time to let our kids know that you will improve with hard work but sometimes your bar is set too high to be reached. The same is true with improving your trumpet playing ability when the number of years have reached the six decades or plus range.
A very good friend passionately told me that his goal was to play as well as he had in college. His college years would be some forty years previous. In my usual tactless fashion I responded, “You can’t, you’re too old”. Talk about deflating his balloon.
I would like to hit a baseball as far as I did in Jr. High.
I would like to run as fast as I did in High School.
I would like to shoot an arrow as accurately as I did as a teenager.
There are many things I would like to recapture and enjoy the excitement of success, but it ain’t going to happen.
Advancing age has a way of slowing us down and when you become comfortable with that fact, your life becomes much more enjoyable.
As an example-
This past week, my youngest son invited me and others from our family to join him fishing for trout in Colorado. Being the great White Hunter I have always considered myself to be, I agreed to join him. Little did I know what I was in for. All went well until I realized that Estes Park, Colorado was at an elevation much higher than Dallas, Texas; 6,858 feet higher to be exact. Usually this would not have been a problem for I have continued to keep in reasonable shape for a 76 year old man. But, after my heart attack two years ago, things have not been the same. My heart attack happened on stage while playing my show in Branson. After leaving the stage during intermission I proceeded to the restroom and became reunited with my morning breakfast. I returned to the stage and finished the second half of the show and realized I had suddenly lost half of my vital capacity (lost half of my air intake). It wasn’t until several weeks later that I was scheduled for a stress test to see what had happened. Before the stress test was started, the tech asked me when I had my heart attach. Surprise!
The reason I shared this tidbit of history was to illustrate the effects of advancing years on one’s body. Many of us want to play “just like we did in college” but as the decades pass, so do our physical conditioning and muscle strength. When speaking of involved muscle strength, the lips are not the only set of muscles we use to play a brass instrument. Many combinations of muscles are involved and ones muscles at an advanced age will never be what they were when we were in college at our prime. “It isn’t going to happen”.
Now that I have dashed all of your hopes and aspirations to become the next Maynard at your current age of 60+ years, just remember; Maynard couldn’t play as well in his later years as he did when he had his first rehearsal with Kenton January 1, 1950.
So. Where do we go from here?
Ageing has many advantages over youth.
- You don’t have to prove anything for, in your own mind, you have already achieved it.
- Nobody expect an old person to be good at anything anymore.
- Most young people treat old people with respect.
- Old people, when remembering back to their youth always tend to exaggerate the truth which makes them feel better.
- Old people can make up things for they know that everyone who was there at the time is now dead and the truth has been buried with them.
So, if an older player wants to get back to the “Good Old Days” of playing, what can be done to improve his/her ability?
Here are 10 suggestions for improving your chances for a successful comeback.
- Be realistic, not falsely optimistic.
- Don’t get in over your head. Be content playing a second part until you find out if you can play a higher part.
- When playing an improvised solo, start easy and then build.
- When warming up, don’t leave all your high notes in the warmup room.
- Don’t try to tell everyone how great you are or were; let them find out for themselves.
- NEVER OVER BLOW THE LEAD TRUMPT PLAYER!
- Don’t give advice when you’re new on the band.
- Let the other players complain about the leader.
- Don’t complain about your chops, we all have chop problems.
- Pick your bands carefully. It is better to continue upward than it is to be demoted downward.
The best advice I can give someone who wants to play like they did in college is to remember “as you get older, you need to get smarter”.
