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Playing the trumpet and the guitar at the same time must be a hard thing to do.



You know John, it's funny you should ask ... Yes, it's been a heck of a ride! I'm now wondering if others who play two or more instruments have some of the same episodes as me. My trumpet fingers want to react automatically to the notation I'm viewing at the time and there's been a time or two when I've had to just stop and put the guitar (or the trumpet) away for a few, then come back with my 'other' hat on, and then it seems to fall together more times than not! I don't know why except to suggest that maybe I'm getting into the music (listening to my music) and I'm sometimes not 'consciously aware' of what instrument I'm playing.

On the other hand, I've been thinking that it's interesting (from a brain-mechanics point of view), that there is difficulty in all of this and yet, I'm pressing trumpet buttons with my right-hand and pressing frets with my left, so why SHOULD there be a problem at all!

Here's a scenario: I find myself sometimes WANTING to use my index finger to play a 'B' on the guitar (since that's what I use on the trumpet). I have to actually stop and think (in the middle of playing) until it kicks in, what I'm doing (BTW normally the lower-octave, guitar 'B' is played with an open string -- where I'm not pressing a fret at all -- interestingly enough, even though I've comitted that 'B' to automatic guitar-memory sometimes the 'trumpet memory' crosses over if you're not paying attention and your fingers want to take over! I know, I know ... Weird stuff!

In contemplating this the other night I found that I could trumpet-finger the chromatic scale with my left hand, just as easily as my right! Now where did that come from? And up until now, It's never occurred to me that I even knew how to do this (not that there's any value to it of course)! It has proven to be an interesting set of circumstances to say the least (from a scientific view).

Certainly somebody's had to pick up on this stuff before and I'm sure there's probably books on the stuff. Oh, and I play split-hand piano too -- I don't even want to begin to think where that's going to go!

FYI -- I had a former instructor who in jazz band would come down off the podium and (with any score we knew how to play), bounce from one instrument to the other and never miss a beat -- and he knew how to play every one of those instruments before he was 13 years old! I tell ya' ... during those times it sure made us jazz-wanna-be's think long and hard about whether we should even consider this business to pay for our meat and potatoes -- I know that it made me envision myself starving!

Ike