Category: Horn

Embouchure Misconceptions – Five Myths About Brass Embouchures

~ wilktone ~ 21 Comments

If you look around at a number of different resources for brass players and teachers you will notice that while there is a general consensus on topics such as breathing, there is a lot of contradictory advice on brass embouchures.  In the above video I look at five commonly held myths about brass embouchures.

1.  If you want to sound like a famous player you should use the same embouchure as that player.  If you want your students to have a well functioning embouchure, they should use the same embouchure as you.

Most players and teachers seem to feel that the embouchure that works well for them personally must be the correct one, so they instruct others to play similarly.  Sometimes students who emulate a famous player believe the key to sounding that good is to adopt the same embouchure as that player.

The trouble with this logic is that everyone has a different face and what works well for one player doesn’t for another.  There are examples of successful brass players with very different looking embouchures.  A one-size-fits-all approach to embouchure development will be successful if you or your student happens to have the anatomy suited to that instruction, but others will fail.

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A Brief History of Brass Instruments

~ wilktone ~ 11 Comments

What is a brass instrument?
Before getting into the history of how brass instruments and brass music originated and developed it is necessary to be clear on what a brass instrument actually is. A brass instrument is defined as an “aerophone,” which means it is an instrument where the musician must blow air into the instrument. The musician produces the tone by buzzing the lips into what is generally a cup-shaped mouthpiece. It doesn’t mean that the instrument is necessarily made of brass, since instruments that are made of other metals, wood, horn, or even animal bone are included in the family of brass instruments. Likewise, other instruments that are made of brass or metals, such as the flute or saxophone, do not constitute members of the brass family of instruments.

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The Composition Process: Sonatina for Brass Quintet

~ wilktone ~ 2 Comments

I’ve already written a bit about my composition process a bit, specifically some strategies I use to overcome “composer’s block.”  While the general strategies I discuss there have been useful for my students, I’ve found it to be much more helpful if I clarify some of this advice using actual examples.  With this in mind, I kept a journal detailing the steps I took to completing a composition for the UNCA Brass Quintet, including saving different drafts of the piece as I went.  You’ll be able to see here how I got from simple handwritten sketches of basic thematic and motivic material to a completed composition.

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Embouchure Dysfunction: An examination of brass embouchure troubleshooting

~ wilktone ~ 39 Comments

In the above 2 part video I discuss five unique case studies.  Each of these five brass players has some issues in their embouchure which correlate with some noticeable embouchure features.  I try to show how making corrections in their embouchure form, using basic embouchure types as a guide, may lead to improvements in their abilities to play.

There are a few points I wanted to address with this video. The first was to show that the embouchure is an important part of any brass player’s technique, and is not something to be ignored.  Even very successful performers at the peak of their career can suddenly develop embouchure dysfunction.  Traditionally, brass pedagogy takes the approach that it’s best to disregard the embouchure and focus instead on breathing and musical communication.  Since all of the subjects in my video, and most likely in all the other research I’ve read about the topic, were ignorant of their basic embouchure characteristics they were unprepared to accurately determine what precisely was causing their troubles.

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The Three Basic Embouchure Types

~ wilktone ~ 26 Comments

When looking closely at a large number of brass player’s embouchures certain patterns emerge, irrespective of the player’s instrument or practice approach.  Using two universal features of all brass embouchures, the air stream direction as it pass the lips into the mouthpiece and the pushing and pulling of the lips and mouthpiece together up and down along the teeth, it’s possible to classify all brass embouchures into three basic types.

Since each of these three basic embouchure types function quite differently from each other it’s important for brass teachers to understand them, as different types respond to the same instruction in different ways.  Understanding what proper embouchure form is for each type will help teachers guide their students more efficiently and also understand when a player is playing on an embouchure that isn’t appropriate for his or her anatomy.  When confronted with a serious embouchure dysfunction it can help teachers discover the real cause of the troubles and how to best go about correcting them.

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Brass Embouchures: A Guide For Teachers and Players

~ wilktone ~ 9 Comments

On November 8, 2009 I gave this presentation to the North Carolina Music Educators Convention, held in Winston-Salem, NC.  I was pleasantly surprised to have a generally full room of musicians and music educators who mostly seemed genuinely interested in learning more about a topic that is typically ignored in favor of a “let the body figure itself out” practice.

In order to make this information more accessible for both my NCMEA audience as well as to the general public, I created a video that includes my slide show notes, video footage, and the narration from my presentation. 

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The Embouchure Motion

~ wilktone ~ 9 Comments

I made the above video about a year ago to demonstrate and explain a phenomenon that is quite difficult to describe verbally or even using images, the “embouchure motion.”  Most brass players are completely unaware of their embouchure motion, or they may be peripherally aware of it but have an incomplete understanding of it.  Even among people whose expertise I trust in this matter seem do disagree on some of the finer points of it.  It’s a very complex topic and our understanding of it is superficial.

To summarize my points in the video, when changing registers brass players will slide the lips and mouthpiece together up or down along the teeth behind them.  Some players will push the lips and mouthpiece together up towards the nose to ascend and others will pull down towards the chin.  Although the general motion is up and down, most players have some angular deviation in the imaginary line that their mouthpiece moves along.  Some players look almost as if they are making an embouchure motion that is closer to side to side than up and down.

Here are two photographs of the same trombonist playing a low B flat (a major 9th below middle C) and a B flat two octaves higher (a minor 7th above middle C).

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Brass Embouchures and Air Stream Direction

~ wilktone ~ 25 Comments

In 1962 Philip Farkas, a noted teacher and former hornist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, published a book called The Art of Brass Playing. Subtitled, A Treatise on the Formation and Use of the Brass Player’s Embouchure, this text contained Farkas’s hypothesis on the proper embouchure for a brass instrument. According to Farkas, the proper embouchure would have the lips and jaw lined up in such a way that the air stream would be blown straight down the shank of the mouthpiece, illustrated as below.

from Phillip Farkas’s “The Art of Brass Playing”

It wasn’t until later that Farkas tested out this hypothesis and discovered that this wasn’t the case.  In 1970 he published a shorter text, titled A Photographic Study of 40 Virtuoso Horn Player’s Embouchures. The photographs Farkas took told a different story from earlier. 39 of the horn players buzzed in such a way that the air stream was directed at a downward angle, and 1 subject blew the air stream upward.

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