Category: Practice

“Greasing the Groove” for Brass Practice

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There’s an approach to weight training that I’ve been reading about that I think might have some benefits for brass musicians, particularly those who have limited practice time due to demanding work or family schedules. The basic idea is to do fewer repetitions of weight training, but to do so frequently. It’s sometimes called “greasing the groove.”

…Tsatsouline advocates lifting weights for no more than five repetitions, resting for a bit between sets and reps, and not doing too many sets. For a runner, this would be like going for a four-mile jog, but taking a break to drink water and stretch every mile. Tsatsouline’s book suggests spending 20 minutes at the gym, tops, five days a week. In this way, he claims, you grease the neurological “groove,” or pathway, between your brain and the exercises your body performs. It’s not exactly the brutal routine you’d expect from someone billed as a Soviet weight lifter. But Tsatsouline contends this is the most effective way to build strength.

Lift Weight, Not Too Much, Most of the Days, Olga Khazan

This is obviously not a new idea for music pedagogy and practice. We already know that it’s better to practice 15 minutes a day (every day) over the course of a week than to spend a similar hour and 45 minutes one day over the week. It’s also pretty well established that our brains learn and retain information better with spaced repetition over cramming, but the concept that it’s better to train strength and/or motor skills this way often alludes our thinking when we apply it to brass practice. While many brass teachers advise students to rest as much as you play or never practicing past the point of fatigue, it’s really easy for us to get so focused on practice that we practice on tired chops, leading to reinforcing bad habits or even injuring ourselves.

What does “greasing the groove” look like and how can we apply it to brass practice?

One way to grease the groove is to just do the exercise whenever you think of it. Ben Greenfield, in Beyond Training, describes how he would do three to five pull-ups every time he walked under a pull-up bar installed in his office doorway. By the end of the day, he’d have performed 30 to 50 pull-ups with minimal effort.

Lift Weight, Not Too Much, Most of the Days, Olga Khazan

I usually have one of my trombones out of the case on a stand at all times. When the horns are in my cases there’s an extra step to take it out and put it together before I practice. It’s not a lot of work, but if your practice time is limited during the day and you want to try this approach it helps to have your instrument ready to go. When you walk by your horn, pick it up and play a little.

These days my practice time is limited on week days due to my wife’s work-from-home schedule, so I absolutely need to carve out time to practice. But in the past I’ve found that practicing for a few minutes many times a day is a pretty effective way to keep my chops up. Practicing in this way you will never be playing while tired, so you won’t be resorting to those bad habits that can creep in when our chops are spent (excessive mouthpiece pressure, squeezing the corners too tight, etc.). It also can keep you mentally fresh every time you pick up the horn and play so that you can focus on what you’re practicing better.

Of course this isn’t the only way to practice and if you want to be able to play 2-3 sets of lead in a big band without tiring you’ll want to spend some time practicing over longer periods of time, but depending on your schedule “greasing the groove” might be a better way to practice. In normal times I usually have regular rehearsals and gigs that keep me playing for 2-3 hours with less breaks, so I don’t feel like I need to practice for hours at a time. I can usually maintain endurance by playing those rehearsals and gigs. “Greasing the groove” during these times does seem to help me build and maintain my correct playing form so that when endurance does become a factor I’m much more likely to play efficiently and it’s not usually a problem to play for long periods of time. In fact, I strongly suspect that for a few minutes at a time many times a day could improve your endurance even without playing your horn for hours at a time. And if you do have longer periods of time set aside for regular practice, resting as much as you play and spacing out your practice sessions over the day is good advice too.

Try it out and let us know in the comments how it works for you.

External Focus to Optimize Playing Technique

~ wilktone ~ 1 Comment

To paraphrase Dr. Gabriele Wulf, a central question for music teachers is: How can learning playing technique be facilitated and how can musical performance be optimized? In her article, “Attentional focus and motor learning: a review of 15 years,” Dr. Wulf addresses what research into motor skill development published between 1997 and 2012 tells us and offers some practical suggestions that teachers and musicians can use in their practice.

I’ve discussed similar concepts before. My most comprehensive attempt was A Review of Implicit and Explicit Learning Strategies in the Development of Motor Skills and its Application To Teaching Instrumental Technique. In that paper I discussed the difference between implicit (goal oriented) and explicit (detail/technique oriented) instructions and what the literature tells about those two extreme pedagogical approaches. My (inexpert) findings from that research were that if we rely only on one or the other, the implicit approach where one focuses on the goal of good sounding music will work better than spending time on the details of how technique is developed correctly. That said, it’s not an either/or dichotomy and much of the literature acknowledges that both approaches happen in teaching and learning and the there should be some sort of balance between the two. Wulf’s 2012 article on attentional focus and motor learning was published the same year I did my research and wrote my paper.

That’s a slightly different topic than Wulf’s article, but I have come across her work before and posted about it here. In my post Golfing Focus Applied to Music I considered the idea of keeping the musician’s focus as external as possible. In that post I discussed some thoughts about an interview she gave for a golf podcast and how her suggestions to improve golf performance might be applied to music pedagogy and practice.

Here is the paper abstract.

Over the past 15 years, research on focus of attention has consistently demonstrated that an external focus (i.e., on the movement effect) enhances motor performance and learning relative to an internal focus (i.e., on body movements). This article provides a comprehensive review of the extant literature. Findings show that the performance and learning advantages through instructions or feedback inducing an external focus extend across different types of tasks, skill levels, and age groups. Benefits are seen in movement effectiveness (e.g., accuracy, consistency, balance) as well as efficiency (e.g., muscular activity, force production, cardiovascular responses). Methodological issues that have arisen in the literature are discussed. Finally, our current understanding of the underlying mechanisms of the attentional focus effect is outlined, and directions for future research are suggested.

Attentional focus and motor learning: a review of 15 years – Gabriel Wulf

I do feel that some of the criticisms I noted in my review of implicit and explicit instructions also apply to Wulf’s paper. For one, an awful lot of the research she sites in her paper were written by her or with her as one of the listed authors. On the one hand, it’s a sign that Wulf is considered one of the experts in her field, but if you’re looking for a consensus opinion it is also a sign of a potential bias. Not having read most of the papers she reviewed I can’t really say if any criticisms or confirmations she covers in her article are valid, but as I recently have been reminded, you can often tell what side of an argument a paper will come down on merely by looking at the authors. Wulf’s research seems to suggest that an external focus is always better, in spite of that not being a universal suggestion.

That said, Wulf does address the research that conflicted with her own findings and discusses potential issues that might cause the differences of opinions. And she also acknowledges that at times it is essential for us to attend to the details of technique. The trick is to make the focus of attention as external as possible, rather than focused internally on the motor control. One study she cited came up with a creative way to teach golfing technique with a more effective external focus. An important part of the golf swing is apparently how and when a golfer shifts weight towards the front leg. The study, “Carry distance and X-factor increases in golf through an external focus of attention,” compared golfers instructed with an internal focus (shift your weight to the left foot) and an external focus designed to elicit the same mechanical procedure (push against the left side of the ground). As expected, the external focus worked better.

All but one of the papers and articles Wulf cited were unrelated to music, but one study with piano students was discussed.

Duke, Cash, and Allen (2011) examined attentional focus effects on music performance. Music majors were asked to perform a keyboard passage, which consisted of 13 alternating sixteenth notes (A and F) that were to be played as quickly and evenly as possible. All participants played the sequence under four conditions: with a focus on their finger movements, on the movements of the piano keys, on the hammers, or on the sound of the keyboard. On a transfer test that involved the reverse tone sequence, a focus on the more distal movement effects (sound or hammers) resulted in greater consistency than either focusing on the more proximal effect (keys) or the internal focus (fingers).

Attentional focus and motor learning: a review of 15 years – Gabriel Wulf

My takeaway is that when technique is addressed in teaching and practice that some creative approaches to keeping the attention external is more effective than focusing on fixing the mechanics with an internal focus. Considering trombone technique as an example, here are some of my ideas on creating an external focus to achieve a specific motor skill.

Breathing

Arnold Jacobs and some of his former students had some great ideas about making the breath technique external. Jacobs was pretty adamant that he didn’t want students to think about “filling up the lungs” or otherwise thinking about the expansion that happens with inhalation. If you need to take in more air in an efficient way he advised paying attention to the feel of “wind” moving past the lips. Concentration on the belly expanding is a very internal focus. Moving it to the lips is a little less, but still internal. So how can we think about inhalation in a way that is more external?

It’s necessary to be a little creative here. I like to draw on mental imagery. Rather than feeling the inhalation at the lips, imagine that your breath is drawing in air from across the room.

For the blowing I’ve been borrowing from ideas I’ve gotten from Sam Pilafian’s and Patrick Sheridan’s book, The Breathing Gym. There’s an exercise in there where you imagine blowing the air as if you were shooting an arrow, throwing a dart, and tossing a paper airplane. So, for example, to help a student keep the air moving smoothly through a phrase you can have them visualize floating a paper airplane on the air flowing out of their bell.

Embouchure

The embouchure motion is a relatively easy technique to move to an external focus. The specific technique we’re trying to encourage is the pushing/pulling of the mouthpiece and lips along the teeth and gums. The mouthpiece itself is external already, but if we want to follow Wulf’s findings that the more external the focus the better, we can instead focus on the bell of the instrument moving up and down or side to side, whichever matches the individual player’s embouchure motion. If the horn angle should change somewhat while changing registers, rather than think about how that feels at the lips, focus on what’s happening at the bell.

For something like a smile embouchure I like to again resort to mental imagery. If the problem is the mouth corners are pulling back to ascend, rather than focus on what the mouth corners are doing imagine a long spring on either side that is attached to both walls on one end and at the mouth corners on the other end. As the student ascends, those springs are pushing against the corners and keeping them in place.

Tonguing

Tonguing is the most difficult topic of brass technique for me to come up with ideas for external focus. I think the current standard of using the tongue in a vocal manner works pretty well. So rather than thinking about raising the level of tongue arch to ascend the student will imagine saying, “tah-ee.” Another thought I had would be to imagine that there are motion sensors in the tongue that project its movements to a giant, artificial tongue so that they move in tandem. While playing ascending slurs the student could visualize what that giant artificial tongue is doing, rather than focusing internally on their own tongue.

A visualization that seems to work pretty well for me is to imagine that there’s a line of air coming out of the bell that is at the precise level of my tongue arch. As I slur from a middle range note to an upper range note that line of air is raised higher. Again, the point is to move the focus away from the internal (inside the mouth) to the external (on the other end of the bell).

Some of the above ideas aren’t great, but I’m really just brainstorming right now. I’ve been experimenting with moving my focus external in my practice for a while now but I haven’t tried it more than a few times with students. From that small sample I suspect that different visualizations and different degrees of distance in the point of focus will vary from player to player. This jives with some of the research Wulf mentions that the more advanced the subject the more distant the point of focus can be.

One thing I would like to point out is that my examples, and many of Wulf’s, involve someone (a teacher, coach, or other independent observer) knowing and understanding exactly what and how the performer should be doing. With the knowledge of how to play a savvy teacher or performer can come up with methods to affect a specific motor skill using the more effective external focus. At no part in this process does it appear that it’s recommended to ignore the playing mechanics. Interpreting this research as advocating letting the body figure itself out would seem to be less effective than approaching it through an understanding of what efficient playing technique is and working towards that physical goal using a focus that is as external as possible.

And of course it should go without saying that the sound should be the guide for the teacher and player here. The point of moving your focus to the external is to create the habits we want to adopt for good playing. When you’re done working on the technical aspects of performing for the time being it’s good to forget about them and put your attention on playing with expression.

Try it out in your own practicing and teaching and see how it works for you. What other ideas for shifting the focus from something internal to more external can you think of? Please leave your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.

Rest As Much As You Play

~ wilktone ~ 1 Comment

There is a concept for practicing brass instruments that is fairly well known, but probably not done correctly by most of us – when practicing, rest as much as you play. Those instructions are fairly clear, but hard to implement and also leaves a lot of room for interpretation. What does it really mean to rest as much as you play while practicing?

My interpretation of this advice is to break that up into two concepts. First, when in the midst of a practice session when I get done with an exercise routine or piece that I’m practicing I will try to put the instrument down for the same amount of time it took me to play it before moving on to the next routine or piece. So in a 60 minute practice session I might only have the metal on the mouth for about 30 minutes of that hour, but it’s 5 minutes on, 5 minutes of rest, and so on. In actuality, there’s perhaps even more rest time than playing time if you count the very short breaks I’ll be taking built into whatever I’m practicing. Solo rep has rests in it, many technique exercises have repeated “sets” where I’ll take the mouthpiece off the lips for a moment and then move on to the next set, etc.

The other interpretation I have of resting as much as you play is to then put time between practice sessions. In general, I rarely practice more than an hour at a stretch, so when I come back to another practice session I make sure that I have an hour of not playing between. With my current schedule that’s not a problem since I usually am able to practice for an hour each morning and if I don’t have a gig or a rehearsal that evening will put in another hour in the evening. Back when I was a graduate music student I had a more demanding rehearsal and practice schedule and would organize my practice time around my rehearsal schedule so that I could put at least an hour in between each playing obligation.

The basic idea here is that while practicing you should always be refreshed enough to play correctly. When fatigue sets in it’s very easy to slip into habits that aren’t very helpful. Some of these habits will seem like they’re working, to an extent, but it’s often not until the next day where it feels stiff and unresponsive. Resting as much as you play both in a practice session and throughout the entire day helps you avoid that.

It’s also worth mentioning that players will respond differently to how much you rest and play. If you’re familiar with the basic brass embouchure types, players belonging to the two downstream types will typically find that they can play for longer periods of time, but when they finally get tired they will need a nice long break to recover. In contrast, players who belong to the upstream type find that they can get tire quickly, but all it takes is a short break to recover. These are generalizations and you can find exceptions, but they can be used to your advantage if you understand your embouchure type and how to play correctly for that type. For example, as an upstream player I find that practicing in shorter spurts of just a few minutes at a time, then resting for a few minutes, can get me through more challenging materials better than trying to go through everything as quickly as possible.

It’s important, at least at first, to be more diligent about this. Take out your phone and time yourself on how long it takes you to get through something you’re working on. Then set a timer for that amount of time and rest before you play again. Better still, record yourself and then listen back to it in its entirety. Hearing how you sound while not in the act of making music is great feedback. Another fine way to duplicate this is to find a practice partner working on similar things as you. If you’re working on technique routines, for example, you play an exercise and your partner plays it back, then you move on to the next one and go back and forth. If you’re practicing solo repertoire you can alternate phrases with each other, or play the same phrase back and forth. If improvising you can trade choruses, 16, 8s, or 4s. Rest for a few minutes between each set that you’re doing.

If you already practice this way, let us know in the comments why you’ve adopted this approach and how it’s worked for you. If you don’t, tell us why you’ve chosen to not do so or try it out for a week or three and then let us know if you felt a difference.

Glenn Libman Talks Donald Reinhardt

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I wasn’t familiar with trumpet player Glenn Libman prior to coming across this video. Libman studied with Donald Reinhardt for a number of years. In this video for the Trumpet Diagnostics YouTube channel Libman got together with Bobby Medina and Paul Baron to discuss Donald Reinhardt’s pedagogy.

I don’t know exactly when Libman studied with Reinhardt, but I do know that Reinhardt altered some of his ideas and presentation over the years. Some of what Libman discusses in this video are contrary to things that I learned from my teacher, Doug Elliott, who also studied with Reinhardt for a number of years.

For example, Libman describes Reinhardt’s term “pivot” more about bring the bell of the instrument up or down. He does qualify it as bring the bell up also pushes the mouthpiece and lips up, but this is a tricky way to describe it. My preference is to call the phenomenon as an “embouchure motion” and discuss any horn angle changes as being related to keeping the mouthpiece pressure consistent across the entire range.

Libman also discusses Reinhardt’s IIIB type (what I usually call the Medium High Placement) as being the most common, and IIIA (Very High Placement) as being more rare. If I recall correctly, Reinhardt wrote or said something similar that his IIIB type was pretty common. That said, my experience has been different. I find many more players belong to the Very High Placement (IIIA) type than the Medium High Placement (IIIB). I wonder if the prevalence of modern orthodontics have made some types like the Medium High Placement/IIIB less common than they were during Reinhardt’s day.

He also describes free buzzing as working against upstream players, where I was taught that free buzzing was a very good exercise for upstream players (as long as you don’t buzz into the instrument). There seems to be something about the upstream embouchure type (Low Placement/IV) that these players have trouble building embouchure strength and endurance simply by playing a lot. Free buzzing seems to really help upstream players do so.

Regardless, I found the whole interview interesting and informative. There’s a lot of good information in there and if you are curious about Donald Reinhardt’s pedagogy it makes for a solid introduction.

The Evidence On Mouthpiece Buzzing Efficacy

~ wilktone ~ 1 Comment

Back when I was a high school and college music student my brass teachers never really emphasized nor discouraged mouthpiece buzzing. It didn’t seem to be a point of controversy. I knew that a lot teachers recommended it, but I didn’t really consider it more than doing it occasionally. As a doctoral trombone student, my mentor, John Seidel, did have certain exercises that he used that involved buzzing on the mouthpiece. These days there are many high profile brass performers and teachers who actively discourage it while others argue that it’s extremely valuable.

I’ve written about this topic before (here and here), but until recently I haven’t gone out of my way to get a decent look and see what empirical evidence is out there for and against mouthpiece buzzing. I did a quick search in a college library catalogue for “mouthpiece buzzing,” limiting it to sources published since 2000, to see what would come up in the academic and professional literature. I ended up finding 35 articles/papers that had something to say about mouthpiece buzzing, of which only 29 actually addressed whether mouthpiece buzzing was useful for teaching and practice. By no means is this a comprehensive literature review, but rather gives us a snapshot into what sort of information is available and what the state of current research is on the topic.

Rather than summarizing each reference, I instead just looked at the following five criteria:

  1. Does the article/paper empirically research the efficacy of mouthpiece buzzing?
  2. Does the article/paper speculate on the efficacy of mouthpiece buzzing with relevant and/or accurate information?
  3. Does the article/paper avoid speculation on the efficacy of mouthpiece buzzing using anecdotal, irrelevant and/or inaccurate information?
  4. Does the article/paper properly cite sources or otherwise logically reason out its arguments for the efficacy of mouthpiece buzzing?
  5. Is the article/paper pro-mouthpiece buzzing, con-mouthpiece buzzing, or neutral?

Note that I’ve phrased the questions in the above criteria in order to make “yes” answers show that a resource would be a helpful reference for objectively looking at the effectiveness of mouthpiece buzzing. Likewise, any “no” answers mean that this paper or article would not make a very good objective reference. That’s not to say that the paper isn’t good, it just won’t be able to objectively answer the question on whether or not mouthpiece buzzing is a positive or negative practice approach.

I also feel compelled to point out that I mostly skimmed these papers and articles, glossing over things that weren’t relevant to the topic of mouthpiece buzzing. It’s entirely possible that I missed or misunderstood some points in this literature and so you should take my evaluation of them with a grain of salt.

Results

You’ll see in the below chart that the vast majority of papers and articles I found simply state their opinion on mouthpiece buzzing without citing any sources or backing it up with logical speculation. It largely seems that almost everyone simply assumes mouthpiece buzzing is useful and the rational comes down to either tradition or anecdotal support. Some of them contain surveys of literature and/or brass teachers that endorse mouthpiece buzzing, but this is a poor method to judge the effectiveness of a pedagogical approach – if the pedagogical tradition is already biased towards mouthpiece buzzing then we can assume most players and teachers will be similarly biased. That doesn’t necessarily mean that mouthpiece buzzing is bad, but the reasons for it are flawed. As you’ll note in my chart below, very few people have subjected mouthpiece buzzing to an honest test.

Likewise, you’ll note that the vast majority of the literature I found falls into the “pro” camp towards mouthpiece buzzing, while only two ended up as “neutral.” I didn’t find any resources that were definitely against mouthpiece buzzing in this search, although I know of a few high profile teachers or players who are against it. A literature search for the term “mouthpiece buzzing” is probably going to be biased towards papers and articles recommending it, since authors who are against the practice are not likely to mention it at all if they are recommending another method.

A very large number of these resources got a “no” answer on Criteria 3 (does it avoid inaccurate speculation) because it claimed that the instrument functions as an “amplifier” for the buzzing lips. While this may be a good analogy for teaching and there is an element of truth to it, the actual physics behind the standing wave inside the instrument makes that idea too simplistic to logically speculate on the efficacy of mouthpiece buzzing as a practice method. This is one of those ideas that’s been repeated for so long that a lot of brass musicians accept it without question.

As an aside, one of the reasons I restricted my search to resources written in the 21st century is because in a recent Trombone Chat forum conversation one participant lamented that much of the discussion there revolved around pedagogy from 50 years ago or longer (specifically, that of Arnold Jacobs). That said, a great deal of the articles and papers I found cited Jacobs or even were specifically devoted to his pedagogy. Jacobs’s pedagogy is still dominant, at least in English language resources. While I feel there’s much that his approach has to offer players and teachers, there’s also much that needs revision and too often it’s the later that gets cited in support of certain pedagogical practices (you can read more of what I’ve written about Jacobs’s pedagogy here).

Out of the literature I found, there was only one study that made an attempt to measure whether or not mouthpiece buzzing is an effective practice tool, “The Effect of a Researcher Composed Mouthpiece Buzzing Routine On the Intonation and Tone Quality of Beginning Band Students,” by Jason Beghtol. In Beghtol’s review of the literature he doesn’t cite any other study that similarly tested mouthpiece buzzing, leading me to believe that it’s likely no one has done so before him. I think it’s very important to note that the results of Beghtol’s tests showed no statistically significant results between his sample population of students who were given mouthpiece buzzing instruction compared with his control group. Keep in mind that there were some limitations of methodology that make it difficult for us to draw up conclusions that will apply to the general brass playing population, but so far the only empirical evidence concerning the use of mouthpiece buzzing shows that it’s no more effective than not mouthpiece buzzing at all.

TitleCriteria 1Criteria 2Criteria 3Criteria 4Criteria 5
“Dr. Nathaniel O. Brickens: His Pedagogy, Career, and Influence On Trombone Performers and Educators,” Dunwoody Mirvil, 2008NoYesNoNoPro
“A review of the unique injuries sustained by musicians,” Michele Heinan, 2008NoNoYesNoPro
“Pedagogical Methods of Vincent Cichowicz as Witnessed by Larry Black, 1964-1966,” Brittany Hendricks 2013NoNoNoNoPro
“Developing a Solid Bass Trombone Sound,” Aaron Wilson, 2016NoNoNoNoPro
“A Guide To Daily Routines,” James Boldin, 2011NoNoNoYesNeutral
“Conrad Herwig Masterclass,” Antonio J. Garcia, 2014NoNoNoNoPro
“Endurance: Thoughts On Winning the Unwinnable,” Patrick Boyle, 2009NoNoNoNoPro
“A Lost Embouchure Found: A Journey Back From Focal Dystonia,” Ashley Gulbranson, 2014NoNoNoNoPro
“Empowering Musicians: Teaching, Transforming, Living,” William J. Dawson, 2016NoNoNoNoPro
“Starting the French Horn: Step-By-Step to Ensure Success,” Drew Phillips, 2019NoNoNoNoPro
“Song and Wind In Canada: The Impact of Arnold Jacobs’s Teaching on Canadian Tuba Pedagogues,” Jonathan David Rowsell, 2018NoNoNoNoPro
“A Pedagogical Approach For Developing the Endurance, Technical Facility and Flexibility Necessary to Perform Anthony Plog’s Concerto for Solo Trumpet, 14 Brass, and Percussion,” Michael Sullivan, 2014NoNoNoNoPro
“The Modern Trumpet Player,” Tony Carlucci, 2011NoNoNoNoPro
“Steps Toward More Effective Brass Blowing,” Chad Criswell, 2009NoNoNoNoPro
“Technique Tips: Accuracy,” Jeffrey Agrell, 2010NoNoNoNoPro
“From Blat to Beautiful: Help Your Trumpeters Develop a Great Embouchure,” Alicia Sanderman, 2004NoNoNoNoPro
“Making a Good Sound On the Trumpet,” Thomas Dust, 2007NoNoNoNoPro
“Embouchure Problems In Brass Instrumentalists,” Richard J. LedermanNoYesNoNoPro
“Five Basics For a Horn Embouchure,” Andrew M. McAfeeNoNoNoNoPro
“Euphonium Euphoria: Encouraging Great Sound and Facility from Your Euphonium Players,” Aaron WilsonNoNoNoNoPro
“No More ‘Bad Days’ – A Trumpet and Brass-Instrument
Warm-Up Routine that Works,” Christian McIvor, 2017		NoNoNoNoPro
“Upper Register Training for Young Horn Players,” Drew PhillipsNoNoNoNoPro
“Endurance: Thoughts On Winning the Unwinnable,” Patrick Boyle, 2009NoNoNoNoPro
“To Bee Or Not To Bee: The Art of Buzzing,” Mike HeriottNoNoNoNoPro
“Teaching Beginning Trombone Players,” Todd L. Fallis, 2001NoNoNoNoPro
“Lessons Learned From the Slide Trumpet,” Chase Sandborn, 2003NoNoNoNoPro
“The Buzz On Horn Buzzing,” Jon Chappell, 2008NoYesNoNoPro
“Mouthpiece Buzzing,” Gillian MacKay, 2012NoYesYesYesPro
“The Effect of a Researcher Composed Mouthpiece Buzzing Routine On the Intonation and Tone Quality of Beginning Band Students,” Jason Beghtol, 2018YesYesNoYesNeutral

You might wonder after going through this exercise what I personally think at this point. My opinion on mouthpiece buzzing hasn’t changed. There are probably some situations where it can be a useful tool, when done a certain way. It’s also possible that doing it wrong or too much can actually be counterproductive. I think it’s very likely that when done correctly and moderation that it’s not really all that more useful than practicing other things that have less risk of working against how we want to actually play the instrument, so I’m going to continue to avoid it in my own practice and use it sparingly in my teaching.

Embouchure Experiment – 10 Days With the Opposite Type

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This post is a followup to Friday’s post. If you want to try to solve this embouchure puzzle on your own you should look at the video here first, then come back and read this one. In order to follow this post completely you’ll need to understand what the three basic brass embouchure types are. If you don’t, please read this post and watch the video embedded there. If you want a more complete discussion of this, start here at this page.

I’ve been taking some time lately to catch some video lessons with my one of my mentors, Doug Elliott. For those of you who might not already be familiar with Doug, he is a trombonist, mouthpiece maker, and an expert in brass embouchure technique. He was also the primary source in my dissertation, “The correlation between Doug Elliott’s embouchure types and selective physical and playing characteristics among trombonists.” Doug has been guiding me through an experiment we tried to fix the problems I’ve been dealing with.

Once more, here is a video that shows the issues that I’ve been covering up for a while now manifest. You can hear the choked upper register, but can you spot the mechanical issue that is causing it? The answer, and the path that Doug helped guide me though to make corrections, are below the break.

Can you spot the cause of the problem?
Continue reading “Embouchure Experiment – 10 Days With the Opposite Type” →

Embouchure Difficulties – Spot the Cause

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Many brass musicians have had embouchure breakdowns, including some very exceptional players. So it should come to no surprise that a mediocre player, like myself, can run into some issues with embouchure technique. This in spite of my interest in brass embouchure technique and almost 25 years of study in embouchure form and function.

For years I’ve had some nagging difficulties that have caused some problems in my playing. I’m usually able to muscle my way through them, especially after warming up for a while, but I haven’t been fixing the mechanical problems, only getting good at covering them up. This is actually quite common. What’s strange is that I know exactly what I’m doing wrong and what I should be doing, it’s just been a bear to make the corrections happen consistently.

Recently I’ve decided to make it a priority to fix these problems. Since at the current time we’re still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I don’t have any serious performing obligations so this is a good time to get this done. I’ve been catching some video lessons from my mentor, Doug Elliott, who has been guiding me through an interesting embouchure experiment that has helped solidify things for me. But before I post about that I want to give the masses a chance to see my problems manifest and make your best guess as to what you think is going wrong. Then, offer your hypothetical advice.

Can you spot the mechanical issues? How would you fix them with a student? Post your thoughts in the comments here. On Monday I’ll post what Doug and I figured out was happening and the experiment we tried that eventually made for good improvements.

Deliberate Practice

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This is probably not new news to most of you, but I found this article called “The Myth of ‘Practice Makes Perfect‘” interesting. Author Annie Murphy Paul discusses the research on how improvement requires not a lot of practice, but deliberate and focused practice.

“Hundreds of thousands of people took music lessons when they were young and remember little or nothing,” he points out, giving lie to the notion that learning an instrument is easiest when you’re a kid. The important thing is not just practice but deliberate practice, “a constant sense of self-evaluation, of focusing on one’s weaknesses, rather than simply fooling around and playing to one’s strengths. Studies show that practice aimed at remedying weaknesses is a better predictor of expertise than raw number of hours; playing for fun and repeating what you already know is not necessarily the same as efficiently reaching a new level. Most of the practice that most people do, most of the time, be it in the pursuit of learning the guitar or improving their golf game, yields almost no effect.”

The Myth of ‘Practice Makes Perfect’ – Annie Murphy Paul

While this is really not new information, most of us still don’t practice deliberately most of the time. It’s not fun poking at your flaws and forcing yourself to address them. If you’re into an activity it’s probably because you find it fun and constantly finding things that you don’t do already well make it less so. It takes discipline to spend your practice time not sounding good, but it’s absolutely the best way to spend your time if you want to maximize your results.

There’s a lot of scholarly evidence to support this approach. Paul cites a couple of papers that are also interesting reads. I couldn’t find the original paper online, but here is a 2008 paper by Anders Ericsson, “Deliberate Practice and Acquisition of Expert Performance: A General Overview.”

Traditionally, professional expertise has been judged by length of experience, reputation, and perceived mastery of knowledge and skill. Unfortunately, recent research demonstrates only a weak relationship between these indicators of expertise and actual, observed performance. In fact, observed performance does not necessarily correlate with greater professional experience. Expert performance can, however, be traced to active engagement in deliberate practice (DP), where training (often designed and arranged by their teachers and coaches) is focused on improving particular tasks. DP also involves the provision of immediate feedback, time for problem‐solving and evaluation, and opportunities for repeated performance to refine behavior. In this article, we draw upon the principles of DP established in other domains, such as chess, music, typing, and sports to provide insight into developing expert performance in medicine.

Anders Ericsson

Paul also references research done specifically with musicians, “It’s Not How Much; It’s How: Characteristics of Practice Behavior and Retention of Performance Skills.” The researchers looked at how different pianists practiced a challenging passage and then rated their performances the next day to see what strategies worked best. You won’t be surprised to learn that the musicians weren’t the pianists who practiced the longest, but those who focused their practice in a way that they practiced the passage correctly, rather than reinforcing mistakes.

The lesson to learn here is to always practice with an ear towards what your mistakes are and make sure to fix them. It takes great effort and isn’t the most enjoyable way to practice, but it’s absolutely the best way to improve.

Speaking of which, it’s time for me to go practice.

Thoughts On Mouthpiece Buzzing

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When I was a music student mouthpiece buzzing didn’t seem so controversial as it seems to me today. Most of my teachers used it to a degree, but didn’t emphasize it too much. Today there are many books and routines for brass that incorporate or even focus on mouthpiece buzzing. There are also many teachers and players, some very prominent ones, who discourage any mouthpiece buzzing. Others swear by it. 

When I see disagreements in brass pedagogy and practice I like to take a step back and look at the question as objectively as possible. What does mouthpiece buzzing practice do to our normal brass playing? What’s the relationship to normal brass playing and why does it have a positive or negative effect? Are there ways to maximize the benefit and reduce any drawbacks? 

Mouthpiece buzzing requires the brass musician to focus the embouchure perfectly on pitch or else the note will be out of tune. On the instrument the player can get away with being a little off because the acoustics of the instrument will “slot” the note for you. However, if the embouchure still isn’t focused correctly on the instrument the tone won’t be as focused. I also suspect that playing a note with the embouchure not quite in focus is more tiring in the long term then working with the natural resonances of the instrument.

Even though buzzing on the mouthpiece doesn’t utilize the natural harmonic resonances of a brass instrument, it’s worth noting that a mouthpiece does have a harmonic frequency, It’s just a high one due to the very small resonance chamber that’s created. I’m not expert enough in the acoustic principles at play to know how this comes into play when mouthpiece buzzing, but I do know that many brass musicians find they have areas where they have issues when buzzing the mouthpiece. 

Along with requiring the embouchure to focus correctly, mouthpiece buzzing also works the player’s breathing. If you buzz into the mouthpiece alone you’ll find that you exhale the air more quickly. One school of thought is that by buzzing into the mouthpiece alone you practice really moving a lot of air quickly. The idea is that by getting used to moving more air than usual the player will be better able to move a lesser amount air on the instrument. 

Some teachers and players adjust the resistance while mouthpiece buzzing in some ways. There are devices that you can buy the allow you to fine tune the opening of at the shank end of the mouthpiece and simulate the back pressure of playing the instrument. A cheaper alternative is to put a bit of your finger up and block a bit of the hole at the shank of the mouthpiece.

Critics of mouthpiece buzzing offer that it’s different from playing the instrument. They argue, plausibly, that the technique you use for buzzing the mouthpiece well is going to be different from what you want to use while playing your instrument. I tend to agree that there probably other things that brass musicians can practice that will work better in the long term. If you’re too accomplished at buzzing the mouthpiece it risks getting in the way of playing the instrument well.

But there are situations where I think that mouthpiece buzzing can provide some benefits, with some caveats. I feel mouthpiece buzzing should be used sparingly and only for short times. When used, it’s best to immediately afterwards play something on the the instrument. Mouthpiece buzzing is different from playing the instrument, and if you are careful it’s possible to exploit that difference.

One of my mentors used mouthpiece buzzing mainly in the context for helping legato playing. He would have his studio play a phrase or three of a legato etude, then buzz it on the mouthpiece (only tonguing initial attacks after the breath, the rest no tongue). Immediately after buzzing, with as little time as possible, we were to pop the mouthpiece back into the instrument and start the etude over. Usually students would notice an improvement in tone and ease of playing. 

For teachers, this mouthpiece buzzing exercise can give your student a quick and easy “win” in your lesson. While benefits of mouthpiece buzzing seem to be a little more short-term, sometimes it’s good to give a student a boost of confidence. There are also definitely musical techniques that mouthpiece buzzing works on outside of brass technique, such as ear training and even expressive playing. 

I should also mention that mouthpiece buzzing is a great way to introduce beginners into how to form a brass embouchure. Free buzzing is usually pretty challenging for a beginner, at least while getting the embouchure form I want to encourage, but it’s much easier to do on a mouthpiece. Buzzing on the mouthpiece is often easier for a new player to get their first sound than trying it on the instrument.

All that said, I really haven’t used mouthpiece buzzing regularly in my own practice and teaching for a while. My preference is to work to address things in ways either directly on the instrument or in a way that is further removed from how normal brass playing works (i.e., through singing to develop ear training, free buzzing to develop embouchure strength, breathing exercises to develop good breath control). 

My two cents – You probably can do just as well without mouthpiece buzzing in the long term, but if you don’t do more than a few minutes or so a day you should be OK if you feel it’s helpful. I would recommend you don’t use it as a warm up, always start your practice by playing your instrument. When you do buzz on the mouthpiece, always immediately return to playing the instrument and ensure that you’re developing your ability there, rather than getting better at being a mouthpiece buzzer.

“Embouchure Motion” Stabilizer

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Donald Reinhardt created an exercise he called the “Pivot Stabilizer.” He intended students to use this exercise as their first notes of the day. Here is the exercise, with some hand written notes and instructions for a specific trumpet student.

In order to better understand this exercise you first should forget about the embouchure “pivot.” Reinhardt defined it a certain way, but unless you studied it from him you almost certainly don’t understand what it is. Instead, think of this as an exercise to stabilize a brass musician’s “embouchure motion.”

Embouchure Motion – The natural motion a brass player makes when changing registers where the mouthpiece and lips together will be pushed and pulled along the teeth and gums in a generally up and down motion. The position of the mouthpiece on the lips doesn’t change, just the relationship of the mouthpiece rim and lips to the teeth and gums. Some players will push upward to ascend while others will pull down. Some players will have a track of their embouchure motion that is side to side. For more details on this phenomenon go here.

Assuming that you fully understand the embouchure motion definition above, you can make use of Reinhardt’s exercise to help make a student’s embouchure motion function more efficiently with less conscious effort. The arrows drawn into the music above are a specific trumpet student’s embouchure motion direction, just make sure that you’re instructing (or using, if this is for your own practice) the correct embouchure motion for the individual student. The student should use this exercise as a way to find where the tone is most open and resonant for each particular note.

The first time through each three measure set the student should watch what the embouchure motion looks like in a mirror. On the repeat Reinhardt instructed the student to close his or her eyes and instead focus on the feel of the embouchure motion assisting with the slurs. The “V” after each set was Reinhardt’s notion to remove the mouthpiece from the lips for a moment before moving on to the next set.

One thing I wanted to adjust for this exercise was the starting note and where the “home base” range for this exercise lies. For many students, particularly the Very High Placement and Low Placement embouchure types, it can be more useful to use a higher pitch as the central range point. Many of these musicians will find it easier to play correctly in their upper register, so slurring up to the high range before playing down to their low range gives them a better chance to descend correctly (as opposed to slurring down to the low range before up to the high range, as Reinhardt’s original exercise).

The above exercise duplicates the purpose of Reinhardt’s “Pivot Stabilizer” but moves the center of the exercise to G on top of the staff (for trumpet) and also has the student playing an ascending slur first, before descending to low C.

If you want to experiment with your own practice or teaching using these exercises here are some printable files for you.

Original Pivot Stabilizer
Embouchure Motion Stabilizer for Trumpet
Embouchure Motion Stabilizer for Horn (I might transpose the range differently, depending on the student)
Embouchure Motion Stabilizer for Trombone/Baritone/Euphonium
Embouchure Motion Stabilizer for Tuba