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Steve's Clinic: Mouthpiece Characteristics and Buzzing. How to buzz and how not to buzz! How to drastically improve your playing! Applies to all brass instrumentalists including Trombone, Trumpet, Tuba, Horn, Euphonium.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VCnqnS ... e=youtu.be" target="_blank

stevennorsworthy wrote:Steve's Clinic: Mouthpiece Characteristics and Buzzing. How to buzz and how not to buzz! How to drastically improve your playing! Applies to all brass instrumentalists including Trombone, Trumpet, Tuba, Horn, Euphonium.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VCnqnS ... e=youtu.be" target="_blank" target="_blank

This is really cool stuff, a few questions.

1.what does the impulse or frequency response look like when you use different shape mouthpieces?

2. When you take different shaped mouthpieces, what do their frequency responses look like?

3. Can you do this with a few different common tuba mouthpieces?

Just do a different screenshot of different mouthpieces so you can show their frequency like one for an f tuba and one for the CC tuba. This may explain why different mouthpieces work better on different keys as well as with different horns like F tuba or CC tuba.

Technology being used in the modern world, awesome.

MackBrass wrote:This may explain why different mouthpieces work better on different keys as well as with different horns like F tuba or CC tuba.

Bear in mind that playing the mouthpiece as intended, the air volume in your Helmholtz resonator there is significantly different, compared to this "tap" that I suppose is something like a palm across the large end, because your lips are stuffed in there to some degree, and the sound impulse is coming from the a different place and focus if that matters. So while it's a fair bet that Helmholtz resonance would be one of the acoustic effects that make one mouthpiece more suitable than another, this seems like the wrong way to measure it. The B/Bb effect in the video seems like more of a remarkable coincidence, unless his embouchure takes a rather flat form.

I’ve sampled many mouthpieces. The more shallow the cup, the higher the resonant freq. The length of the mouthpiece from rim to the end of the shank is the dominant factor of the 1/4 wave resonance freq. The cup depth is secondary regarding where the pitch is. The cup depth makes the characteristic have a lower or higher ‘Q’ factor, which is how sharp the resonance is. The tuba mouthpiece will have a lower Q factor, hence, slightly broader, but you will still get 10-100 times or 20-40 dB rejection. The tuba and bass trombone mouthpieces are not much different in terms of total length so the difference in where the resonance freq. is located is not much different. A super deep tuba mouthpiece of the same length lowers the resonance freq. only a 1/2 step, say, A4 instead of Bb4.

Regarding how the impulse excitation is done, the entire area must be fully excited with an impulse of air pressure, unlike the aperture which varies with size vs pitch being played. During aperture-based playing excitation, it would not change the characteristic of the fixed physical characteristic of the mouthpiece but it would excite it differently, just bringing out more or less excitation of the whole volume of the cup, but the resonant freq. of the piece would not change.

All that said, once the mouthpiece is IN THE INSTRUMENT, the instrument’s acoustic impedance for any given partial being played will dominate over the resonance of the mouthpiece. During playing, the mouthpiece is affecting the overall impedance by contributing its own impedance in series with the impedance of the oral cavity and aperture of the player it is coupled to, and then the series coupling with the instrument.

The main ‘take-away’ is to illustrate that mouthpiece buzzing is in effect a fighting and frustrating exercise against a very highly selective band-pass filter or resonator that only wants to ring at one frequency and wants to reject all other frequencies by a factor of 10-100, so fighting that is nothing like playing! It is better to exercise the lip muscles with a more constant impedance, hence, free buzzing does that. Of course, the oral cavity and aperture during free buzzing are not the same shape as actual playing, hence, free buzzing should only be viewed as a muscular isometric.

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Peterbas, show me where on the impedance curve you want to buzz using the mouthpiece and show me why you think it is good to buzz anything other than the single tone of main resonance? Yes there are subharmonics but they are still down. Why not buzz into constant impedance? That way there is no added influence on the mass/spring of the chops/air system, and only the chops are causing the pullback from the forcing function of the air. Yes, it is like an isometric exercise but it is ‘unbiased’. You should direct a question over to Doug Elliott, as he has spent most of his career deeply understanding free buzzing and its effects and its empirical results with top players and students at building strength and fixing issues. It is a totally logical exercise and it is a totally illogical exercise to fight a high-Q resonator with the chops.

stevennorsworthy wrote:I’ve sampled many mouthpieces. The more shallow the cup, the higher the resonant freq. The length of the mouthpiece from rim to the end of the shank is the dominant factor of the 1/4 wave resonance freq. The cup depth is secondary regarding where the pitch is.

I'm mostly sorry to disagree but the only thing that affects pitch on a mouthpiece is the frequency being created on the mouthpiece by the enbouchure. Depth might affected some things but not pitch.

Any tube, whether it's a mouthpiece, instrument, hose, or straw, has a resonant frequency and set of harmonics. He's not talking about what you put into it - you can buzz anything but the resonant frequency will simply be the pitch it will lock onto strongest .

Ok this all makes sense, and I follow, but empirically if you are having trouble with a passage like locking in pitches and you buzz the mps a couple times plugging back into the horn and wala it’s better, what’s going on there?

Another question are screw together mps less resonant that solid?

jpwell wrote:Ok this all makes sense, and I follow, but empirically if you are having trouble with a passage like locking in pitches and you buzz the mps a couple times plugging back into the horn and wala it’s better, what’s going on there?

Another question are screw together mps less resonant that solid?

Either freebuzzing or mouthpiece buzzing forces YOU to control the pitch instead of relying on the feedback from the instrument. When you get that feel, then add the instrument back in, you can lock in better. I happen to prefer the freebuzzing approach.

Mouthpieces don't resonate when you're playing - it's the air inside that resonates.

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