Many brass players spend several minutes per day playing their mouthpiece in unison with a piano or keyboard. It is a great way to practice your buzzing as well as your intonation. 

All you need is to sit at the keyboard and play yourself scales, arpeggios and simple tunes while buzzing along. It's not always easy to tune to a piano because the sound it so different. Buzzing along with the keyboard will help you play more in tune with the piano and with yourself.

I've seen this on Facebook today. It's quite true.
The image didn't come out well so there are a couple of things missing among others that unsuccessful people secretly want others to fail.

I would say that successful people have results while unsuccessful people have excuses. 

However, being successful doesn't mean that you'll never have any setbacks or that you'll win every audition and competition you try. The strongest isn't the one who never falls, it's the one who always stand right back up after falling. 

You'll have success if you keep a positive attitude and learn from every experience positive or negative.

Don't feel too bad if you see a couple of things in there that put you in the "unsuccessful people". No one is perfect. I personally watch TV every day! Oops!...

You don't need to play a concerto to play musically. You should "switch on" your musicality right from the first note of the day. 
When I warm up, I think like a singer doing scales and arpeggios and it makes everything much easier. 
You probably play more or less the same things every day to warm up so it's easy to become mechanical with it. The musical energy you put in your warm up will help you reach the notes and prepare you well to play your excerpts, etudes and concertos with great musicality once you've completed your warm up drills.

Happy New Year everyone!
A few announcements to start the year: the progressive method volume 3 will be tweaked to make it a bit more palatable to the average student. I'll keep the same pieces but I'll change a few passages to make it easier on the endurance. For the modified numbers, I'll leave the original at the end of the book for those who want a bit more challenge or do them later once they have more chops. 
This should take about two weeks after which I'll write more numbers for the progressive method vol. 4. 

I wish everybody a wonderful 2013 full a great musical fun!