Naperville Trumpet Lessons
The trumpet is the highest pitched instrument in the brass family. It has three valves and two slides. The trumpet is held with the left hand, and the right hand fingers push the valves up and down in order to change the pitch. It is different from a stringed instrument because the pitch goes down when you add a finger, where the pitch would go up on a violin if you added that same finger. Anyway, for this lesson, we will focus on buzzing the mouthpiece, and fine tuning with the kick-slides.
To get a great buzz, we need to first get our air moving. Air is free, so don't be afraid of using enough of it in your playing. An easy way to get your air moving is to use the pinwheel method as described on Naperville Lessons tuba page. So, your air should now be moving without a problem. The next step is to keep the air moving and to bring your lips together until you get a nice relaxed buzz, and condense the lips further to see if you can create a buzz that would fit inside of the trumpet's mouthpiece. Now, pick up that mouthpiece, and try to buzz your lips just within the mouthpiece. At this point, you should focus mainly on getting a consistent sound while keeping your face and body relaxed.
By the time you have been playing the trumpet for a couple of months, you should know how to tune. Tuning is accomplished by slightly adjusting the main valve while playing the trumpet with all the valves up. You can use either a tuner or a drone pitch in the tuning process. Certain notes can be tuned while you play by adjusting the kick slides with your left hand's thumb and ring fingers. There is more to this process, but that basically covers how to tune the trumpet.
-Naperville Lessons, August 2010