Focusing the Air

Have you ever blown across the top of a bottle and gotten it to whistle?

If you have then you understand the importance of focusing the air. If you just blow at the bottle without focusing you don't get a sound (other than 'whoosh') but if you focus it in just the right place you get a whistle.

We also need to focus the air in the right place. If the airstream hits your lips wider then the inner diameter of the mouthpiece rim then you are at a disadvantage. It's very hard to control the lips with the air and we will fall back into the hands of our old enemies: tension, stiffness, lack of range and endurance, intonation problems, etc.

Just like whistling we use our tongue to focus the air at just the right place.

If you can get the air to focus the same size of your aperture and right  at your aperture then you will be playing very efficiently, will make a great sound and your technique will get much easier. Combine this with proper breathing and you will be a formidable horn player!

Blasting the Air

Left Coast Horn Playing uses several exaggeration techniques to accelerate learning. Being able to suddenly produce an intense, focused blast of air is a basic technique of playing and is best learned by exaggeration.

It is imperative that we learn to control the flow and changes in flow of air from as low in our abdomen as possible. The lower the control the better and more efficient the sound, the more relaxed the mouth and throat can be and the more control we have over the music!

It is also imperative that one learns to breath using muscles low in the body. How can you blast air from lungs that are not full or by using muscles in the rib cage? Foolishness!

It is also very difficult to tongue cleanly if the air is controlled from too high up in the body. That makes the throat and tongue tense! How can you control it if it is already tense?


Many people do not have a lot of strength in Place #6. That is why we have to work at our breathing exercises every day. Forget your embouchure weights and other gizmos!  Spend that time working on blasting the air and trilling properly and you'll improve much faster!

To blast the air properly

• Get your body in a proper position to take a huge breath.
• If the muscles around Place #6 are not relaxed you cannot do this properly.
• Take a quick, full breath, using an oh sound, filling the bottom of your lungs first. Do not raise your shoulders.
• Suddenly tighten the muscles around and just below your belly button as if someone was hitting you in the gut. Push in and a little bit up. Do it hard! Violently!

You should get a sudden blast of air. If not, try it again. Work at it once or twice every day and in a short time your playing will improve.

Put the Air Down Low First

When we say down low we mean down low. The muscles we want to use to control the air are around and just below our belly buttons, which we call Place #6.

If the air is up high within your rib cage the only way you can press to get it out is to use the muscles inside the rib cage and in the throat and mouth. How can you relax and use the flow of air to play when you can't get the air to flow!

If you inhale in a way that puts the air high in your chest first that is where your muscles will work to exhale. 

Think of your lungs as being like a plastic bag full of air and you have gathered the top together so there is just a small opening.

The right way to breath can be described as holding the bag around the sides and pushing up from the bottom.

If you press the bag in the middle you get air pressure going up and down. This may be the single most common problem in horn playing. It causes all sorts of grief, from footballs (notes that are louder in the middle), missed notes, thin tone, endurance and intonation and tonguing problems.

This is why many players have all sorts of vicious tension in their mouths and throat when they play. You can't unclench when you use muscles up high in your body to work the air.

When you breathe in it is imperative that you make a deep oh sound.  If you don't you won't get the air to the bottom of your lungs first.

Important note for advanced players: There are times when a high thin breath can help you make an effective sound - when you want it to be thin, perhaps to hide behind woodwind players. But you better have great control first and only do it when you want to produce a thin sound or you are going to develop lots of problems!

Hot Tea!

One trick to learn how to get the air pressed behind the tongue, rather than held by the voicebox is to use the words Hot Tea.

The idea is to inhale while saying Hot, including getting the tongue in the right position while inhaling. As soon as the tongue is in place (the t in hot) we press the air against it and keep the air pressure inside of you elevated.

Then release the tongue with an explosion of air while saying (or yelling!) Tea. We want a really hard T, like a hammer striking metal.

For all of you thinking this isn't tasteful, you are so right. It's an exercise! If done right it's an exaggeration, although there certainly are occasions to tongue like this.

Our goal is to learn the pattern, the sequence, the feeling. When we tongue quietly we want to use the same sequence and pattern, just not as loud.

About Left Coast Horn Playing Technique

Left Coast Horn Playing is a way of practicing and playing that emphasizes training the body and mind to inhale and exhale correctly.  Left Coast Horn Playing takes a logical and behavioral approach and develops controlled, repeatable technique. Our techniques are not designed to produce a single unchangeable style, rather they are designed to give you control over your style by developing a wide palette of repeatable techniques.

Main features of Left Coast playing and practice

• We have a daily plan and we follow the plan
• We focus on controlling the air inside the horn and working daily to improve breathing with the goal of controlling the flow of air from as far down in the abdomen and as far forward in the mouth as possible
• Knowing what and where the target is and aiming the air at it
• Getting away from the illusion that concentration and development of the embouchure is more important than focus on air control and emphasizing exercises that develop air strength and control
• Use of exaggeration in teaching. Sffz, long decrescendos and practicing in a wide range of tempi are typical
• Clean tonguing and using the tongue to focus the air
• Working to reduce or eliminate unnecessary movement of the face and tongue by focusing on air control
• Short progressive and leveraged drills designed to hone in on one particular aspect of playing or combining techniques to make learning efficient
• Working to improve ensemble skills as well as individual technique

What is The Target?

The Target is where we aim the air.

It is the center of the upper lip, at its lowest point. If you stick your tongue out and close your lips, it is where you tongue touches the upper lip.

The Target is where your lip actually vibrates.* It's where we want to aim the air. Always. We can aim up or down but the air must pass through the target.

Most players aim up higher than the target, especially when playing high notes. Unfortunately aiming above the target makes it harder to play high notes!

It make so much sense, to aim up when we play high and to aim low when we play low.  Fortunately for those of us in the know aiming up or down doesn't make the pitch go up or down.

What makes the pitch go up or down depends on the size of the aperture (the hole where the air goes out your lips), the speed and intensity of the air and the tension of the lips.

Note that we are talking about aiming the air at the Target or above or below it.  All air should be aimed at the Target regardless of pitch or range.

This straight ahead kind of playing has numerous advantages

• It helps to keep the tone quality good and similar in all ranges
• It make slurring smoother
• It allows for large leaps without changes in tone
• It helps you understand where to tongue

Why Tongue at the Target?

Tonguing at or near the target produces clean and powerful attacks and reduces the movement of the tongue. Moving the tongue too much brings the back of the tongue into play, constricting the flow of air, changing the tone and slowing the tonguing down.

When most people tongue at the Target for the first time they can't believe it can work because they are so used to tonguing higher.

Having a Target gives you something to aim at

How handy!

You know that feeling right before a high, quiet entrance? How are you going to get the first note to sound nice? Wouldn't it be great to get rid of that abstract, almost lost feeling?

You have a really loud entrance and don't want to splat the first note?

Give your brain and body something to focus on! Think about the target, where it is and how you are going to deliver the air to it.




* Yes we know vibrates is the wrong word but let's keep it simple.

The Illusion of Up

Where are high notes? On the ceiling? Are low notes on the floor?

There are two factors that cause us to believe the Illusion of Up. When we begin playing we have no muscles in our embouchure and every note can seem 'heavy.' We feel like we have to hold our embouchure up for every note.

The worst part of the illusion is the very terms we use. High notes and low notes and middle range notes. High notes are written higher up on the page. Lower notes are written lower. They could be reversed. But if we turned music writing completely upside down it would confuse us because we believe the illusion.

What makes notes higher on a horn? We need to make the aperture smaller, increase tension in the lips and increase the speed of the air.

The things that we do to aim up - tensing the cheeks, turning the lower lip forward, raising the shoulders, etc. makes it more difficult to play high! Try to play straight ahead!

A demonstration we do frequently is to hold a finger up and ask a student to aim right at the finger tip and play a note. We then ask for a lower note and we move the finger tip higher. The player will see that you indeed can aim higher for a low note and lower for a high note.

Don't Drop Your @#$&!@# Jaw!

Few words have done more damage to horn players' low ranges than the dreaded 'Drop the Jaw.'

To develop a controllable focused low range try not to move your jaw when you play lower. Practice playing in the mid range and using that mouth shape as a template for your low range.

Dropping the jaw before the note starts does several things, all of them bad.

• It makes it difficult to focus the air
• It causes the back of the tongue to move up, restricting the flow of air
• It makes it almost impossible to return to the middle or upper ranges without terrific amounts of tension

Note that we do not say the jaw does not move or the mouth get slightly bigger when playing low. The difference is that we let our mouth relax and find the right shape from the acoustics of the note. We do not try to put the mouth in the right shape first.

We want the shape of our mouth for our lowest and highest notes to be the same as much as possible.

The C Word

It's a word you hardly hear in connection with brass playing and that's a shame, since it is one of our most important concepts. It allows us to play cleanly and makes our technique much easier.

The word is Coordination!

We have to coordinate the timing of the lips, fingers, abdominal muscles, and tongue on every note. The timing is critical! Small changes in timing can have deleterious or beneficial effects.

This is one more reason it is so important to practice slowly and carefully several times a day and why the Slow to Fast practice technique is so valuable.

A common coordination problem is the relationship of air control and embouchure when slurring. Most people increase the air flow for a slur too late, after the chops start changing. This is a common fault of face-based playing. When slurring the air should move first.

Experiment with your timing and you will find your playing much improved. The act of working on it will make you a better player.

Sample Practice Plans

The basic outline of a Left Coast practice plan looks like this

• Breathing exercises and routines
• Buzzing exercises
• A simple exercise done the same way every day
• Arpeggio exercises
• Tonguing exercises
• Exercises for special problems or to develop other techniques
• Long tones
• Scales
• Reading and learning music

Each of our exercises can be extended or leveraged. For example Exercise 1b might be played as plain as possible or with decrescendos on the last note, or continued on as low as possible, etc.

For a young student or beginner the entire routine before the music might only take ten minutes, for an advanced player it can be an hour or more.

Sample Beginner Practice Plan
Ten minutes

• Reverse Ho Ho Ho and 6 Places
• Mouthpiece buzzing exercise
• Exercise #1b (done allegro with brick shaped notes)
• Exercise #8
• Long tones
• Scales
• Etudes, solos and music preparation

Sample Intermediate Practice Plan
Half hour

• Reverse Ho Ho Ho and 6 Places
• Mouthpiece buzzing exercise
  
• Exercise #1b (done allegro with brick shaped notes)
• Exercise #2
• Exercise #3
• Exercise #4
• Exercise #6
• Exercise #8
  
• Long tones
• Scales
• Etudes, solos and music preparation
• Exercise #1a

Notice that Exercise #1a is always done last and every other day.

Sample Practice Plan for a Professional Player or Advanced Student
45 minutes to an hour

• Reverse Ho Ho Ho and 6 Places
• Mouthpiece buzzing exercise
  
• Exercise #1b (done andante and going down as low as possible)
• Exercise #2 (with extended variations)
• Exercise #4
• Exercise #5 (all versions)
• Exercise #6 (two octaves)
• Exercise #7
  
• Exercise #8 (for double tonguing, high and low range practice)
  
• Long tones
• Scales
• Etudes, solos and music preparation
• Exercise #1a

Strength and Efficiency

Strength is good. Efficiency is good Strength plus efficiency = the best!

Knowing which muscles need to be strong and which need to learn to relax is key. We need to have the muscles at the corners of our lips to be very, very strong. We need our lower abs to very strong. That's about it.

We need to keep the muscles of the throat relaxed, especially the lower part of the tongue. Your tongue is probably longer than you think. When you swallow the lower part of your tongue helps to push the material down your throat. You can feel the tongue flexing all the way down to your vocal chords.  

Tension in the back and bottom part of the tongue is one of the most common problems in brass playing.

How do we overcome this tension? By breathing from Place #6. Controlling the air in our out from above Place #6 causes causes tension in the throat.

To gain the strength in Place #6 we constantly remind ourselves to breathe from there. We strengthen those muscles simply by breathing correctly over and over.

We strengthen our chops by playing progressively longer and higher drills. Long tones are very important. Long descrescendos help too.

We define efficiency as the percentage of air that goes through the mouthpiece without increasing the buzzy quality of the buzz. You can hear two things in a buzz, the raspy buzzy sound and the hissing of the air. The hissing airy sound is the inefficient air.

The airier and hissier the sound of the buzz the less efficient. The raspier and buzzier the sound the more efficient.

Some benefits of being more efficient are obvious but there are many that are not so obvious. Intonation is greatly improved with an efficient buzz, as are endurance, flexibility, steadiness, tonguing, quiet playing and phrasing.

Building a High Range

Good high ranges don't happen in a day.  They take time and proper technique to build. Here is how to go about it.

First read these articles

• Six Places
• Ah vs Oh
• Don't Move
• Face Based vs Air Based Playing
• Aiming and the Target

At first you'll want to work on your high range every other day. It's ok to be really tire your chops out if you let them rest a day.

Start by playing some of our exercises in their normal range so that you play them properly. Then start transposing them up by half steps.

• A good way to start is with exercise #1A. Start in your mid range and play the exercise up as high as you possibly can. Pinch, squeeze, make funny faces, whatever you need to do to get up as high as possible. For this exercise we are not looking for fine technique or a pretty sound.

Do this exercise as the last thing you play for the day.

• Make sure your practice time includes exercises to expand your LOW range.
• Practice scales and long tones up as high as possible every day.

Don't expect results the first day or even the first week. With diligent practice you will notice your high range getting easier and more reliable soon.

If you are in this position, ask your conductor to program a piece you are afraid of to light a fire under you. Knowing you have to perform something outside your range will get you working (hopefully intelligently) on your high range!

Six Places - The Most Important Exercise

Six Places is a quick exercise that makes us sensitive to the different parts of the body that can be used to breath in and out. Doing this several times a day, especially right before and during practice will develop breathing habits that enable you to control the air - and your sound and your technical abilities!

This is simply an exercise to teach you where the air should be controlled by your body. Obviously you can’t put air below your belly button, but developing and using the muscles there will get you the tone and control we work for in Left Coast Horn Playing.

By concentrating on using the muscles in Place #6 we get the big fat brass sound we want and great control over the air. Six Places teaches us where to control the air by focusing on where most people go wrong and showing us what is right.

A brass player, more than anything else, is an air delivery system. How you deliver the air to your embouchure is more important than the kind of horn or mouthpiece you play, the strength of your chops or anything else.

Proper breathing will overcome a less than perfect embouchure but no embouchure can fix your playing if your breathing is incorrect. There is no more important principle in Left Coast playing.

The Six Places

Place #1: the nose
Place #2: the cheek
Place #3: the throat
Place #4: halfway down the sternum, or to sound fancy between the sternum and xiphoid
Place #5: halfway between the bottom of the sternum (the xiphoid) and belly button
Place #6: one inch below your belly button

To practice Six Places we breathe in while touching the places air can be controlled in our bodies and try to feel like we are putting the air in that place. So for Place one we touch our nose and try to put air just in there. Touching the places is very important as it helps your body remember where they are and what they feel like.

The sound of each breath should be distinct enough to hear the change from the wheeze of air going into the nose to the low oh syllable formed when air goes into Place Number Six.

Very important - notice we said the oh sound. Not an ah sound, which is indicative of high breathing. Try breathing in and making an ah sound then an oh sound and you’ll see that the air is controlled from higher up with the ah sound. Bad mojo!

Also very important - the oh sound is for breathing in. Sometimes you will want to use that mouth and throat shape when exhaling but not always. It depends on the sound you want to make. But when you are breathing in you almost always want the oh sound.

The only time you should use an ah sound when inhaling is when you purposely want to make an airy unsupported sound, for example when trying to blend and stay out of the way of a singer or woodwind player.

Getting Your Posture Right

Frequently our posture keeps us from being able to use the muscles in Place #6 correctly. It is imperative that the muscles around Place #6 are relaxed before we start or we can't use them to control the air.

To find out if your posture puts you in a position to use your lower ab muscles do the following

• Stand up straight. 
• Put two fingers on either side of your belly button. Lower them one inch. 
• Bend backwards and you will feel those muscles tighten as they help to support your back. 
• Now straighten your back and lean forward until you feel those muscles relax. That is the position you must be in to breath from Place Number Six.

To sit properly you have to be in a position where you can hold the horn comfortably and have Place Number Six control the flow of air.

Six Places is a great exercise to use with young players as it is easy for them to understand ‘you are pushing from place two’ than any explanation of diaphragmatic breathing or using a device to train them.

How it should work

Imagine holding a plastic bag upright. Gather the top together so the opening is small and round and you can blow into to inflate the bag. When the bag is inflated you could push the air out by squeezing the equator of the bag, right in the middle and pressing horizontally. You will expell the air but the pressure you create will be pushing the air up - and down. This is why so many young players notes sound  like footballs, notes that start quietly, get louder in the middle then die away. It’s also one of the main sources of clams.

When the air pressure changes up and down like that the mouth is constantly changing shape. When the air pressure diminishes at the end of a note the airway constricts making it even more difficult to get the next note out correctly.

Ah vs Oh and the Reverse Ho Ho Ho

When you inhale you want to get the air down in the bottom of your lungs first. To do this we need to use an oh syllable when we inhale, not an ah syllable.

The more attention you pay to this the better player or teacher you will be. This is the most important concept in Left Coast Horn Playing.

For a teacher it is easy to hear when the student is breathing from Place #6. The 'oh' sound is unmistakable when inhaling and the deep, round tone color is unmistakable when playing.

Make sure the oh sound happens from the beginning of the breath to make sure the bottom of the lungs fill up first.

Left Coast Horn Playing has produced many fine adolescent players. It's simplicity and focus on what works gets their minds and bodies working on the right things.  In our quest to make things simple we came up with this idea to get the air low in the body. 

Santa Claus says "ho ho ho" and so do we. But we say while inhaling! Say it strongly and use the Place #6 muscles. You'll note that if you breathe from higher up you will say 'ha ha ha' instead of 'ho ho ho.'

Don’t move!

Many of the problems we have are caused by parts of our bodies moving when they should be still, or being tense when they should be more relaxed.

A big culprit is the back of the tongue and the muscles around the throat. In most cases this is caused by controlling the air at Place #5 or higher.

There is a fancy name for this problem and it’s at the heart of most breathing treatises. It’s called the Valsalva's maneuver and you can find a lot of information about it on the web but here it is in it’s simplest form:

If you control the air above Place #6 you will have to use the muscles in your throat and mouth to push the air out. The muscles will tense.

If you control the air above Place #6 you will have all sorts of problems

• Your throat will close and you will have trouble tonguing cleanly
• Your mouth muscles and your tongue will tense up and you can’t use them to get the air focused and they won’t be relaxed enough to let your mouth find the right shape
• Your volume of air will be small
• Your sound will be thin
• You will have trouble with your high and low ranges
• You will have little volume control
• Flexibility will be a problem
• Intonation will be difficult to control

Since many of us do not have the lower ab muscles developed we have to practice controlling the air down them. Do it for a couple of minutes every day and your playing will improve dramatically!

The Importance of the Brick-shaped Note

Not only do we want to make brick shaped notes our standard note shape we want the ability to make them not-brick shaped if we wish. To get that kind of control one must be able to produce a beautifully brick shaped note.

A brick shaped note begins with a good solid tongue and continues without crescendo or decrescendo until it ends cleanly.  It is difficult to do and requires a lot of dedicated practice. It takes time to develop. The important thing is the mental focus on making brick shaped notes and the use of Place Six. If you focus on those you will notice great improvement in your sound in a short time.

Musically speaking playing with non-bricked shaped notes creates unwanted attention on the shape of each note rather than the phrase. Many amateur players play this way thinking they are making a beautiful emotion-laden sound. In reality they are making their audience seasick!

Imagine a really bad actor auditioning by reading the Gettysburg address. Read the following aloud and make each word a football, getting loudest in the middle of the word:

Four - score - and - twenty - years - ago

I can hear the auditioners already yelling Thank you. Next! It’s irritating.

Then say it as if it was one phrase:

Four score and twenty years ago today

And you can hear how much more musical it is.

Our Way of Practicing

The most important feature of Left Coast Horn Playing is that we work on our breathing every day. Not just an occasional taking of a deep breath or blowing into a machine but real work with real improvement.

1) Work on your breathing every day! Don’t assume you have figured it out. Work on it to improve it every day before you practice or play. Do it all the time!

2) We practice with a written plan on our stand and we follow the plan every day that we practice.

The plan may take ten minutes to execute for a young player or beginner or for a player who is so advanced they can accomplish something valuable in ten minutes, or twenty minutes for an intermediate student to an hour for an ambitious player doing a heavy workout.

Having a written plan that you work from every day means that you build upon your skills every day. A well designed practice plan makes your practice efficient and effective, not scattered, haphazard and inefficient.

3) After our breathing work every day we practice three things

• Careful drills that are the same every single day
• Drills and exercises that increase your technique (higher, lower low, faster trills, cleaner slurs, etc.)
• Reading music to increase fluency

These are in addition to etudes, solos and concert preparation.

The drills focus on controlling the air and reducing manipulation of the embouchure. We use exaggerated hard tonguing, sffz, glissandi and other exercises to learn how to shape and control the air.

20 minutes of this kind of focused practice will be of more benefit than hours of noodling.

4) We are always working to expand our technique. We want to be practicing to higher, lower, louder, softer, etc. every day. If you play only what is as difficult as you played yesterday you get stuck in yesterday.


Focus on Your Breathing All the Time

OK, maybe not all the time. But frequently.  'All the time' is only a slight exaggeration. This is the crux of Left Coast playing. Focus a lot of attention on where you are putting the air in your body, which muscles are doing the work and how it is shaped when it comes out.


Focus on What Works and Attack Your Enemies

Focus on what works, don’t focus on what’s going wrong. If you need to improve your tonguing, don’t think I am bad at tonguing instead tell yourself Now I am going to sit up straight and take a deep low breath and work on improving my tonguing.

No matter what your enemies are, go on the attack!

When you want to improve something set aside time to focus on fixing it. At the same time make sure you are doing what works - good posture, correct breathing, clean tonguing, etc.

Then try to figure out what is actually happening that is causing the problem. Be curious, be aware of what parts of your body are doing what and have patience.

No Negativity!

We are trying to train ourselves to be comfortable reliable players and that is tough to do if you are berating yourself constantly. When something goes wrong try to figure out what caused it and how to change it.

The difference between a genius and a schizophrenic is that the genius tells the voices in his head what to say.

You can convince yourself of anything. If you tell yourself that you have a tonguing problem, or a weak high range or any other problem you won't get better by reinforcing in your mind that there is a problem. Simply think of it as a problem to be solved over time and you'll have success.

Exaggerate Exaggerate Exaggerate

If the exercises say FF or SFFZ we really mean it. If your neighbors call the police when you practice these then you are doing it right? If the dog whines, your teeth self clean and your canned food pops open then you are doing it right.

Hit the SFFZ notes really hard. Blast those puppies! Don't worry about tone color or musicality. Exaggerate!


The purpose of these exercises is to develop breath control and strength.

Make it Your Goal to Get Better Every Day

Even if you have off days you will be on a steady path of improvement.

Lastly

Find ways to really enjoy playing. How often do you take your horn out of the case and admire it. Imagine the knowledge and skill that went into producing the metals, the shape, the case, everything. Read about the great composers. Listen to a style of music you have never heard of before.

Your audience can tell if you are having a good time whether you're playing bluegrass with your family or the most serious opera.  


OK, Really Lastly

A valid criticism of Left Coast Horn Playing is that we do not address musicality in any way on this site. Of course we care a lot about musicality and that's why we are willing to spend the time doing structured practice to be our best at it.

But we feel that musicality is best learned beside a qualified teacher. It is the most human part of music.

How to Play Left Coast Exercises

Left Coast exercises are meant to be concentrated and leveraged. They are short so we can really focus on what we are trying to accomplish. They are designed to be flexible and extensible.

Always play them with a steady rhythm and start slowly!

In all the exercises have these goals in mind

If you don’t take a deep low breath, controlling the air from Place #6 then none of this matters. While playing these exercises always take a deep, relaxed breath, controlling the air from as low in your body as possible.

When the exercises advise you to keep the same tone color throughout, we are looking for brightness. Some of our exercises ask you to decrescendo without changing tone color. You can only do this if you control the air from below Place #5, halfway between your rib cage and your belly button.

We use these decrescendo exercises not only to learn to make beautiful decrescendos and control the ends of the notes but to train ourselves to control the air from as low as possible.

Some of our exercises have sffz on them. These are to be played loudly and with as much air as is possible to push through the horn. Play them loud all the way through with no decrescendo or softening at all. Be tasteless and wild! If your neighbors call the police you are doing it right!

If the exercise says to play Slow to Fast, then start really really slow. The slower the better. You can increase the tempo right away but start out really slowly.

For Slow to Fast exercises go faster and faster until you reach the point it falls apart. Never play as fast as you can then quit. Go faster! Always push!

In all technical exercises every day try to go higher, lower, faster, slower, louder, quieter! Always push yourself!

While these exercises can be done occasionally you will improve very fast if you do them every day. Ten minutes a day doing these drills will help you improve much faster than doing them for once for an hour each week.

What is The System?

The System is everything from the outside of your lips to the bottom of your lungs. It all works together and if one part isn’t working properly then another part has to pick up the slack.
If your support is shallow then your throat has to push the air out, making the muscles tense and restricting the flow of air.

If your tongue is tense then your embouchure will be tense.

If your posture is poor then your whole System is at a disadvantage.

Face Based vs Air Based Playing

When we play we get most of our feedback from our chops.  We hear players say ‘my chops are messed up today’ or ‘my lips feel thick’ or tired or dry or whatever. We rarely say ‘I think my tongue is not quite in the right position’ or my breathing isn’t being controlled from the right place today.’ And that’s a pity.

We get most of our feedback from playing from our faces. If our chops are tired we feel defeated. If our chops feel good it feels miraculous. Unfortunately this also means that we focus our attention on our embouchure instead of our breathing.

The main focus of Left Coast Horn Playing is to train your mind and your body to focus on the air, not the embouchure

It takes a combination of a strong and correctly formed embouchure,  proper breathing both in and out and the correct shape and texture in the mouth and throat to play well. Most players concentrate on the chops both while they practice and when they play in an ensemble, ignoring their breathing. Many teachers are guilty of having their students work on drills, etudes and solos and excerpts and never mentioning how to breath other than an occasional truly confusing comment about diaphragmatic breathing.

How you take the air in and blow it out is more important than having a good embouchure.  One can play well with a misshapen or ignored embouchure but without breathing correctly one cannot play well.

To divert our brains’ attention from our chops we need to concentrate on breathing. There seems to be an equilibrium between how much work the air does and how much the chops do. If our faces work really hard then the air can’t be doing it’s job. If the air does its job the face can relax an amazing amount.

We want the shape of our mouth when we play to funnel the air to the point where the sound is being made - the center of our upper lip. This target is the flap of lip that actually moves and creates the sound.  Focusing the air anywhere else or not focusing the air is inefficient and produces an unstable, airy sound.

Getting the focal width of your air the same as your aperture will, if aimed at the aperture, be the most efficient way to play.

The most important factor in breathing correctly is which muscles in the body are used to draw the air in and to blow it out.

It’s easy to demonstrate how important this is. I say, ‘I am going to play like a beginner’ and then play like a 7th grader. Then I play like a high school freshman, then a senior, then a good college student then a professional. The only thing I change is which muscles I use to take the air in:

7th grader: I take a quick snort through my nose
Senior: I take a slightly longer breath into my throat and a little into my chest
College student: Controlled by the muscles at the bottom of the rib cage
Professional: I use the ab muscles right below my belly button.

It is the length of the air in the body that determines not only the tone quality and color but that enables us to focus on the air and all but forget about embouchure.

Some great horn players will say to breath naturally. Those same players tend to be large men who take huge breaths when they play. I think what they really mean is to have relaxed muscles pulling the air in.

You’ll note in some of the Left Coast exercises there are notes marked sffz. These notes should be hammered! Play them as loud as possible with sudden contractions of your abdominal muscles, as if someone had punched you in the stomach and you harden the muscles to protect yourself. This is an exercise to learn control and gain some strength in your abdomen, so hit them hard and don’t be tasteful.

These are Annoy Your Neighbor drills. Blast those notes! Don’t worry about tone color or if it goes to the wrong pitch. That’s ok but playing them quietly or weakly is not!