BuzzPro by Phoenix Brass

THE BuzzPRO is HERE and ready to help

YOU

Play better, easier and more efficiently in minutes!

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The BuzzPro is a mouthpiece backbore that you can use with any mouthpiece top*, and which lets you switch between playing and "BuzzMode" with a twist.

You don't even have to take the mouthpiece off your face!

BuzzMode is like mouthpiece buzzing but better - you don't buzz it, you PLAY it. Think half-way between playing and mouthpiece buzzing, and you still have the slots for every note.

*** Don't have a mouthpiece top? We can help sort you out with a close match to what you normally play on :-) ***

The BuzzPro Shank is the green part, which is two pieces - a mouthpiece backbore and the BuzzShell which goes on the outside of the shank and is used to select which mode you want to use.

You can also order the BuzzPro with a threaded mouthpiece top to closely match whatever you currently play.

We use industry-standard threads, so you can use the BuzzPro Shank with any top with standard threads.

The BuzzPro is a fully-functional mouthpiece that has been designed to PARTIALLY interrupt the resonance of the instrument. The result of this is a curious and very useful mix of Playing and Mouthpiece Buzzing.

The BuzzPro has different 'modes' you can use, including Normal playing mode where it plays just like a normal mouthpiece and several variations of how much resonance you want to remove from the system.

I like to think of it as an UltraSound for your playing. You go to the doctors office with a complaint, and they say "can't see anything obviously wrong, so lets get an ultrasound and see what we see". The BuzzPro is like that. You use it as a tool and it makes what's really going on obvious and often makes the solution really obvious!

In particular, I think it is helpful for fixing specific issues like spread chops, excessive mouthpiece pressure, and poor or inconsistent air flow. More generally, I think it is helpful for fixing less obvious issues like sloppiness in accuracy, pitch, articulation, and centring of notes.

As an added benefit, the BuzzPro also works really well with a practice mute to make practicing with a mute not totally SUCK. It helps offset the backpressure of a mute while keeping the volume down. It'll be a bit louder with the BuzzPro but it's a great compromise for situations where you don't need to be super quiet, just to keep it down enough to avoid complaints - I wish I had this when I lived in an apartment!

Why would you want to REMOVE resonance?!

Resonance is the thing that takes you by the hand and says "It's okay deary, let me help you out". Which is tremenously helpful when playing and performing, but it's like a singer relying on AutoTune and lots of Reverb and EQ. They can get away with being a pretty lousy singer.
Resonance for us trumpet players is like that autotune etc. It lets us get away with a LOT.

When you have the full resonance of the system, you only have to be accurate to half the distance to the nearest slot, and the resonance will kick in and help drag you kicking and screaming where you're supposed to be.

Basically, the resonance HIDES all the sloppiness that is actually going on. It hides all the times you didn't actual go from the full resonance to full resonance between notes. The notes came out well enough, but only because the resonance of the system took you comfortingly by the hand and said "It's okay deary, let me help you out".

Have a look at this example of me working on the Hummel Concerto. You can hear on the BuzzPro all the places where I'm not getting to the centre of the note or even getting the wrong slot, or where I'm losing vibration and connection between notes etc. But even working on it and getting this level of precision - which is already better than where it started - when I go back to "normal" mode, it just felt easy. I can only imagine how easy and secure it will feel as I get more and more precise on the BuzzPro, because the difference for me when I added the resoance of the instrument back in felt like a HUGE improvement.

I'm a long, long way from being the player I would like to be, but the improvement I noticed from just 5 minutes of work on the BuzzPro honestly was pretty massive. Better still, once it had shown me what it should feel like, it started to become much more obvious when I started to slip. It gave me a kinesthetic reference that I could return to as a touchstone.

(Note: This video features and earlier prototype of the BuzzPro, not the redesigned version)

Sloppier Than You Realise

The downside of all of this is that all of the sloppiness catches up with you in a way where you have problems that seem to have no obvious cause, because the problems often show up or accumulate as you go, rather than being immedaite. Maybe you miss and split more notes than you feel you should, and in seemingly random place. Maybe you have a good sound, but you feel like there is another level of sound that you just can't reliably access. Maybe you have been banging your head against the wall with a challenging passage and have tried every practice technique and it's still unreliable. Maybe you struggle with range or endurance and they haven't improved despite working on range building and lip slur exercises.

I've come to believe that most of these walls we hit in our playing are because the resonance of the instrument is misleading us about our own competence. It's telling us that we're being pretty accurate because all the right notes are coming out, but if you took away even some of that resonance, you'd discover that most of what you're doing is only just good enough that the instrument can make it work.

What this means is that you've only achieved the absolute bare minimum of prevcision to get by with. And this means you're always one tiny misstep away from something going wrong.

It's like you're practicing playing darts and provided you hit the board, you get to score a bullseye. But you're never actually practicing hitting the centre of the board. And the board might only have to be somewhere a little different than you expect and you're going to miss entirely.

What we want is to be good at hitting an true bullseye as much as possible, because then we are a little off target, we're still nailing notes somewhere close to centre at least! That way, the instrument's resonance can give you that helping hand and you'll still be having what looks like a good day to anyone who doesn't know better.

I personally believe this is why the top level pros in the world can play so consistently, because they have found ways and techniques to ensure they are practicing being extremely precise and to not be fooled by the instrument's helping hand.

This is where I think the BuzzPro will help players, even those without chop issues.

How is this different from Mouthpiece Buzzing?

The idea behind things like working on things like Mouthpiece Buzzing is that we want to maintain good airflow and to get good about being *the 

Unlike Mouthpiece buzzing, you can still feel and hear the slots and centre of the notes on the instrument.
The closest equivalent I can give is think leapipe buzzing but it's the entire instrument and all the slots are in their normal places.

With mouthpiece buzzing, I've PERSONALLY found that it tends to encourage me to pinch and to manipulate the lips in a way that doesn't match how we play the instrument. (This is obviously not everyone's experience, I'm not poo-pooing mouthpiece buzzing!) The BuzzPro doesn't seem to have that effect because there is still SOME resonance in the system, it's just that it is very weak when you aren't in the middle of the slot.

Playing the BuzzPro is like playing the instrument, it's just it doesn't help you as much as it usually would, which puts more burden on the PLAYER to be precise and not tolerate sloppiness.  It really shows up issues in connection between notes, poor or jerky air, poor pitch, poor fine motor control of the embouchure, and so on.

That's why I think of it like an UltraSound for your playing. It lets you get behind the pretty surface layer where everything seems fine and to see the truth of what's really going on.

Is the BuzzPro going to help everyone?

I would love nothing more than to have discovered a tool that makes every single trumpet players lives better, easier and playing more satisfying. But I can't make any sort of claim at this stage. I don't have much data, I just have my own experience of using it myself and with a handful of students, and having awesome results.
I do sincerely believe it will help folks, and that it is not just a gimmick. So, I wanted to make this available to people because if it does help other folks, that would just be really, really awesome.

I'm also not trying to make a lot of money out of it, the goal is to keep them as affordable as a I can given the amount of time that goes into making each one, which is proabably more than you'd think. This definitely isn't a get-rich-quick situation for me 😂

Money-Back Promise :)

Because I genuinely want to help people here, and I very much don't want to just be selling snake-oil and wishful thinking to people, if you buy one and you try it out, experiment with it for a bit, and you don't think you'll be able to get your money's worth of value out of it, just reach out to me and I'll give you your money back.

We just want to help folks and make music accessible, affordable and fun :)