Few things are as useful as a quality low range for a brass player. It helps improve tone quality and control and sets the System up to produce a quality mid and high range.
Building a good low range takes time and focus but we have some shortcuts and recommendations.
Traditional brass teaching espouses making the mouth bigger, exaggerated opening of the throat and the dreaded and destructive dropping of the jaw.
Left Coast Horn Playing advises exactly the opposite. We want to develop an efficient low range, one that is controllable and repeatable. Making the mouth too large keeps us from focusing the air at the target, changes our embouchure from the mid and high ranges and makes clean tonguing difficult if not downright impossible.
When developing your low range keep a bright sound! Make your mouth small top to bottom and front to back. Practicing tonguing hard and keeping a bright loud sound will develop your low range better than simply playing low. Playing with unfocused 'warm air' makes low notes difficult to learn. We use that kind of blowing to make a warm sound, for example when you want to blend with woodwinds or cellos, but for our general practice we make a bright sound. It's much easier to build a bright low sound then learn how to darken it rather than the reverse.
Warm, dark sounds are important tools for us and we need to learn to play this way too, but to develop your low range you will have better luck and improve quicker if you follow our directions.
To develop your low range
Building a good low range takes time and focus but we have some shortcuts and recommendations.
Traditional brass teaching espouses making the mouth bigger, exaggerated opening of the throat and the dreaded and destructive dropping of the jaw.
Left Coast Horn Playing advises exactly the opposite. We want to develop an efficient low range, one that is controllable and repeatable. Making the mouth too large keeps us from focusing the air at the target, changes our embouchure from the mid and high ranges and makes clean tonguing difficult if not downright impossible.
When developing your low range keep a bright sound! Make your mouth small top to bottom and front to back. Practicing tonguing hard and keeping a bright loud sound will develop your low range better than simply playing low. Playing with unfocused 'warm air' makes low notes difficult to learn. We use that kind of blowing to make a warm sound, for example when you want to blend with woodwinds or cellos, but for our general practice we make a bright sound. It's much easier to build a bright low sound then learn how to darken it rather than the reverse.
Warm, dark sounds are important tools for us and we need to learn to play this way too, but to develop your low range you will have better luck and improve quicker if you follow our directions.
To develop your low range
- Use Exercise #1b as a way to develop your low range. Every day go as low as possible.
- Practice Exercise #5 to develop an even sound across your ranges.
- Use Exercise #12 as a way to develop clean tonguing in your low range. Tongue hard! Play loud!
- Every day take an exercise or an etude (Kopprasch, Kling, Gallay, etc.) or a solo and play the entire thing down and octave or two.
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