TubeNet

There was no real category for this. I dorsal tongue, which means I tongue the roof of my mouth, but with the area back of the tip rather than the tip.

Arban was French, non? viewtopic.php?f=2&t=48948

lost wrote:Great thread. For me, I found tonguing like a trumpet player is fine in the mid to high range, however the extreme low end of my instruments require me to tongue in between my teeth for a faster response. It feels weird, but it works for me. I got that advice from these boards in some random thread, tried it and it helped!

I have a theory about this but not having an MRI, have no way to test it.

It is this: many people who tongue "between their teeth" are actually dorsal tonguers without knowing it, but they have long tongues so naturally it falls between the teeth. Tongue length varies a lot, a shorter tongue would be back behind the teeth.

Dorsal tonguing is also called K tongue, KTM, and Clarke tonguing; it is not the same as TCE (tongue controlled embouchure) because that requires the tongue to support the lower lip directly. At least, as I understand it.

In my own concept of playing there are a wide range of front end shapes that I’d like to use. To produce those I use a range of tongue locations (higher ie “toe” for more percussive and lower ie “tho” for less), mouth & throat shapes (ie “oh” for lower and “eeh” for higher), and air speed & volume. All exist on a continuum with very little use of the extremes, lest things get out of control.

I thought for many years my tongue stayed behind my teeth; a clear mouthpiece showed otherwise.

swillafew wrote:I thought for many years my tongue stayed behind my teeth; a clear mouthpiece showed otherwise.

Wow

Spent what seemed like hours with my nephew (whose tonguing was flatly neglected over his first year and a half of playing trombone) talking about what part of the tongue touches what part of the teeth -- and that's only because it was how he was talking about it. He was more of a gamer nerd than a music nerd, so I had to get into his way of thinking. It took some time, but I weaned him off of the minutiae of oral physiology and got him to think of syllables, consonants, and vowels -- "too" and "doo" and "noo" and "loo", etc.

It kinda worked out well after all, because he was aware enough of the physiology to notice how the different consonants changed the motion of the tongue -- so he trusted that thinking of consonants created viable results.

That recent series of MRIs probably changed some minds over what we really do with tongue and throat, as opposed to what we think we do.

It is not unusual for trombone players to tongue on the bump on the roof of the mouth, considerably back behind the teeth, using either the tip of the tongue or the dorsal surface with the tip of the tongue lowered.

With a long tongue, some people (especially trumpet players) may tongue with the tip of the tongue tucked down on the bottom teeth or in the gully behind the bottom teeth, and articulate with the dorsal surface behind the tip.

timothy42b wrote:It is not unusual for trombone players to tongue on the bump on the roof of the mouth, considerably back behind the teeth, using either the tip of the tongue or the dorsal surface with the tip of the tongue lowered.

I'm a trombonist and I can confirm that's how I articulate a legato. Typically, the tip of my tongue meets the top of my teeth, right where teeth become gums. It makes for a soft, but defined articulation on trombone which is neither staccato nor legato. On bass trombone my tongue moves down and articulates on my teeth more. It sounds like a mess on a BBb though, I'm still trying to figure out how to cleanly articulate the lower notes... my articulations sound "clumsy" when I tongue that way. I can get away with it on EEb though.

I'm thinking of a potentially sacrilegious question, opposite of tonguing: how do we stop a note? Especially a series of short notes?

Stryk wrote: If you are music long enough, you find out people do a lot of things you don't feel are correct, but get great results. You can't argue with results.

Also, people think they do a lot of things that they aren't really doing. It's not like golf where you can take a video and do frame by frame analysis. What goes on in our mouth and lungs is very hard to actually determine. Watch those recent MRIs, they are enlightening.