Developing embouchure control requires a certain degree of embouchure strength. Having strong embouchure muscles allows the brass musician to focus the muscular effort in the correct place, develop a more effortless feeling while playing, and tolerate mouthpiece pressure better without risking injury.

The orbicularis oris is one muscle group used in playing a brass instrument. It is used to pucker the lips and close the mouth. It encompasses the entire lips, including the vermillion and runs from just under the nose to down just above the chin.

Here is a video I recently came across where “Bahb” Civiletti (I’ve discussed Cviiletti before in my discussion about the tongue controlled embouchure, a technique I generally discourage) discusses a Facial-Flex device that is designed to strengthen the orbicular oris.

Best as I can tell, this device can be used as an “away from the horn” exercise to strengthen the orbicular oris, but I think a good question to consider here is whether or not this particular exercise is a good thing for brass players to practice.

For the record, I am an advocate of using exercises to build strength in the embouchure muscles. Things like free buzzing, the pencil trick exercise, the jaw retention drill, and the P.E.T.E. can all be used effectively. When done correctly (and doing them correctly is the key) they can be analogous to weight lifting for your chops. They allow you to build muscular strength in a particular set of muscles without risking injury that can result from lots of heavy playing. When done incorrectly, however, they can end up developing the wrong muscles or train the player to use the muscles incorrectly that might potentially work against the player. In the case of the device that Civilitti is promoting above, I suspect that it may do more harm than good to a brass player’s embouchure.

It is definitely true that the orbicularis oris is a muscle group used for playing a brass instrument. Dr. Matthias Bertsch and Dr. Thomas Maca studied the muscles used by trumpet players using infared thermography and compared the muscles used by experienced players to inexperienced players.

The analysis demonstrates that the main facial muscle activity during warm up is restricted to only a few muscle groups (M.orbicularis oris, M.depresor anguli oris).  The “trumpeter’s muscle” (M.buccinator) proved to be of minor importance.

However, I take issue with Civilitti’s presentation of photographs of a handful of trumpet player’s as “evidence” for how important this muscle is for a brass embouchure. Here are photographs of two trumpet players, one students and one professional player. Compare how their muscles look to the photos Civilitti presents. The bottom player is the professional trumpet player playing a high C while the top is the student playing the same pitch (and struggling). Can you tell by the photographs alone how much the orbicularis oris is engaged and whether or not one player is using more or less effort than the other? I’m not certain looking at photographs of great players (out of context, no less) will be an accurate measurement of what muscles are used and to what extent. In contrast, take a look at this photograph of a professional player from Bertsch and Maca’s paper. Note the areas where more muscular activity has occurred (redder).

With this particular player the orbicular oris is shown to be engaged, but largely focused in the lower lip with this particular player, not so much the top lip (as Civiletti points out in his video). Now I would caution everyone from drawing any conclusions from these small number of examples, but it does suggest that perhaps the orbicular oris isn’t engaged quite in the same manner that Civiletti feels, at least not with all players.

Note also in the above thermographic photo that the muscles at and just under the mouth corners are shown to be an area of much muscular effort with this player. This is the area where I believe the bulk of your embouchure effort should come from, not the orbicularis oris. When brass players are able to develop the strength to lock their mouth corners in place and use that area instead of relying on a pucker or smile to ascend the playing is generally stronger. The Facial-Flex device Civiletti demonstrates strengthens the orbicular oris in such a way as to move the mouth corners inward as with a pucker formation, rather than locking them in place.

This is the exact same reservation I have with some of the other “away from the horn” exercises I often recommend. Some players will practice the pencil trick or P.E.T.E. in such a way that they are using the orbicularis oris in the way Civiletti’s device is used. By bringing the mouth corners in to pucker around the pencil or P.E.T.E., rather than locking them in place and using the muscles indicated in the thermographic photo above, you are training your embouchure formation to work in this way. It’s important when practicing the pencil trick or P.E.T.E. to form your lips as if playing, rather than allowing the mouth corners to come inward into a pucker. This is tricky, because this works to a certain extent, but generally causes more long term problems than it solves. (For full disclosure, my personal experience here is a tendency to pucker my right corner too much in particular, which results in some difficulties with attacks and sound in my upper register up to a certain point and some difficulties getting into my low register after playing high without resetting the mouthpiece. When I’m able to keep the corners  in place and more relaxed it is easier and sounds more focused. Take that for what it’s worth, a single anecdote.)

All that said, I suppose there may be certain situations where the device Civiletti is demonstrating might be useful. Many players will bring their mouth corners back as if smiling to ascend and for these players it might actually be helpful to train their mouth corners to come inward instead. I suspect, however, that this might be best done in moderation and once the player gets a more proper embouchure formation happening it would likely be better to avoid using the Facial-Flex device altogether. My preference is to use free buzzing as an exercise to help players with the smile embouchure as it not only strengthens to correct muscles but also trains the player to keep the mouth corners in their most efficient place.

In summary, I personally feel that the use of the Facial-Flex device is probably not very helpful for brass players, and possibly even counterproductive. There are other exercises that target the embouchure muscles in a better way with less risk of allowing the mouth corners to slip into a position that tends to work against good brass playing.

Do you have a different opinion? Have you experimented with the Facial-Flex device yourself and found it useful or did it work against your playing? Leave your comments below and let us know what you think.

Hans Boschma, who created the site on http://www.embouchure.nl/ (in Dutch, so you’ll need to rely on translation software to read it if you don’t speak Dutch) emailed me a Prezi presentation for his Embouchure Reminder poster that I’d like to share with you. It’s interesting, although as a non-Dutch speaker I’m guessing that a lot of his ideas are getting lost in translation. In reading through it carefully I’ve found some things that seem to be misleading or maybe factually inaccurate. Take a look through his presentation first and then let me know if you think the below comments to Hans from me are accurate or if maybe I’m misunderstanding his ideas (or maybe I’m just plain wrong). Links in my comments go to other posts in my blog that go into more details about what I’m commenting on specifically if anyone wants to see more about my evidence and/or logic on why I feel a particular way.

https://prezi.com/obvdfvxloxfx/embouchure-reminder-hans-boschma/

1. I’m assuming that the 3rd slide (titled ” Interpretation of Stroboscopy”) refers to the diagrams on the prior slide. If so, you seem to be implying that the position of the mouthpiece on the lips is changed for different registers. I found that the majority of fine brass players do not change the position of the mouthpiece on the lips for different registers and personally prefer to teach my students to keep their placement consistent throughout their entire range.

2. On the first slide titled “B Continuation Normal Embouchure” you wrote, “The lower you play the higher the mouthpiece will shift and reverse.” This again give the erroneous impression that the mouthpiece is shifting to a new position on the lips, whereas what actually happens is that the mouthpiece and lips together will slide along the teeth and gums. The mouthpiece/lips shift to a new position in relation to the teeth and gums. Also, some players will do this in the opposite direction, so some push the mouthpiece and lips together up to ascend while others pull down to ascend. My preferred term for this phenomenon is “embouchure motion.” More on this in a moment.

3. On the same slide you mention using a “pivot.” While your use of this term is consistent with how most other brass players use the word “pivot,” you may want to be aware that the author that coined this term, Donald Reinhardt, defined a pivot as the sliding of the mouthpiece and lips together as a single unit up and down along the teeth and gums. This is why I prefer to use the term “embouchure motion” to describe this, as it is less likely to be confused. Also, you seem to be implying that the angle of the instrument is what determines the air stream direction of the embouchure. This is not accurate. The ratio of upper to lower lip inside the mouthpiece is what causes an embouchure to be upstream or downstream, not horn angle. If a player places the mouthpiece so there is more upper lip inside the cup, the embouchure will be downstream, even if the horn angle is straight out. Likewise, players who place with more lower lip inside have an upstream embouchure, even if the horn angle is tilted down. As far as “straight stream” goes, one lip or another should predominate inside the mouthpiece and the air will be either upstream or downstream. I’ve never observed a player blow straight into the shank without having serious playing issues, although the lower a player plays the closer towards blowing straight the air stream will go.

4. It’s hard to interpret what you say in the second slide titled “B Continuation of Normal Embouchure” without being able to look at the diagrams you seem to be referring to, but I’m confused about a couple of points you mention. First, although you are calling these characteristics “normal” you are also commenting that these normal embouchures are characterized by mouthpieces that are either “too large” or “too small.” You also mention some of these as shifting happens “mostly upwards” or such, but don’t comment on whether this shifting (I assume you’re referring to what I prefer to call the embouchure motion) happens while ascending or descending, which is confusing. In B6 you are calling blowing straight down the shank as normal, which really seems to only be accompanied by players with problems. Again, properly functioning embouchures really appear to either be upstream or downstream, a principle that you can see for yourself if you use a transparent mouthpiece to look at brass embouchures. In B8 you comment on the lip thickness as a determining characteristic of downstream embouchures. In my dissertation research the statistical analysis of lip thickness showed no significant correlation to embouchure type, so I don’t think that this statement can be considered accurate.

5. I’m not certain how to interpret your diagrams of “Embouchure Deviations” and the descriptions you use without more information. For example, you show number 9 of a split tooth and comment that there is some “rustling and hiss” in the sound. There are many fine brass players with significant gaps in their teeth. Two that I can think of off the top of my head are Jon Faddis and Dave Steinmeyer, both who have very focused sounds that I wouldn’t describe as having any hiss in them. I think it’s more important for a player with features like this to learn to work with their tooth structure and it’s definitely possible for players without gaps in their teeth to have some hiss in their sound. It seems to me there must be other factors at work producing this sound, rather than the teeth. You also show one player with an off-center aperture and comment that this results in a “loss of power.” I think if you observe many fine brass players using a transparent mouthpiece you’ll see that off-center apertures are more common than you seem to be implying here and they aren’t really accompanied by a weaker embouchure. Similar to the gapped teeth, many players without an off-center aperture have problems with a loss of power and manny players with an off-center aperture have very strong embouchures. It would appear that these issues are caused by something different, and probably such symptoms are caused by enough different things that it’s not so easy to encapsulate into such a simple cause and effect relationship as you appear to be implying in this presentation.

6. On the first slide titled “D Embouchure Deviations 2” you comment that round teeth arch cause problems. Again, this is not something I’ve ever noticed, but I do agree that your teeth structure are important considerations for building a good embouchure. Much like I commented above, I feel what players who are having issues related to their teeth have to do is work out how to work with those characteristics. This sometimes means placing the mouthpiece very high, very low, an/or off to one side of the lips. Sometimes players without any easily observable anatomical characteristics play better with atypical mouthpiece placements as well, so I’m not certain that there’s a direct cause and effect relationship here either.

7. On your slide entitle “F: Low Tones/Low Play” you mention that the jaw must come forward and the horn tilted up. This is indeed how many players to get into their low register, but I think this is too simplistic in many ways. For example, some players will descend more easily by bringing their horn angle slightly down instead of up. Secondly, I personally don’t advocate doing something in the embouchure, like dropping the jaw and/or bringing it forward to descend, unless it works the opposite way to descend. Many (perhaps most) players will bring their jaw slightly forward to ascend and slightly back to descend. However, at a certain point in their low range (usually extreme low range) they will reverse this by bringing their jaw suddenly forward a great deal. Personally, I think it’s best to avoid this practice as much as possible as this seems to be accompanied by a change in timbre and potentially can cause issues down the road if this practice starts to work it’s way into the middle and upper register. Working with the embouchure motion, jaw position, and horn angle in the middle and upper register can help these players learn how these minute changes work, which then can help them open up the low register without resorting to horn angle and jaw position change you’re advocating here. I should mention, however, that my ideas here are probably not the majority opinion, but I do think the logic that this is based on is sound and have had success helping students learn how to descend in this way.

8. In your next slide you discuss “Non Pivot.” If you define pivot the way Reinhardt did (what I prefer to call the embouchure motion), then all players will pivot to some degree or another. If you’re defining it as a horn angle change, then not all players will tilt their horn to change registers. Of those players who don’t, some will possibly play better if they do learn how to adapt their horn angle according to the register, as long as they learn how to make this work with their anatomy. This is something that is personal to the individual player and hard to generalize or relate to any specific embouchure or physical characteristics.

9. Almost all of your diagrams show a very large mouthpiece over the vermillion (red) of the lips and most seem to be perfectly centered. While a tubist’s embouchure might actually look like this, I’m not certain that this makes for the best or most accurate depiction of how mouthpiece placements work with brass embouchures. It implies that a centered placement is best (not typically true, one lip or another must predominate, sometimes to a large degree). There’s a lot more variation in how brass embouchures work and I’m not convinced that your diagrams make for the best way to present what works and what doesn’t work. While it’s very difficult to capture good photographs and video of players playing into a transparent mouthpiece, in my opinion this is the best way to go and really the only way to accurately document what you will actually see. Drawing diagrams may help present information, but they can also be misleading and I’ve found that many brass authors who rely on drawing diagrams to describe what goes on inside the mouthpiece are frequently wrong and simply imagining what they think should be happening rather than taking the effort to actually look. Philip Farkas is one example, in his book “The Art of Brass Playing” he described air stream direction completely wrong, but then later discovered upstream and downstream embouchures and published these photos in “A Photographic Study of 40 Virtuosi Horn Players’ Embouchures.” Many of your diagrams do match what I’ve observed using transparent mouthpieces, but some do not so I can’t tell how much actual study of functioning embouchures you’ve done to arrive at those depictions.

Criticism aside, there’s a lot in his presentation that I agree with. More importantly, I like that Hans is interested in sharing his information and taking a scientific approach to studying the embouchure, rather than the “arm chair” speculation that passes for embouchure analysis by many brass players and teachers. I think if more people would toss around ideas like this and make it easy for discussion and debate that the field as a whole would move forward more quickly than it tends to.