Book: The Balanced Embouchure Author: Jeff Smiley Publisher: N/A No. Pages: 149 Purchased @: http://www.trumpetteacher.net/books.html

Description:

The book is almost all words and about 30 percent exercises. Basically this is as the book describes it self " A DYNAMIC DEVELOPMENT SYSTEM THAT'S EASY TO LEARN AND WORKS FOR EVERY TRUMPET PLAYER"

My Opinion:

I'm not really going to get to much into what the book has because you can easily find that out for yourself if you visit the website www.trumpetteacher.net . Basically the beginning is a bunch of text that describes and gets into the mechanics of trumpet playing and breaks everything up and gets into details of what the role of everything is and how it works. After that he has more text about equipment, the mental part of trumpet playing and stuff like that. After all the text he goes into explain his chop set up and then into the the exercises to develop the chop change. At the very back of the book he has lesson plans, and a troubleshooter. The book also comes with a CD witch has all the exercises on the book. The cool thing about the CD is that his own students recorded the CD.

I tried the method but it didn't work for me. He has some good ideas and stuff but the chop change didn't work for me. Although I did learn how to play double pedal tones (witch I use when I warm up) I didn't really learn anything else. Maybe I just didn't understand the text or something wasn't clicking. I have tried to make the system work but it just doesn't work for me. I don't know if it's just me or what. The book has worked for many other people and I'm probably the only person on Earth who the book hasn't worked for. This sort makes me feel stupid but I'm not going to lie and say that the book worked for me when it didn't.

I would like to say that the book is put very well together and Jeff Smiley did a nice job on it and obviously put in allot of time and effort into it. Although I personally didn't gain much from the book it doesn't mean that others won't because allot of people have said that they have gotten allot from the book.

In conclusion look around the website and make up your own mind weather you want to buy the book or not. If you're interested and you have 40 bucks sure why not buy it. I mean it's still pretty amazing to hear teenagers nail dubba G's like it ain't nothing. Some people say that "it's a most have book" I personally don't feel like that. But it wouldn't hurt to have it laying around. Maybe in the future I will get more out of it.

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