Self-Regulated Practice and Technical Consolidation in Trumpet Performance: An Autoethnographic Doctoral Study

Resumen

This article explores the evolution of trumpet performance through the consolidation of self-regulated practice, understood not merely as a set of strategies but as a reorientation of attention, perception, and embodied musical experience. Drawing upon a multi-year doctoral process documented through journals, performance chronologies, and lived encounters with teachers and colleagues, the study narrates how a musician burdened by years of over-analysis, technical rigidity, and psychological pressure gradually reconfigured his practice through inner hearing, non-anxious repetition, and emotional regulation. The narrative is framed within established scholarship on self-regulated learning (Zimmerman), deliberate practice (Ericsson et al.), phenomenology of musical experience (Small; Benson), and practice-as-research in the arts (Barrett & Bolt; Borgdorff). Through this lens, the article argues that technical consolidation emerges not from muscular control or intellectual understanding alone but from the sustained cultivation of attentive, embodied listening. The findings contribute a pedagogical model in which repetition becomes refinement rather than correction, error becomes meaningful information, and inner hearing becomes the organizing principle of motor coordination. Ultimately, the study demonstrates how self-regulated practice can reshape not only technique but the very experience of making music.