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PACK YOUR A-GAME: HOW TO MAINTAIN PEAK PERFORMANCE AS A TRAVELING MUSICIAN

-by Paul Baron

I have been asked many times in clinics, masterclasses, lessons, and by colleagues as well, how to maintain peak performance on the road. Traveling for gigs poses a number of different challenges with many variables involved that we wouldn't necessarily encounter while working at home.

First of all, there is the obvious... travel. This often requires many hours on planes and busses and in itself can be very fatiguing. Very often I play a show late into the evening and because of the distance to the next city and venue, will be up for travel four hours later. Many times this is unavoidable so I make sure to stay hydrated at all times. The other thing I do is carry headphones and ear plugs to try and get cat naps on the plane or bus. Even getting a little dozing off time can be refreshing so being able to cut out some of the exterior noises, young kids crying or screaming, or loud cast members who never stop "performing", helps to refresh on long travel days. This also helps me recover more quickly once I've arrived at the destination.

We can learn a lot about maintaining physical performance from athletes. It's obvious that after a strenuous athletic endeavor, being it a training session or event, an athlete needs rest to recover. This is no less the case for musicians, especially a high energy trumpet gig. Lactic acid, as well as extra blood, builds up in our lips as a way of protecting the tissue, so rest is a big factor in bringing down the swelling and washing away the lactic acid and excess blood. Hydrating helps with this as well.

I always do a warm-up starting with a clean slate everyday. What I mean by this is that I make sure to start off gentle and listen to my body as it gives me signals with how to progress. Sometimes I pick up the horn and things feel pretty fresh right off the start. I am able to progress easily through my warm-up and feel ready to perform after only five minutes. Other days, especially if the travel schedule is tiring and I've had a heavy playing schedule the day before, my warm-up can take on a different role.

For those times I find it even more important to listen to the signs my body is sending to start even more gentle. If travel and schedule allows, I prefer to do a gentle warm-up in the later morning so as to start the healing process early in the day. Since I don't have any time constraints to hurry through the warm-up to get ready for the gig, I allow myself whatever time I feel is necessary to get my chops back to square one. Often this involves lip flapping alternating with very soft "whisper tones".

What I'm trying to do is get the lips vibrating as gently and easily as possible with the smallest trickle of air. Sometimes the lips just aren't ready to vibrate. Rather than force them by blowing more air, I stop and flutter my lips some more, and then attempt the same very soft volume again. We may have all experienced stiff chops and probably also experienced having to blow harder to force the lips to vibrate.

With enough air we can force almost the stiffest of chops to vibrate but this isn't an efficient use of air and the effort to sound ratio is not very good. Playing in this way, fatigue will set in much faster, volume, range, sound and intonation, will all suffer, and we may even do irreparable damage. I consider this warm-up time as physical therapy (PT) and am more concentrated on the feeling than the sound at this point. If I am able to do PT and damage control to get my lips feeling and vibrating easily without much effort, I know the gig will go much better as well.

Once things are back to working well, or at least as good as they're going to get for the day, I can move on into a practice session,