Archives | Classifieds | JFB | Friday, November 2, 2018

Out of the Case: An Alternate Approach to Embouchure

Development, Part 1
Sam Burtis - sabutin@mindspring.com
Freelance Artist; Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra
This is my fifth article for the Online Trombone Journal. In the Related Info
previous four I covered various subjects that relate to the process
Other "Out of the Case"
of creating a technique that would allow a certain elegance of
Articles
playing and freedom of motion on the slide trombone. We come
now to a more dangerous topic: embouchure.

I use the word "dangerous" here because ill-considered

dabbling with "embouchure" has ruined more good brass
players than you can possibly imagine. This is the reason I've
been reluctant to write about embouchure, and I want to
emphasize this point as strongly as I can before going any
further: if it ain't broke, don't fix it! Work on your
embouchure is necessary only if you're having serious range,
sound, pitch, or endurance problems, or if you've reached a point in your development where
no matter what you do, how hard you practice, you're not getting any better.

The first approach you should try to take is to continue practicing the way you play at the
present time, at least up to a point where you're really convinced you can go no further.
Inevitably, when you begin considering embouchure "changes", your playing will take a
certain backward step. If you approach these changes internally, that is, not from a theoretical
or external position (externally, that is, as in when someone tells you "Move your jaw to the
right when playing above high X, and always put the mouthpiece 2/3 on your top lip, 1/3 on
your left ear"), but instead approach them from the position of what works and what doesn't
(no matter HOW unorthodox what "works" might be), your adjustment time and the dues you
have to pay should be minor. Get obsessive about it, however, at your own peril.

A good corollary to the above "If it works..." statement could be, "If it doesn't work, don't
continue doing it." I have a three week rule for equipment, technical considerations, new
exercises, whatever. I never do or change anything unless it feels better immediately. (Fairly
radical embouchure experiments are generally an exception to that rule. They most often
DON'T sound good immediately, but if they give you more range or strength or endurance,
persevere for a while and see if you don't begin to sound better over the course of a few
weeks.) Usually, soon after, no matter what change I've made; a new mouthpiece, a new
approach to tonguing; it will begin to feel TERRIBLE. I consider that an adjustment period,
the time it takes my body to become reflexively used to the new variable. If it continues to
feel bad after about three weeks of regular work, then I stop doing it, because if it hasn't
started to feel good by then, it's not going to.

WHAT IS A "GOOD" EMBOUCHURE?

Without a "good" embouchure, without a "good" sound, without range and endurance, none
of the things I've covered in the last few months are really very useful, and WITH a "good"
sound, extreme mobility is almost unnecessary.

Easily ninety-five percent of the work I've done in my career as

a free-lance trombonist has required very little technique in
terms of speed, and most successful trombonists that I've known
haven't really developed their "speed" chops to any great degree.
The characteristics they almost all HAVE shared have been
good sound, pitch, range, endurance, consistency and musicality.

The one aspect of trombone playing necessary for all those

above mentioned qualities is a "good" embouchure. You'll
notice I keep putting quotation marks around the word "good".
That's because there are as many "good" embouchures as there
are "good" players. Dizzy Gillespie had a "good" embouchure
that broke every rule in the book, but it worked well for him, thus it was "good". Dave
Taylor's embouchure wouldn't be very useful for someone who wanted to play like Frank
Rosolino, and Rosolino's approach wouldn't work very well in the Chicago Symphony or
playing with Eddie Palmieri. Every different jaw and tooth formation, every different body
type, every different horn, every mouthpiece, every different set of musical requirements
impacts on what is or isn't a "good" embouchure. In my opinion no hard and fast set of rules
and no survey of all the "right" and "wrong" ways one can form an embouchure can help an
individual player find an effective approach for the requirements of his particular musical
needs at any particular time.

So what do you do if you've not been gifted with a "naturally good" embouchure? (i.e., an
embouchure that does the job you ask of it.) I wasn't given that gift. I switched with no
guidance from tuba to trombone in my teens. Although what I was doing "worked" to some
degree, it left much to be desired. I was told by several well known teachers early in my
career to "Just keep playing; it'll all work out." It didn't. After several years of fair success, as
I was asked to perform more and more challenging music, my inefficient and badly formed
embouchure simply stopped working well enough for me to play professionally. I had to
rebuild it from the ground up. It was not a fun couple of years, I assure you, but I learned a
lot.

I developed my way of playing under the influence of a remarkable teacher, Carmine Caruso.
Although much of what I say in the rest of this article bears little or no superficial
resemblance to those exercises popularly known as "The Caruso Technique", they are largely
inspired by his approaches to brass playing.

BEL CANTO SINGING and TROMBONE

In the operatic style of singing known as "Bel Canto"(meaning "pretty singing") that
developed in Italy in the 19th century, the cornerstone of voice development was the theory
of "three voices" (or registers), which were labeled "head" (high) voice, "chest"(low) voice,
and "mixed" (middle) voice. In an untrained voice, one usually finds only two voices, chest
and head, and there's a "break" between the two voices. Many folk forms of singing, like
yodeling, use this break as a musical device.
Many male voices are used entirely in the head range, in what's known as falsetto. What the
Bel Canto singers discovered was a way to bring the lower voice up as far as it would go,
bring the upper voice down as far as it would go, strengthen both of them, and gradually
create a "mixed" voice where each of the "natural" voices blended imperceptibly into the
other (depending on volume and the direction of the melodic line), thus effectively
eliminating any "break" in the voice whatsoever.

At this point you might well be saying "OK, but what's this
got to do with playing a brass instrument?" Do an
experiment for me now, please. Get your horn, partially
loosen the mouthpiece (just so it's not stuck into the
receiver),and play a mezzo-forte third partial F. While
playing that F, slowly withdraw the mouthpiece from the
receiver. (If you can't sustain the note, practice it a little. It
should be pretty easy. Try playing the note OUT of the horn,
and then putting the mouthpiece back in. If you still can't
keep the note happening while extracting the mouthpiece
from the horn after a few minutes, then just play the F on the
mouthpiece alone, for the sake of this experiment.)

However you've arrived at it, play a third partial F with the mouthpiece alone, as much as
possible using the same embouchure and feeling as you use when you play the note IN the
horn. Now slowly, and with no big shifts, gliss up, carefully listening and paying attention to
how it feels. Somewhere above the original note you will probably find a change in
resistance, maybe just a radical change in timbre, or possibly a complete stop of the buzz...a
break of some kind. It could be a fourth or fifth away, maybe on octave, maybe more, maybe
less. Keep trying and paying attention until you find it.

Now do the same gliss DOWN from the same third partial F. Again you'll probably find a
change in resistance, a change in timbre, or a complete stop of your buzz at some point below
the original F. With this exercise, you will have delineated the upper and lower limits of
ONE of YOUR several "voices" or "registers", on YOUR mouthpiece, with YOUR lips, on
the particular day you're trying this technique.

Unlike singers, our vibrating surfaces (our lips, as opposed to their vocal cords) are not
irremediably anchored to the sides of our primary resonating cavity (our mouthpieces, their
throats). By subtly repositioning our embouchures on the mouthpiece, it is possible for us to
have more than two "natural" voices or registers. Nevertheless, the process of "mixing"
registers is the same for us as it is for them. By identifying for yourself your own "natural"
registers using mouthpiece buzzing techniques similar to what I just described, and then by
both strengthening and expanding those "registers" into the ranges that are normally the
locale of the next highest or lowest "register", you can create "mixed" registers that can
eventually make for a relatively seamless four or five octaves of consistent sound.

Now that you've found a resistance point, either above or below that F, try playing a note a
major second to a minor third beyond that note. For example, if you felt a break of some kind
around Bb or C a perfect fourth or fifth above the third partial F, try playing a fifth partial D
in the horn and then taking the mouthpiece out, again sustaining the buzz. (Work on it the
same way as before if you have trouble doing it.) Now gliss DOWN from that note w/just the
mouthpiece, trying to identify the first place below that D where there's a break. Do the same
going UP from the fifth partial D.

Where those two breaks are is the rough boundaries of THAT "register" ("voice",
"embouchure", "setting", "tendency", call it what you will.). After a period of a few weeks of
consistent exploration of all your ranges using this method, you will be able to fairly
accurately identify those several areas where your "natural" registers exist. By that time it'll
be September and I'll write another column about what to DO with them.

Spend ten-twenty minutes a day trying to figure out what YOUR set of embouchures is like
NOW, even if you don't want to make any changes. Remember...knowledge is power, as long
as it doesn't get in the way of your playing. (I think that's at least half a joke, but re-reading it,
I'm not so sure.)

By way of a conclusion, I want to point out that, taken to extremes, NO ONE keeps the
"same" embouchure throughout the entire range of the horn. In microcosm, every change in
pitch, timbre or volume is created by SOME "change" in the embouchure, no matter HOW
small. In macrocosm, there's no player in the world whose embouchure on a fortississimo
pedal G is even remotely similar to how he plays a pianississimo C above the treble clef.
Every person has a different SET of "embouchures". Some have more, some less; some are
"correct" according to common practice, some NOT so "correct". If you can identify the way
you "naturally" play certain registers on the horn, and blend them into the ways that you
"naturally" play areas above and below them, then however small or large the ranges covered
by each setting. Incidentally, I've found most of mine are about an octave wide and however
"normal" or "odd" those settings are in relation to the way everyone else plays, your
embouchure(s) are going to be "CORRECT". (And they'll work well, too.)

Have fun checking this stuff out, and remember to send me some E-mail. I've got no way of
knowing whether this stuff is working for anybody or not unless I hear from you.

About the Author...

Sam Burtis attended Ithaca College and The Berklee School of Music. He has been a
working musician in New York City since 1969, playing tenor trombone, bass trombone,
tuba, valve trombone and euphonium in just about every idiom and situation available to a
professional musician in New York during that time. He is also a composer and arranger,
writing and transcribing for such musicians and organizations as The Lee Konitz Nonet, The
Charles Mingus Band, The Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, Tito Puente, and the
Chico O'Farrill Orchestra.He is currently forming his own ensemble to play his
compositions. He is also a free-lance musician, playing studio, theater, concert, and jazz club
work regularly in and around New York City and throughout the world.

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