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.

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.

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.