Trumpet Player, Trumpet Lessons Teacher, Composer/Arranger, Trumpet Book Author
Welcome to EddieLewis.com, the central hub for Houston trumpet player, Eddie Lewis. Eddie has made a full time living in music for his entire life, maintaining an active career as a performer, educator, author and composer/arranger. This website is here to help you get to know Eddie a little better.
Here is a list of this website’s 12 newest pages and most recent major updates. EddieLewis.com is huge and we are constantly adding new content. However, much of it is hidden several levels deep. So we thought it was important to add this update list.
We have a number of new trumpet lesson kudos that we want to share here on the Eddie Lewis home page. These are all from current students, all of which are taking trumpet lessons on Skype.
Julia Mason
I have so much to say about Eddie so would like to write just a few sentences first in case you would like a short version!
Eddie is a wonderful teacher. He is great at working with young children. He is consistent, kind, adaptive, creative, and experienced.
The Skype lessons have been very effective. We have thoroughly appreciated our time with Eddie!
My son, Riley, started working with Eddie at 6.5 years old. We were living in the Houston area at the time and Riley had asked for a trumpet for his 6th birthday. I started asking around but no one would take him because of his age, until I found Eddie 6 months later. Riley is now almost 11 and has been playing with Eddie for 4.5 years.
Eddie believes in tenants of the Suzuki method and Riley listens to a lot of music with him. Eddie will play all the music first so Riley has to rely on his ear as well as the notes on the page. It worked beautifully for a young child and now Riley can internalize a song that he hears and mimic the music in a very detailed way, paying attention to note-length, articulation, and dynamics.
Eddie consistently works with his students every week, only rarely missing a lesson for a gig, so Riley has consistently improved during his time with Eddie.
Riley played with Eddie through all his teeth falling out with no problem and worked with his opposite hand the time he broke his finger.
Eddie is kind and cares about his students beyond the trumpet lesson. He tells stories about life and teaches Riley to have priorities. He also helps us with requests. He wrote Riley music for school talent shows and Christmas recitals at his Grandma’s house. He helps him find joy in the trumpet.
Recently, we joined a Big Band group in our hometown and Eddie has been helping Riley work through some challenging music on the rehearsal list. Eddie can adjust to whatever is needed.
We moved to California three years ago and Skype lessons with Eddie have been just as great as the in-person lessons. During the pandemic when the kids were kept home, we added a second lesson to Riley’s week, so he could have something to work on when there was so much time with nothing to do.
I actually started trumpet lessons as well during this time at 38 years old! It has been really fun to share this experience with Riley. Eddie helped us get through a rough period and gave us something to focus on.
Eddie’s knowledge and experience with the trumpet has led to a unique education for Riley. I have not seen the likes of it before. Eddie’s method has given Riley a creative understanding of music. Riley cannot only play the trumpet because of Eddie but he can write music as well. He can improvise and he has been able to apply the lessons he has learned from Eddie to the piano and marimba. He sits down at the piano and just plays with no music. He creates, which is something I never learned in music lessons growing up.
We look forward to lessons each week because no matter how well we have learned the music, he meets us where we are and helps us progress forward.
He has given Riley and I an experience where we can be challenged, without feeling anxiety, because he is there to guide us through it. He practices with us if our practice was insufficient and that is ok with him. It makes the lesson less stressful and more about the enjoyment of it all.
We feel so lucky to have found Eddie. He has enriched our lives immeasurably!
Randal Zapata
Eddie is great with my son and working with him on improving his trumpet skills. I recommend Eddie!
Marcel Boily
Last year, with the pandemia and my retirement from work, I decided to learn to play the Trumpet.
I do not have any background in music ( exept a few lessons taken in the late nineties ) and could not meet with teachers in person because of the limitations brought by covid…
Luckily enough Youtube and the internet make it possible for anybody ( I live in the province of Québec, Canada) to look for teachers all over the world.
Watching videos on YouTube, I learned about Eddie Lewis and his approach. I listened to some of his music. I liked what I heard. I contacted Eddie, he answered my questions even if at that point I was not a pupil of his. After a few emails, I decided to start to take on-line classes with him, using the Skype platform.
A year later, I am still working on a weekly basis with him. I enjoy our sessions. He is always positive, encouraging. It shows that he has experience as much as a performer as a teacher.
Overtime, I realized that he understood my difficulties and cared about my progress. In addition , he has an impressive amount of teaching material developed over the years for students of any level, material well designed and tested.
Besides his capacities as a teacher and musician, he is a great human being with a good sense of humor and wonderful communicating skills. I am looking forward for more lessons with him, hoping that someday I will become comfortable to touch this beautiful but so difficult instrument.
Charles Young
Where to start.
I have been taking lessons with Eddie for about 2 years now and I am more than pleased with the progress I have made under his tutelage.
I have studied both classical and jazz styles with him and he has an amazing knowledge of both areas. To further the learning in either he has a vast array or original exercises and method books that he tailors to your skill level.
I am currently studying jazz with him and after forays into improvisation and composition I am now concentrating on learning and recording the jazz etudes he has composed for the Texas High School Allstate Jazz Band tryouts. They were initially beyond my abilities but he has helped me improve my skills to successfully play them.
One other factor is that I live in Tucson, AZ so all of our lessons have been over Skype. It has worked very well. The connection is good enough for me to play or for him to demonstrate live. Much of the time though is spent reviewing recordings that I have made during the week. I would highly recommend Eddie as a teacher for all levels of players from beginners to aspiring professionals.
Dr. Robert Zapf
D.M. Organizational Development; USAF (Retired); Associate Professor (Retired); Freelance Trumpet Musician
As a comeback trumpet musician who studied with some great performers and teachers while serving in an Air Force Band years ago (e. g. Vincent Cichowicz, David Hickman, et al.), I can credibly attest to the efficacy of Mr. Lewis’ observations, philosophies, methods, and approaches regarding how to develop trumpet playing skills and musicianship.
Mr. Lewis is a highly respected performer, great teacher, and all-around fine person. I have been studying with him for more than a year to regain my chops and abilities after many years of not playing, and I plan to continue studying with him for quite some time to come. Accordingly, I harbor no reservations recommending Mr. Lewis to any individual keenly interested in developing their trumpet playing skills and musicianship.
I began recording his Unadorned Trumpet Hymn series in 2013, having no idea what would become of those recordings. I eventually published them as an album and that album quickly became popular on Spotify. Then the Unadorned Trumpet Hymns were soon regularly published on a weekly basis on YouTube.
With the popularity of the Unadorned Trumpet Hymn series came requests for the arrangements. There is something about the simplicity of these unadorned arrangements that pulls people in. Trumpet players from around the world began asking about the arrangements.
Unfortunately, there were no arrangements. There was nothing formally written that other people could use. And once I began transcribing the hymns from my series, I realized that those arrangements wont work in a published format. So I spent time editing each of them to bring them up to the current standard.
That’s what lead to the name change. I wanted a title that was close enough that people could make a connection to the popular series, but different enough to distinguish it as something better. Unadorned Hymn Duets made sense as the best title for the arrangements in book form.
Here are the online bookstores where you can buy physical copies of Unadorned Hymn Duets:
Links will be added as the products are posted at the stores.
Reward yourself with many hours of musical merrymaking while also honing your hard-earned trumpet skills.
Are you struggling to see results after so many hours of dedicated practice? You religiously practice your fundamentals. You ambitiously attack challenging etudes and solo works. But for some reason, you are not seeing the kinds of results you’ve been expecting.
Sometimes this can be because you don’t spend enough time making music with other people. It’s no coincidence that the students who most stubbornly refuse to play music with other people are also the ones who see the slowest progress. As a teacher with over 40 years of experience, Eddie Lewis recognized this phenomenon early in his teaching career. That’s why he always strongly recommends ensemble participation to each of his students.
Making music with other musicians is the “application stage” of learning a new musical skill. Ensemble participation forces us to execute new skills in real time, sourcing them from the subconscious part of our minds.
Unfortunately, many of us don’t have enough access to formal ensembles. That’s where trumpet duets come in. You receive the same benefits from playing trumpet duets as you do playing in a concert band or church orchestra.
40 Trumpet Player Duets takes those benefits up a notch. This book is designed to use the skills you’ve worked so hard to acquire.
Take a deep dive into 40 Trumpet Player Duets and make your trumpet beast roar.
Here are the online bookstores where you can buy physical copies of Trumpet Christmas Duets
Links will be added as the products are posted at the stores.
Heartfelt Christmas carols for any Christmas program, Trumpet Christmas Duets is an interesting collection of favorite classics. Some are festive. Some are pleasant. Most are joyous. There are 21 trumpet duets for intermediate to advanced trumpet players. Trumpet Christmas Duets is perfect for family gatherings, Christmas Eve services, school Christmas concerts and your annual Christmas party.
Christmas carols in this trumpet duet book include:
Angels We Have Heard on High, Away in a Manger, Deck the Halls, The First Noel, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, Good King Wenceslas, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, The Holly and the Ivy, In the Bleak Midwinter, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, Joy to the World, Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, O Come, All Ye Faithful, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, O Holy Night! O Little Town of Bethlehem, Quempas Carol, Silent Night, Still, Still, Still, We Three Kings of Orient Are, What Child Is This
Here are the online bookstores where you can buy physical copies of Trumpet Christmas Duets
Links will be added as the products are posted at the stores.
Launch your trumpet life with Tonalization Studies, a system of trumpet scales that guarantees success.
Beginner trumpet students do not need to sound bad for long. If you want to sound like a pro, then you must practice what the pros practice.
Unfortunately, the exercises professional trumpet players practice are too difficult for beginners. This is a problem Eddie Lewis has been addressing with his students for decades. He has composed hundreds of trumpet exercises which bridge the gap between the beginners’ limitations and the benefits of the professional level exercises.
Now YOU have access to these beginner exercises. Trumpet Pioneer Tonalization Studies has the same types of scale exercises that Eddie teaches his professional students. By limiting the number of keys and limiting the range, the scale patterns in this book are appropriate for even the earliest of beginners.
If you are a beginner trumpet player who wants the full benefit of pro level practice, then make it happen with the Trumpet Pioneer Tonalization Studies.
Note:
Trumpet Pioneer Tonalization Studies can also be used by students of higher skill levels. If you are familiar with Eddie Lewis’ One Range approach to chop building, then you know about the importance of range limiting. Trumpet Pioneer Tonalization Studies has all the exercises you need to practice your major Tonalization Studies with a reduced range. (See the One Range book for more details about range limiting.)
Here are the online bookstores where you can buy physical copies of Trumpet Pioneer Tonalization Studies
Links will be added as the products are posted at the stores.
To go to a webpage fully dedicated to the Trumpet Hymn Duets book, please click HERE.
We are very excited to announce the release of a new book, Trumpet Hymn Duets. This is a book of 21 hymns arranged for trumpet duet. We are telling people that the Trumpet Hymn Duets book is “hymns first, duets second.” Eddie has already written a book of 101 clever trumpet duets. Trumpet Hymn Duets is not that.
When he set out to do this project, Eddie’s objective was to write trumpet duets that honored the mood and harmonies of the original hymns. He wanted them to be 100% appropriate for traditional Christian church services.
Here’s just a tiny bit of bad news. While the book is available online, the distribution process got stalled somewhere. It is available as a physical book at Amazon.com, and as an eBook at our family online sheet music store, Tiger Music, it is not as widely available around the world as most of our other books are. We are trying to fix this problem, but we appreciate your patience.
Here are the online bookstores where you can buy physical copies of Trumpet Hymn Duets. For some reason, the category I chose for this book dictates that it will not be available as a physical book at the same stores as most of our other books. If I can change this in the future, I will. For now, these are the only stores fro now.
Links will be added as the products are posted at the stores.
Eddie Lewis is an active YouTube creator. Click on the play list to see his most recent trumpet and jazz video posts.
Mr. Lewis posts videos of his trumpet playing, videos of his compositions and trumpet lesson videos. As of 2019 he has over 1000 subscribers and is still growing strong. This is a great way to connect with Eddie as a trumpet players, even if you don’t live in the Houston area.
We are pleased to announce the release of our most recent book, Trumpet Chops Player. This is the third book of a seven book series. If you have a range at least up to G above the staff, then this book is perfect for you.
Trumpet Chops is a series of books designed to be used with my “One Range” approach to trumpet chops building. If you need to work on your trumpet range and/or endurance, the One Range approach gives you a strategy to grow your strength without sacrificing the musical aspects of your trumpet playing.
The Trumpet Chops Player book is part of that One Range system, especially if your top range is up to G above the staff.
This book is also for trumpet players with higher ranges than G above the staff. If you read the One Range book, you will see that it endorses days of range limiting. For trumpet players with higher range, the Trumpet Chops Player book gives you all the benefits of the daily routine while still observing the Three Levels of Rest I write about in the One Range book.
We are very excited to announce this new book for intermediate students. Here is a book of folk songs for trumpet. But it’s not JUST a book of folk songs. This book is like a game. It’s a musical “fill in the blank” game. Here’s how it works:
Learn the folk song in its easiest form on the first page. Play it ten times to get the sound of the song in your head.
Then flip the page. The folk song is now presented in new keys, but here’s the catch…. some of the notes are missing and question marks are in their place. Play the new transposed versions of the folk songs and when you get the the question marks, play the notes that sound right to you.
Click HERE to read more about the Trumpet Folk Fill in the Blank and watch a video about it.
Available as a Physical Book at:
A Trumpet Chops Strategy Guide
We are excited to announce that the One Range book is finally released! This is a very important book because we now have so many trumpet routine books. If you are not one of Eddie Lewis’ students, then you may not know what to do with all the different trumpet routines we have published.
The subtitle of the book is “A Trumpet Chops Strategy Guide“. The book is not an exercise book. It’s a book meant to help you organize and design your practice sessions to get the most benefit out of your practice time.
If you follow the steps in the One Range book properly, it should go a long way towards helping you increase your trumpet range in a way that your trumpet playing will remain musically appropriate.
Now available as a physical book at:
Now available as an eBook at:
Eddie Lewis lives in Houston, but now you can jam with him no matter where you live in the world. We now have a page dedicated to our trumpet play-along (backing tracks) series that we call You Play First Chair. If you are a trumpet player, then we invite you to click HERE and have some fun playing along with our Music Minus One styled videos.
We have another book release! This one is to help school trumpet students master their band scales.
Scales are a very important part of learning to be a great trumpet player and your scales for band are a wonderful way to get started. This book, Band Scale Expansion Studies for Trumpet, helps you to master those scales.
Too often, students tend to only half way learn the scales for band. This is a problem because the scales are building blocks for music. If the building blocks are flawed, so is the music. For that reason, this book is very important for helping you become a better musician.
New EP Album Release
Eddie Lewis’ first hymn album, Unadorned Trumpet Hymns, has been a huge success. With thousands of streams per week world wide, you would think that the reason we did a sequel was because we wanted to ride on the success of the first recording.
But no. The reason we did this second album, Unadorned Trumpet Hymns II, is for the exact same reason as we did the first one. It is a first fruit offering. There will probably be at least one more of these unadorned hymn albums, and then we will find something else to give as a first fruits offering.
We hope you enjoy this album. In some ways it is better than the first unadorned hymns album. It is more pensive and relaxed. Of course, we do hope it ends up being just as popular as the original album, but we have placed that in God’s hands.
We are changing the way we do the listening assignments on this website because of drive space limitations associated with the server. Instead of posting listening assignments as blog posts, the way we were doing it before, we are now simply posting new assignments to a Youtube playlist.
This is that playlist. So all you have to do is come to this page and listen to whatever is new at the beginning. Please let us know if you have any questions.
Click here to read more about signing up for jazz trumpet lessons with Eddie Lewis. Eddie’s approach to jazz improvisation is grounded in tradition but is a more musical approach than traditional academic approaches.
Click here to read about lessons for adult trumpet students with Eddie Lewis. Eddie has been successfully teaching adult trumpet students since the early 1990’s.
Click here to listen to some of Eddie Lewis’ trumpet recordings. With six current albums and singles in both jazz and classical, there is plenty here to help you become more acquainted with Eddie Lewis’ musicianship.
Click here to see some Youtube videos of famous trumpet players. If you are one of Eddie Lewis’ trumpet students, then you should be spending a lot of time listening to these fine musicians.
Who is Eddie Lewis?
Eddie is a trumpet player, private lesson teacher, composer, arranger, and clinician in Houston, Texas. Click HERE to learn more about him and his trumpet career.
What can we do for you?
Do you need trumpet lessons in Houston? Do you need a trumpet player for your wedding? Maybe you are looking for someone to write charts for your band.
Click HERE to learn more about the various services Mr. Lewis offers.
Looking for trumpet recordings?
Eddie Lewis has been recording albums since the early 80’s and has a recorded a number of recordings that feature him as a soloist and composer. Click HERE to learn more about some of his most notable trumpet recordings.
A constantly growing library of original trumpet methods!
Eddie authored his first trumpet book in 1990. That was his Physical Trumpet Pyramid book. He has written dozens of books since. Click HERE to read more about his trumpet methods.
If you need trumpet sheet music, Eddie Lewis has composed hundreds of interesting pieces for trumpet ensembles, brass ensembles and jazz groups. Click HERE to read about some of his more popular pieces.
