Trumpet Assignment Recordings
One of the services Mr. Lewis offers his students is making professional quality trumpet assignment recordings. He teaches that the students must listen to the recordings twenty times before they can practice the music. The first ten times should be without looking at the music. The second ten times the students should be following the music while they listen.
Please Note: It is not always appropriate to use recordings this way. We use them ONLY for performance pieces. We use the recordings much more rarely in the students’ weekly assignments.
Today, Mr. Lewis is making this service available to non-students and at a modest cost.
Studio Quality Example Recordings
Are you performing a piece of music that you don’t know how it sounds?
Are you having trouble finding that music on Youtube or iTunes?
Send Eddie Lewis a PDF of the music you need to learn and make a modest payment. He will record your music for you and send it back as an MP3.
The Controversy
There are some people who consider this kind of teaching to be “spoon feeding” the students. They think the students should be able to learn the music without having to have someone show them “how it goes”. We recognize the value of this criticism, but we respectfully disagree.
The problem is the same false logic we encounter in other areas of trumpet pedagogy. While some of what the critics say is true, it is simply not true all the time. It is true that sometimes the students should figure the music out on their own. This is a valuable skill, a skill we work with every student to acquire.
That said, forcing the students to learn music on their own is not the best approach for important performances and/or auditions. When the students study the sounds of the music first, before they practice it, they greatly reduce the number of mistakes.
How does this work?
Music students do best when they recognize their mistakes soonest. In contrast, a student who practices the same mistakes, over and over again, thinking they are playing the music correctly, will have a very difficult time trying to fix those errors.
Listening to the music twenty times (ten without the music and ten with) makes it possible for the students to recognize their mistakes instantly.
Yes, there are times when the students should learn to figure the music out for themselves. Preparing for important performances and auditions is NOT the right time for that.