Category: Horn

Guess the Embouchure Type – Hornist Bruno Schneider

~ wilktone ~ 1 Comment

Two in a row today.  I recently came across another video of a horn player, Bruno Schnieder, with a quick close-up look of his embouchure.  Take a close look at almost 1:00 into the video.

Unfortunately, there’s not enough in the video to see his embouchure motion, but his mouthpiece placement is obviously upstream.  Schneider is almost certainly a Low Placement embouchure type.

I like finding videos of Low Placement horn players, because so many horn teachers and horn texts are adamantly against this embouchure type.  Actually, you can find lots of teachers on all the brass who think this embouchure is wrong.

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Guess the Embouchure Type – Hornist Nury Guarnaschelli

~ wilktone ~ 2 Comments

It’s time for another installment of “Guess the Embouchure Type.”  Today, I’m going to try to guess the embouchure type of German hornist Nury Guarnashelli.

As always, you need to take this with a grain of salt, but there’s a close enough look at her embouchure that I can state pretty confidently that she belongs to a Very High Placement embouchure type. If you skip ahead to 6:20 into the video you’ll get the closest look at her embouchure.  You can see that the placement is quite high on the lips, with a great deal more upper lip inside the mouthpiece.  Because of the predominance of the upper lip, you don’t really need to see her embouchure in a transparent mouthpiece to tell that it’s probably one of the two downstream embouchure types.  The best clue, however, is the apparent direction of her embouchure motion.  If you know what to look for, you can easily spot her pushing the mouthpiece and lips together up to ascend and pulling them down to descend.  There is only one of the three basic embouchure types that makes this sort of motion, the Very High Placement type.

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Even More On Horn Embouchure

~ wilktone ~ 5 Comments

I lately keep getting into online discussions with horn players and teachers about embouchure, so I’ve been  writing specifically about horn embouchures recently (although I believe that all brass embouchures essentially have the same characteristics, regardless of instrument).  I guess it’s because I’ve only just really started exploring some internet sites by horn players, and have found a number of really excellent ones.  One of those is Horn Matters.  There has been a really interesting discussion going on that was sparked by Dr. John Ericson’s post on Hornmasters and Mouthpiece Placement.

I have already commented at Dr. Ericson’s post and also wrote in more detail about it here.  Today I wanted to discuss some of the interesting comments that Dr. Ericson’s essay (and my response to it) sparked. First, Dr. Ericson wrote a short reply to my comment.

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Horn Matters on Horn Mouthpiece Placement

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John Ericson is one of the bloggers behind the excellent Horn Matters web site (along with Bruce Hembd).  Recently he posted on what horn texts have to say about mouthpiece placement.  Dr. Ericson quotes passages from Philip Farkas, Gunther Schuller, and several other horn pedagogy authors.

It’s an interesting read and most of the texts that Ericson quotes were unfamiliar to me.  Since I take a different approach to brass embouchures than all the authors, I wanted to comment on some of his post and try to put the quotes into a broader context of how brass embouchures actually can be observed to function.

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The Double Buzz

~ wilktone ~ 11 Comments

It’s a common enough experience. You’re happily playing away when suddenly your tone splits into two different pitches. Usually it’s only a simple missed attack and you can instantly correct and hold the pitch stable. Sometimes this happens around a particular note and starts to get impossible to hold the the pitch without the tone splitting. It might even get to the point where you’re so worried about this that every time you get to that pitch you mentally or even physically flinch, which just makes the problem worse.

Having had this problem myself a couple of different times I can really empathize with brass players who are having this trouble. Not understanding what exactly is going on can make it challenging to figure out what to do. Sometimes the solution that seems obvious only makes things worse and sometimes it goes away on its own, only to come back later.

While I’m sure there are many possible culprits, in my experience a double buzz is likely to be caused by one of the following scenarios.

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Rebooting Your Breath

~ wilktone ~ 1 Comment

Have you ever felt nervous just before a very important performance?  Have you ever felt so anxious that you literally couldn’t catch your breath as you started to play?  It’s so tough to stop that “fight or flight” breathing once it’s started, because it’s a natural biological response.  It also makes it harder to play a brass instrument.

Sometimes taking a few deep breaths can do the trick, but it can help to “trick” your body into resetting your breathing patterns.  I’ll sometimes do this short exercise just before stepping out on stage and have given it to a lot of my students who get nervous just before performances or juries.  

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More Thoughts on Horn and the Upstream Embouchure

~ wilktone ~ 10 Comments

This post has been inspired by an ongoing discussion over at James Boldin’s Horn World Blog.  If you’re joining the conversation now, you can catch up by reading James’s post here, my response, and then his followup.  Briefly, we’ve been musing about why there are fewer horn player’s who place the mouthpiece with more lower lip inside compared to other brass.  Because the lower lip predominates with this embouchure, the air stream is blown upward into the cup and is sometimes called an “upstream” embouchure.

It’s also important for brass teachers and players to understand that a player’s embouchure type isn’t a choice to be made by emulating another player, they are related to each player’s unique anatomy.  When a brass player works against their physical characteristics by adopting an embouchure type that doesn’t suit their face, embouchure difficulties result.

Of the three basic embouchure types, the two downstream embouchure types (placing the mouthpiece with more upper lip inside) are more common. Players who have the anatomy suited to play best with an upstream embouchure (more lower lip inside the mouthpiece) are more rare.  It’s not clear how much less common upstream players are, but my best guess is maybe around 15%.

That said, if you compare horn players’ embouchures with other brass instrument players you’ll probably find even fewer upstream players.  Many horn players speculate that there is something about the instruments itself that makes this so, however there really doesn’t appear to be any difference in basic brass embouchure form and function between any of the instruments.  Assuming this is the case, there must be something else going on.

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Dennis Brain and the Upstream Horn Embouchure

~ wilktone ~ 5 Comments

There’s an interesting discussion going on over at James Boldin’s Horn World Blog on Dennis Brain’s embouchure.  If you’re a horn player you are no doubt already a Dennis Brain fan.  Whether or not you’re a horn player, if you’re a brass musician you should get to know his recordings of the Mozart horn concerti.  Brain is still enormously influential to horn players, in spite of him having such a short career and living a relatively long time ago (1921-1957, he was killed in a car accident).

One reason why I’m interested in Brain’s playing is he appears to have been a Low Placement (upstream) embouchure type.  Watch this video and look closely at Brain’s embouchure.

Update 9/24/22 – While going through my blog to fix broken images and links I noticed that the original video I posted was no longer available. I’ve posted a different video of Brain performing. I *think* it has the same video I was commenting on below, but none of the time s

Brain’s mouthpiece placement is quite low, even lower than most upstream players usually are.  Boldin’s blog article has some still photos, I think from this video.  I would like to point out in particular the moment from 2:39-2:46 in the video.  You can not only see the placement looking like it’s right on the red of his upper lip, but also see his embouchure motion (down to ascend, up to descend, for Very Low Placement embouchure types).

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Embouchure Question

~ wilktone ~ 2 Comments

This question comes from “albrt2890” on one of my YouTube videos.

I am going into my third year of college as a music ed major. I teach private lessons as well. I do have a question though regarding the position of the mouthpiece on the lips. I have a student (f horn) who plays with a large amount of lower lip however when he descends into the lower register of the horn he changes his mouthpiece position so that he has more upper lip in the mouthpiece. Would it benefit him to try to play horn with the “Standard” embouchure through all ranges?

Like pretty much any question about embouchure issues, I’d have to see it.  Still, that’s an unsatisfying answer and since albrt2890 is learning to teach music, he/she probably wants to learn more about embouchures.  I’ll try to explain how and what I’d look for in a case like this.  That said, there are a lot of variables at work here (breathing, tonguing, all sorts of embouchure features, etc.) and something that I don’t mention here may completely change around the following suggestions.  Caveat emptor, or maybe more properly, this is free advice and you get what you pay for.  Take everything that follows with a grain of salt.

There are a couple of somewhat common situations that come to mind here.  First, some players will change to a different embouchure type for different ranges.  Or, some players are just altering their mouthpiece placement slightly for different ranges while not actually type switching.  I would recommend players avoid both these situations, but checking out which is going on and how to correct it depends on some different factors you need to look for.

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