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!

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.

Building a Low Range

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

• 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.

It takes patience, determination and the will to do something today for gain tomorrow to build a good low range.

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.

Chop Management

Wouldn’t it be great if most of the time you never thought about your embouchure? This is what happens when you concentrate on your breathing and shaping the air. Eventually the embouchure learns to take care of itself. It will still get tired and some days will be better than others but playing will be more about making music than just worrying if your chops will last long enough.

If you have not read the section on breathing do that before you read this. None of this is worthwhile if you are not working on your breathing.

Great breath control can make a player with a mediocre embouchure a fine player. If your air control is not developed then the world’s greatest embouchure won’t make you a good player.

Understand what your chops do

Like a violin string the part of your lip inside the mouthpiece should be held in place firmly at the ends and flexible in the middle.

Just as a violinist has to drag the bow at the correct place on the string we need to focus our airstream at the correct place on the lips. This place is called the target.

The target is at the lowest point of your upper lip. To find it open your mouth without making an embouchure and put something thin like a pencil or the shank of your mouthpiece in your mouth horizontally and close your mouth. The place where the object is touching your upper lip is the target.

The flesh at the target should be relaxed and flexible. It can be stretched by the muscles at the corners of the mouth pulling away from each other but the lip inside the mouthpiece should not be tense. 

Strengthening the Right Muscles

The right muscles to strengthen are at the corners of the mouth. If you make the biggest frown that you can, the muscles that pull your lips down at the corners are the muscles we are talking about.  These muscles act like the pegs and tuners on a violin, holding it tight at the ends and increasing the tension when needed.

These muscles can be strengthened the same way any other muscles can but we have to remember that they were not designed to play a brass instrument. Our chop muscles are small and weak to begin with. It’s important to take it slow and easy when building the muscles up.

Your lips muscles burn fuel from your blood and create waste products including water and lactic acid.  When you use a muscle a lot the acid builds up faster than the blood can get it out of there so it burns the muscle. When this starts to happen your brain gets a signal saying ‘help!’ and the brain stops using the muscle. This is the feeling we get when our lips are so tired we can’t go on.

But there is good news. When you sleep your body fills in the holes the acid left in your muscles with - more muscle! This is what makes weightlifters’ muscles so huge. They routinely burn the muscles and let them build. We can do the same thing.

You can use a pencil or a mouthpiece or anything and hold it in your lips (no teeth!) as long as you can. When you can’t hold it up anymore rest for a few minutes and do it again. Do this daily and you’ll feel your chops get stronger and stronger.

Long tones are great for strengthening the chops. Make sure you are warmed up. Start in your mid range and hold a note as long as possible. Decrescendo through the whole note but keep a good tone.

At first do four or five notes at the end of your practice day. Hold them as long and as quietly as you can with a good tone.

As you get stronger go up by by thirds.

When you feel quite strong, instead of one note play an arpeggio and slur up a half step from the top note and hold that note as long as possible.