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No arguments from me. At this time coming from Euphonium and Trombone, developing a good Tuba Embouchure to get tone is what I'm having to work on the most. Having already played brass instruments, and being a trained singer I'm already familiar with proper breathing, if it was all about breathing and air then I should already have great Tuba tone, but that isn't the case you have to develop the embouchure as well as having good breath support.

Spent a bunch of hours half a century ago in a practice room and private lessons with Bob Bright and Bruce Nelson trying to mimic the embochure photo from Kleinhammer's book. Really ugly embochure but the hole in the middle was perfect. Now whenever my tone gets suspect I go back to thinking about that photo and keeping the hole in the middle perfect. It really helps.

Harvey Phillips liked to recount being asked at masterclasses, "Mr. Phillips, what do you think about breathing?" -"I think it's a good idea!"

I think I'm with you on this, bloke - I don't really think about my air at all anymore, but I'm constantly trying to get the best 'buzz'. that's where the tone comes from, the vibration.

Not sure if anyone cares to hear about my 2c on the matter... People can be stuck in their own ways and often want to hear only there own personal philosophy. Last year I took a lesson from Mr. Elliott to learn more about embouchure, specifically how mine worked. I am glad I did. I fully believe the Reinhardt System should be explored to maximize efficiency of sound production. Not many people here talk about it, and contrary to popular belief, it can conform 100% to the song and wind approach. The technical aspects are no more complex than learning fingerings.

I agree we are all dealt "different hands" when it comes to our physiology, but learning to use it is what we strive for. Some of those images in the Farkas book are quite interesting, some look terrible, but the performers are quite successful.

So yes: embouchure is very important. The wind behind it is extremely important, and most important is the idea in your head. If you can't sing the song in your head, it won't magically appear on the other side of the bell.

Agreed, no shortcuts.

Personal rambling aside:
I was a terrible student in college. But I had enough sense to listen to my teachers. I may not have applied it then and there, but have as I matured.
It was not until I was playing 4+ hour gigs of rock-a-billy bass lines until I discovered efficiency and endurance. Finesse came much more recently. I have an asymmetric embouchure and perform a very minimal continuous shift throughout my entire range. This shift has become muscle memory over the past year, and has really helped with efficiency. My biggest concern about my playing is keeping my mind on task and focused while I perform.
I do not buzz religiously, but I could buzz any music you put in front of me. The best buzz I have ever heard was from one of my instructors. I was blown away by the immediate, true, firm, an direct pitches that he could produce. It was not necessarily a pretty buzz. It was dead accurate. I strive for that.

I'm totally faking it.luckily,none of u are in my audience...

cktuba wrote:To me there are three equally important components involved in producing a good sound.

1) Air

2) A strong efficient embouchure

3) A good clear mental image of how you want to sound.

#1 is talked about on here constantly, with good reason.
#2 IMHO is accomplished through crap loads of time buzzing, practicing long tones, lip slurs,
glisses and benders.You've got to put in the time to get the fuzz, garbage and "oink" out of the sound.
I also think practicing at the absolute dynamic extremes is an invaluable tool for centering things up.
IMHO #3 is the most neglected. You need to listen to as much music as possible.
Obviously, listen to top tier players on your instrument... but also listen to great musicians on other instruments and singers.
If you don't know what you want to sound like, how do you expect produce a decent sound?

^^Great post^^

Good air with a weak embouchure leads to a lousy sound, for sure. But more often, it leads to the wrong notes, a poor attack, chipped entrances, messy slurs, bad technique, and poor intonation.

Insufficient air driving a strong embouchure leads to a lousy sound, poor intonation, poor phrasing, and poor dynamics.

These lists are not comprehensive.

I just don't think there's any way to make one more or less important than the other. Both are critical.

Both are, to some extent, secondary to mashing the right buttons and playing the correct rhythms. You know--that music stuff. A beautiful sound on the wrong partial, or a semitone off, or half a beat early, is still destructive to the outcome.

The good news is that the practice required to achieve what is necessary for both air and embouchure tends to improve those right-notes-at-the-right-time issues, too.

Scales and flexibility exercises have helped me tremendously. But running out of air renders all that moot, in practice.

Rick "deeply familiar with these symptoms" Denney

Ben wrote: I have an asymmetric embouchure and perform a very minimal continuous shift throughout my entire range.

Veering off topic....could you describe what you mean by a continuous shift? And how you arrived at that way of playing, was it by chance, or were you taught that way? Most people talk about a shift occurring at a specific place in the range (or more than one place) so I'm curious about what you said.

MA

For me, the surest answer to this topic is provided by an honest and frank evaluation of your output as a player. By critically evaluating exactly what is coming out of the bell, there are clear indications of what is going on with the entire production process. One of the most frustrating moments in my playing education was when I had asked a teacher how to fix the missed notes in my playing and he replied with, and I'm paraphrasing, "you have to learn to ignore the missed notes and not let them bother you because missed notes are going to happen". I could not accept his explanation and this started my personal exploration into the mechanics of embouchure and sound production. That exploration continues to this day but one thing I can categorically state is that the journey was worth the effort. I have learned so much about why things happen that my playing has definitely benefited from the effort.

Maybe the best place to start is to ask yourself, exactly what are you doing in your practicing to improve your sound? Have you ever really examined your sound, aside from all other concerns, to evaluate what you sound like and why? Understanding the causal relationship between production and product is the first step but only the first. Others must be taken to affect the desired change.

Lots of air, minimum mouthpiece pressure... then just listen... works well for me.

Mary Ann:
For my set-up (and everyone's face, bone structure, and mouthpiece placement is different), I move the MP of the horn (slightly) down and to the right as I go lower in register, and up and to the left the higher the register. This is a very minimal movement, but the notes center along this axis. There is an additional jaw motion that also corresponds to this motion.

What does this motion do? Initially it minimized the disruptive random motion in my playing that I was unaware of. The motion is very small, and I strive to minimize it, but it is there. Individual pitches seem to "live" at different "GPS cooridinates" along this axis, so the shift is continuous to some extent. My personal exploration of embouchure is ongoing. As I analyze the mechanics, I find the motion is more about learning where to direct the air stream rather than the position of the MP. The MP motion is but a tool in learning how each note blows into the horn. The less MP pressure I use, the less motion is required to truly center each note.

If you want to learn more, I encourage you to seek an expert, unlike myself. I only have a years worth of experience dealing with my own personal quest. Reinhardt describes 9 different embouchure types in his encyclopedia, and there are subtleties that are not well expressed in the text...

But there you have it - my ugly embouchure.

Ben wrote:
But there you have it - my ugly embouchure.

Could be worse

You're behind a tube. not on a catwalk



One of the really better trumpetplayer I've ever known, blew the horn sideways

Interesting. Sam Burtis, a well respected NY trombonist, once showed up on this forum claiming that he'd possibly broken the code to a perfect embouchure. I believe he was ridiculed off the site.

Whatever the reason the discussion took that coarse, his approach is in my opinion sound. It'd be best to google him and look into his approaches and philosophies. One of the things he works at (he's a practice room animal) is switching between lip buzzing, mpc buzzing and horn playing "mid(air)stream" as a way of checking and balancing the embouchure. He's modified this by adding singing into the mix, making sure that the vocal tone production reproduces the desired harmonics one wants to hear on their instrument (and not necessarily singing in a bel canto style voice, for example).

The air is first, so thats where we all start. No air, no sound.

Yes, the embouchure also needs attention, but because the face muscles are so much smaller and subtler than the torso muscles its certainly easier to work on breathing. Breathing's rather basic; in and out. Improving the breathing is probably 99% of the time productive to ones playing. Good investment and not so difficult to do comparatively speaking.

The embouchure requires more of a surgical accuracy and can be a nasty business to address because of dangers of paralysis-analysis. We shy away from talking about it too much with young students in the hope that nature will take its coarse. Logical. By the time the kids have grown up it's suddenly become something many won't talk about. (If your embouchure's not up to par, there must be something wrong with you and you'll certainly be a liability to the company!)

This is only a half truth of coarse, but I do believe within many brass communities that there's a little bit of a taboo on talking embouchures.

Good post!

At the risk of being censored for self-promotion without paying my way on this forum,
if anybody's TRULY interested in what Ben's talking about, that's what I teach and you know where to find me. Every individual's ideal embouchure can be defined by a very few specific characteristics and motions, and once you understand that there is no "paralysis." It frees you to perform.

At the risk of committing sacrilege on this website:

I have heard this phrase "paralysis by analysis" all my life. I simply don't believe it. More accurately, I don't believe it is a blanket prohibition to discussing, exploring, and learning about how the embouchure works. Knowledge is not a bad thing. Besides, anything about our playing can be taken to such an extreme of focus as to paralyze the player, including breathing. Understanding what you're trying to produce is crucial. Combined with adequate knowledge of how the embouchure functions, a player is left to explore what they wish to create and perhaps even enhance that vision.

I wonder how much time others spend really examining their sound, really listening to what happens to that sound when you change certain aspects of the production process, and how often people use critical thinking based on that information to make choices for what they want to sound like. So many of my students come to me with a desire to sound like Mr. X. They don't even think of sounding better or different or unique, simply a carbon copy is the goal. It's one of the primary reasons I almost never play in my private teaching. I work to get students to think for themselves, not mimic someone else.

I believe when discussing these matters it's important never to forget;

"different strokes for different folks"

Of coarse analysis-paralysis is real...very real. But not with everyone. Or maybe with some people but only at a certain time in their life. Or maybe when letting themselves be influenced by someone's ideas which just don't work for that individual. Information can have the same effect on a person as a particular diet; great for one person, not so interesting for the other, and for another detrimental.

The music community is filled with musicians of various talents, skills an ambitions. Of coarse analyzing and working on ones embouchure can be imperative; IF thats were your heads at! Top professional athletes do all the things musicians talk about and more. They HAVE to. Its a profession focused on competition with a very short career span and a lot of money behind it.

We don't have hyper-analize if we don't want to because we're all one-man smalltime businesses. (Its certainly easier not to do it.) But many of us do because its the logical way (and possibly only way) to progress in a profession which centers around oneself.

So "yes", definitely discuss and work on the embouchure. But also accept that not everyones going to (or should) do this with you, 'cause we all need something else in life. That keeps it interesting.

And to make a short story long;

the professional sport community has to dance to the beat of the hyper-analysis drum. It's their culture and there is one goal; to win.

The music community is broader based and has many different goals and cultures. One might be an orchestra with the goal of making beautiful music AND playing all notes accurately AND playing immaculately in tune. Another might be a punk band with the goal of filling the hall with raw fast energy and power. Both are professional music groups wherein the training culture quite possibly differs from one to another.

bloke wrote:agreed again.

One point I would like to offer is that when stuff isn't quite working for me, I find - far more often - that changing stuff that I do with my mouth (rather than with my "air") fixes it...but first, I have to figure out (analyze...??) what I need to change about what I'm doing with my mouth.

Agreed as well. That's why I cringe when I read something like another posted added to the discussion about only examining the embouchure if that's where your head is at. To me, that's kinda like saying you want to be a marathon runner but you're only going to examine how you run if your head is in it. If you want to be a player, you better get your head into maximizing all aspects of playing! Or you will fail miserably. Maybe my viewpoint is a little different from some, I've played in an ICSOM orchestra for 18 wonderful years. During that time, I worked with many really good musicians. I saw, as I would guess anyone sees over a period like that, plenty of so called "natural" players who knew very little about the mechanics of how what we do works but they sounded great right away and never went any further to increase their knowledge of the craft. I remember at least one of those players, a really incredible brass player, who started to have embouchure issues and had no idea how to fix them. The player slowly deteriorated until a career change was required. Having seen first hand how devastating that lack of knowledge can be to someone that depends on their embouchure mechanics for their living, I was only encouraged that my search for more understanding was exactly the right path. Ignoring that aspect of what we do seems reckless to me. To me, doing so is an invitation to disaster in the face of pure fact. That fact being that if you want to control something, you better understand how to do so. Working on your air support or your phrasing or your posture will do nothing for you if you're doing fundamentally wrong things with your embouchure. Even if you do ignore those problems and manage, through heroic effort, to produce a great product anyway, my experience suggests that your "shelf life" will be short-lived if those problems are taxing your muscles in bad ways. There's just no substitute for proper technique.

I apologize if I seem somewhat rigid in my views in this regard. Those who know me will confirm that I am tolerant almost to a fault. But in this regard, my views are very solid and based on years of personal experience. Experience really is the best teacher. Only if you are ready to learn.

Great topic.

I have been recently studying with a great trumpet player who studied with Carmine Carruso for 15 years or so. This method is more embochure centered and less air centered than others. I have to say that I'm reaping some incredible results. My tone is certainly more focused and denser than it was previously.

Many of the exercises, (which includes playing the first three pages of the Arbans, daily!) are structured to play very long phrases until no sound will come out and taking time out to breath rather than use as much air as you can on smaller phrases and breathing in quickly. It also focuses a great deal on pianissimo playing. This has given me a quicker response as well as the ability to play longer phrases. Not to mention the increased dynamic control. There is very little buzzing used in this method, if any, and I've been asked NOT to use a mirror. The Carruso book, Musical Calisthetics for Brass is a great jumping off point, but studying with a direct protege of his, gives you a greater insight into the proper application and greater value of this method.

I think it is important to note something about Mr. Jacobs teachings as well. I have heard from several of his students over the years that he placed strong emphasis on speaking/singing resonantly. This involves lifting the soft pallet and creating lots of internal space upon inhalation to produce great resonance. It does not mean expelling lots of air quickly. Opera singers try to maintain these positions during speach so that the muscle memory is there at all times. I think applying this to playing can reap great tonal results as well.

Just my two cents for what it's worth.