Much has been written on the subject of dyslexia, teaching dyslexics, and dyslexia teaching strategies. The problem here seems to be simple. Is dyslexia a mental disorder, a disability, a learning difficulty or is it that people with this condition simply process information differently than what we call ‘normal’? Or put another way: is the problem of the individual or is it rather the educational system that requires children to process information in a certain way?

First of all, I am a professional trumpet player and have been a trumpet teacher for over forty years. In this time, I have had many students with various learning challenges ranging from Down syndrome to dyslexia. In this article I present a strategy that has proven to be very useful with students who display dyslexic tendencies. I would like to add that although my perspective is that of a trumpet teacher, this strategy can be applied to any musical instrument (and with a little imagination) to other subjects as well. This teaching method has also been used with good results with both children and adults.

Over the years, I’ve seen some people experience the same problem, that is, they lose all orientation to what they’re playing and clearly have no idea what note they’re trying to play. I also noticed that for all of these people, the problem came up with the same notes. To make this as clear as possible, I’ll break down the range of the trumpet in the low register from F# low below the staff to Bb on the staff, the middle range from C on the staff to G above the staff, and the high register goes from Ab and above. Now all these people would lose their orientation between E on the staff and around Bb on the staff. It would go something like this: they were supposed to play, for example, a high A. They would get lost so I would say “A” – they didn’t answer so I would say “A” louder – no No answer so I would yell “A” and so on. Clearly we weren’t going anywhere. They would stop, start in the low register and go up until they found A, and then we could go further. However, a few minutes later, they would again lose orientation and the whole process would repeat itself. It seemed that they couldn’t remember the feeling of where these notes were.

My first idea was to assign different colors to different notes, but this didn’t work as well as I thought it would and was also too limited in scope. Then I remembered an ancient Druid concept known as the Stairway of Lights, or more accurately, “the rainbow colored steps of light.” The ancient druids were fascinated with the sequence of colors found in the rainbow and used this sequence in many of their mystical teachings and rites. The colors are: black, purple, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. As the vibration of these colors increases, I applied them to the overtone series of the trumpet in this way: Low C (under staff) = purple, G (on staff) = blue, C (on staff) = green, E (top of staff) = yellow, G (top of staff) = orange, and Bb high and top = red.

If you didn’t know this, any tube with a mouthpiece on one end and a bell on the other will produce the same sequence of notes. We call this the harmonic series. The notes C (low) G, C (mid) E, G (high) Bb, and C (high) can all be produced without using any valves. When you press a valve down, you lengthen the tube for a lower starting note, but the sequence of harmonic intervals is the same. Simply put: the higher you go, the closer the tones will be to each other.

I would start by having the student close their eyes, take a deep breath, and imagine they were a blue wave. Then we’d play a middle G together. He would stop playing and as they played the GI would guide them through the fantasy of becoming the blue wave, the sound being water. We would then slowly descend to low C and become the purple depth of the sea. The wave would reach an island where there was a rich green forest and then it would turn into the green leaves (the C in the pentagram). We would go up to E and a ray of sunshine. High G was a bright orange pumpkin in a field.

We did this at the beginning of the lesson and then he would leave it there and continue with the other parts of the lesson. However, after about a month, when they were lost where they were, we would stop and bring them up from the low range using the image (colors) to the point where they were lost. We would do it three times. The next time they got lost, I asked them to imagine the picture (color) where they got lost and touch that picture (color) note, and from there go up or down a bit to find the note where they got lost.