Blowing my own trumpet
As usual. Scroll down through the meandering autobiography to get to the pertinent information.
In about 2016, I’d been doing various things with/for Emme Woods. We were friends and I was supporting her transition from teenage acoustic singer songwriter and open mic botherer to fully fledged valvey electric goodness. At various points I’d made videos, studio recordings and played bass, drums and lead guitar for her at gigs throughout the UK. At some point we were writing a song and she said:
“Do you still have a trumpet?”
I had played brass at school. It was a coal mining community, so in the 70s and 80s, the brass band had a sense of community pride and was akin to the school football team. They had been up and down the country winning awards. At the tail end of Thatcherite Britain in mining communities that had run out of coal and run into heroin, I caught the tail end of that. A thoroughly working-class music education, which can be as rare as rocking horse shit in this world.
I played soprano cornet, cornet, euphonium, baritone horn, and tuba at various points throughout my "career." We won the Scottish championships and went to the British championships (Manchester) and the European championships (disappointingly they were always in Falkirk) and went on various trips across Europe. I had success in solo competitions and quartet competitions. Along the way, I got a solid grounding in the discipline and skills of a music education. Then I hit university and stopped it all….
There were so many things happening once I left school that brass fell by the wayside. I was playing in various bands and involved in so much music that I didn’t think I needed it. I auditioned and got into the uni brass band and attended one practice. I played well, but at the break, all the older "kids" gave me the cold shoulder because I was the new guy. My life didn’t need a Disney teen movie.
When you play bass, guitar, drums, and presumably keys, people let you use their instrument at jam sessions. I'd maintained a drum habit for years doing this. I'd drop in to jams in various countries during my travels, and for some time, I was running a few in Amsterdam. Brass instruments aren’t really shareable though. I didn’t know this until I graduated from the working-class school of brass. When you breathed in, you tasted coal which had come out of a miner's lungs, so your school mate’s slobber was less of a worry. It was a different time…..
So once I had "retired" from my real job and was spinning plates in music, the first time I had some spare cash, I bought a trumpet on eBay. Returning to an instrument you used to play is a strange feeling. It had been about 20 years. I had been a kid through the difficult, out-of-tune struggles previously. There were new things like stamina involved. Warm-ups and regular practice. I went at it for a wee while, and then the worry of what the neighbors thought and with little to no application for playing it, it kind of fell by the wayside.
The trumpet is an unforgiving instrument. If you don’t play the guitar for a couple of months, you still know how to strum an E chord. With the trumpet, your tone, tuning, and range are all based on regular practice. You are responsible for tuning, so you need to know the pitch of the note before you try and hit it, and then when you do hit it, you have to listen and adjust accordingly. All these parameters change as the instrument heats up and your lips change shape as you get tired…..
Never play a trumpet cold….. it will affect your tuning
So when Morgan(Emme Woods’ non stage name) asked…. I took this all into account and decided - yeah - why not. I wrote trumpet parts for a few of her songs that suited trumpet more than guitar and a week to the day later, I was playing trumpet to a sold out King tuts. I discovered two things at this gig, one was that I wasn’t experienced enough as a trumpet player to pitch notes without a monitor when there was a loud guitars on stage, the other was that given that I only really played in the choruses I wasn't quite sure what to do in the verses. For some reason you can sit behind a drum kit or stand with a guitar round your neck and quite comfortably not play, but with only a trumpet at my side to join me on staring at lights and an audience I found that I would start dancing awkwardly. Anyone who finds phone footage from these gigs will see me doing a weird shuffle. I was now an unwilling semi-professional dancer.
While the trumpet is a pain in the proverbial to practice there are a few advantages. The next morning I woke up to an inbox full of requests to do trumpet work for people. I felt like such an imposter. My chops were far from professional, but I was getting more attention as a performer for trumpet than I’d ever got for anything else. So my top tip for musicians is to play something unusual. In my 30 year career as a mediocre drummer, bass player and guitarist, I can count on one hand the number of times people have asked me to do something out of the blue. I constantly get requests to record parts and gig with people. I took on some of the work, and was honest about the stuff that was beyond my abilities and passed it on to more able trumpeters trumpers trumpeteers players who I knew. Jam sessions are far more fun. You don’t need to join a queue to get involved. You can also get asked to guest on a song with the headlining band during an interesting support far more often than the bass player can. Tell me the key and I’ll join in without stepping on toes.
So that’s how I found myself becoming a semi-professional trumpet player.
It is an ongoing challenge to maintain my skills through practice and I still feel like an imposter every time I’m asked to do work, but in the past five years, I have appeared on charting albums, received money from PRS and PPL for national radio play, played at some very prestigious sold out venues, festivals and showcases and along the way written and recorded some great parts for some banging tunes. It’s funny how life works out…..
Getting Horny
Once I’d mastered getting work playing trumpet, the next obvious step was to offer horn sections. Growing up on The Commitments and all things Otis Redding it came naturally to me. I could score things in Sibelius with my theory knowledge at a level that I thought was rudimentary but others thought was useful. With a phone book of sax players, trombone players and other trumpeteers, I could write and record something which added a really nice addition to peoples tunes.
How does it work?
Basically I can offer to add trumpet or a horn section to your tunes. I can write a part or you can write a part and I can orchestrate it. I can record it in my own studio remotely or I can come to you. What I normally do is record a few takes of a simple part, and then a few takes of a harmony part and I leave it up to your engineer to decide how to use it.
If you have a big gig coming up - give it a bit of pizazz by adding some horns. Drop me a line and I’ll let you know how much it costs and how much practice is needed. It’s probably cheaper and easier than you think.
In both cases, you just need to send me a demo of the song. It can even be a wee video on your phone, and I’ll let you know what I think would work well.
How much does it cost?
It’s hard to cost any musical endeavour. Some tunes are more complicated than others. As a ballpark - £50 per head per tune. So if you want me to record trumpet in my house for your Tune. £50. If you want Trombone, Sax and Trumpet - £150. If there are multiple tunes, the price goes up, but drop me a line and I can do you a deal. For live work, if it’s on my doorstep and I’m just playing a few tunes, I know that you aren’t making much money from gigging so I can probably do it quite cheap. Bear in mind that brass and woodwind players are highly sought after for wedding and function work. They get about £150-£250 a gig. So they probably don’t want to play on 3 tunes at your gig for £50 on a Friday or Saturday.