Finding the Best Mouthpiece Placement

Trumpet player and teacher Pete Kartu has posted a neat video response to one of my embouchure videos on YouTube.  In his video, Pete demonstrates an interesting idea on finding the best mouthpiece placement for the individual.  Take a look.

I tried it out myself on both my trombone mouthpiece and a trumpet mouthpiece.  On both mouthpieces I found two spots that seemed to work.  One was my normal mouthpiece placement (could be my own confirmation bias, though) and the other was a completely different embouchure type that works very poorly for me on the instrument.  It could be that Pete’s exercise can give us a little insight into the student’s embouchure that just needs to then be worked with the instrument to really know.  What works great for mouthpiece buzzing isn’t always what works well on the instrument.

I’ve heard about some similar ideas.  

Donald Reinhardt sometimes would have the student apply a A&D Ointment on the lips to intentionally make them slippery.  The idea is to force the student to find a mouthpiece placement and horn angle that provides the best foundation (teeth and gums) behind the lips.  I’ve also had some success simply having students try out different placements in a systematic way to try to zero in where it works best, but sometimes that doesn’t always work.

Reinhardt also used cheek puffing as a way to help students find the best mouthpiece placement.  Puffing out the cheeks while holding a pitch pulls the mouth corners away and it won’t allow you to focus the muscular effort on the mouth corners.  This is supposed to help you find the placement that will work best when you go back to playing normally, with firm mouth corners.  Personally, I’ve never found any of the cheek puffing exercises to work for me, but some of my students have responded pretty well to it.

Pete’s exercise looks like another tool we can add to our toolbox, although I think that limiting it to the mouthpiece may be deceiving if we’re not careful.  I would also add that before worrying about mouthpiece placement it can be best to work on helping a student with basic embouchure form first.  If a student has loose mouth corners or other mechanical faults in holding the embouchure firm it might be best to fix those before working out the student’s mouthpiece placement, as the placement can change as the student develops embouchure strength and control.

Thanks for posting your video, Pete!