The spit valve drill - updated

[Roger Lewis]

A TubeNet Member asked that I post this write up of the Spit Valve Drill from a post I made earlier. This is an old Arnold Jacobs trick, as taught to me by M. Dee Stewart at Indiana University. I find it really works for me. I start every practice session with about 2 minutes of this.

Any questons, drop me a line.

Roger


This is a very simple exercise that allows the player to get a bigger sound with much less effort when done properly. To do this correctly requires a mirror and close attention to subtle changes in the embouchure area when working on it. Do not work from music and only use long tones at first to get the feel of the process. Do not use an attack, you want to just breathe and blow.

It is important to do the spit valve drill in front of a mirror as otherwise the effectiveness will be lost. The reason for the mirror: when we form and embouchure, the facial lines that run from the sides of our noses to the corners of the mouth become more pronounced. You do NOT want this to happen. The whole concept is to remove unnecessary tension from the embouchure.
In front of a mirror holding the horn and mouthpiece in playing position, open the spit valve on the main slide and then try to blow the spit from the deepest recesses of the horn. Just let it all hang out.

Your cheeks should puff out and there should be no “nose lines” apparent. Use a lot of air and petty fast air. Blow as though you are trying to produce an FF sound. Again, do not use an attack.
Watch your cheeks puff out (yes, it IS okay to puff your cheeks when playing the tuba – it actually enhances the sound by increasing the size of the oral resonating chamber). Blow through the horn several times this way with the spit valve open.

Now, without changing the way your face looks and with THE SPIT VALVE STILL OPEN (reinforcing that we are still blowing the spit out of the horn), let your lips flap in the breeze. Watch out for the nose lines and just relax, breathe, blow and buzz. Do this several times staying relaxed and letting the cheeks puff out.

Now, let go of the spit valve. If you are moving a lot of relaxed air and your face is still relaxed with the cheeks puffed out, you should be getting a terrific amount of noise out of the horn. At this point I usually ask people if they have ever made this much noise with so little effort and I usually am told “never”.

Now, still without an attack, slowly decrease the amount of air you are blowing and back your air slowly down to about an MP dynamic. Stay relaxed.

At this point I start to do soft partial scales, long notes, up two notes, down two notes, and strive to adjust to the feeling of more sound with less effort. I am still not using an attack.

Next, add in just a very soft attack so that the focus stays on breathing and blowing, not on tonguing. Stay relaxed. Eventually, as you begin to go higher and lower, you will add in SOME muscular action, but the point is to use as little as possible and not over tax the fine muscles of the embouchure.

The purpose of this drill is to take the unnecessary tension out of the embouchure. We will tend to build too much tension in because we “think” we have to, when the reality is the opposite. This is longevity as a player. If you use too much tension, for a long period of time, you will probably start to struggle or lose resonance in your playing as you are decreasing the amount of air going through the lips and not breathing as big as you had in the past. Basically, we get lazy.

A great teacher of mine once told me that, when you are 20 years old you will have a 6 liter lung capacity, but by the time you are 40 it will be 4 liters. This happens as we find ways of conserving the amount of air we use. When I was 20 I had a 6 ½ liter lung capacity, and I still do today (after many years of professional playing) because I’ve never allowed myself to get lazy in my breathing.

A car engine gives better performance when more fuel is run through it. This is the basis of race cars that get 4 miles per gallon, but generate a significant amount of horse power. The fuel is more important than the engine.

In your playing the air is more important than the embouchure, and that is what the spit valve drill brings out.

[jma78]

Has there been a link to the "spit valve drill" in the post and it has been removed?? I can not find the insturctions to this exercise...

[MaryAnn]

The entire post is chopped off midstream for me...
MA

[Kevin Hendrick]

Same here, MA -- here's the last of it that I'm getting:

Do not work from music and only use long tones at first to get the “feelâ€

[Donn]

Yes, it's "bit rot." Just like natural materials like brass and wood, bits are subject to their own kind of decay, and sometimes you come back to something that has set around for a while undisturbed and find that it's rotted away.

Just like with tubas, this process is accelerated by contact with unwholesome stuff. Very likely it's no coincidence that another `junk food' thread just popped up over in the `Off Topic' forum. Could be that this post happened to sit next to an article in that thread, and nature took its course. It would probably be a good idea to get some of the other old articles out and give them some air.

[Roger Lewis]

Bump for new information.
Roger

[Kevin Hendrick]