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.

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!

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.

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!

Aiming and The Target

What makes a high note high? Are they on the ceiling? Are low notes down by your shoes?

When we begin playing we have the feeling that the notes are either somewhere up on the ceiling or down on the floor. Do you remember how high notes in the staff felt?! We tend to develop these exaggerated habits early. We call it The Illusion of Up. We’ll show you how to get past them.

One of the great illusions of music is thinking high and low. We only call them high and low because of the way we write them. In reality what we think of as high and low notes are really short wave length notes and longer wave length notes.  Understanding this allows us to stop doing things that not only don’t help but make it more difficult!

The bit of your upper lip that creates our sound stays in one place as we play. It is our Target and we need to learn how to focus the air at it so that it does what we want it to. We can change the angle of the airstream as it hits the Target to play higher or lower but to play efficiently you must have the air aimed at the Target.

Our air is like a violin bow and the place it rubs to make the sound is the Target. And just like a violin if we change the angle of the air or move it we radically reduce the quality and efficiency of our playing. The analogy is not perfect but it is edifying.

If you asked most players where they aim for their notes they would give a pattern that looks like a ladder - aiming low for the low notes down by the floor and aiming somewhere higher for higher notes. It would never occur to them that they don’t have to.

It’s easy to demonstrate that we don’t need to aim up to play high notes. Pick out a spot on a wall to aim at and play a note in your middle register trying to aim your air right at that spot. Then pick out a spot lower on the wall and aim at it and play a higher note. It should be no problem.

It isn’t aiming up or down that changes your pitch.  It’s the size of the aperture (the hole where the air escapes your lips), the speed, aim and intensity of the air and the tension of the upper lip.

Aiming up or down or opening your mouth to play low or any of those kinds of motions make it more difficult to play correctly! If as you aim up to play higher you take the focus of the air from the Target and tense your tongue, face and throat muscles you impede the flow of air and wreck its focus.

Aiming and tonguing are very closely related. If your tongue is close to your lips when you play you can focus the air right at the Target.  If the tip of your tongue is too far back then the air swirls and changes before it hits the Target giving you less control and efficiency.

When you have an entrance and you are worried about hitting the first note, see a bulls-eye right in the middle of your upper lip where it meets the lower lip. Having a place to aim at gives you something for your mind to do. It’s so much more accurate than just worrying increases accuracy by a large percentage.