Category: Tuba

Guess the Embouchure Types: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Brass Quintet

~ wilktone ~ Leave a comment

Tip of the horn to John B. for spotting this video of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Brass Quintet.  Back in high school I took a semester of Japanese and recognize the characters in the video as the kana.  I gave up after a short while trying to work out which of the orchestra’s brass players are performing here, so if anyone knows and can supply us the names of the individual performers, please leave a comment. (Update – Dan F. worked out the trombonist, it’s Jorgen Van Rijen.  Thanks, Dan!)

You can get a pretty close look at all five of their chops in this video, but it’s tough to spot all of their embouchure motions because most of the time there isn’t enough of a range change at that moment in the music to see one (this is why in my videos I demonstrate this with octave slurs, it’s a large enough interval to clearly see them).  Still, we can make an educated guess based on mouthpiece placement and there are a couple of points in the video where you can spot a player’s embouchure motion.  Take a look and make your best guess of their embouchure types.  My speculations after the break.

Continue reading “Guess the Embouchure Types: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Brass Quintet” →

Guess the Embouchure Type – Tubist Øystein Baadsvik

~ wilktone ~ 1 Comment

It’s time for another one of my installments of “Guess the Embouchure Type.”  This week I’m going to see if I can tell what embouchure type the great Norwegian tubist Øystein Baadsvik belongs to.  Take a look at this video of him playing the Vittorio Monti version of Czardas and see if you can tell.  Although he moves around a lot, making it tough to get an easy look at his chops, beginning around 3:35 into the clip you should be able to spot enough to make an educated guess, if you know what to look for.

Continue reading “Guess the Embouchure Type – Tubist Øystein Baadsvik” →

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.

Continue reading “The Double Buzz” →

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.  

Continue reading “Rebooting Your Breath” →

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.

Continue reading “Embouchure Misconceptions – Five Myths About Brass Embouchures” →

A Tubist’s Embouchure: A Case Study

~ wilktone ~ 8 Comments

I put together the above video to show an unusual embouchure I happened to document for my embouchure research.  This case is particularly interesting for a couple of features.  First, since it’s more challenging to get clear video footage of embouchure characteristics on a smaller mouthpiece, the tuba embouchure makes i very easy to see examples of certain embouchure characteristics.  Secondly, this tubist plays very well, in spite of some embouchure idiosyncrasies that make for noticeable flaws in his technique.

First, a little background about the subject.  At the time I recorded this video he was a college music student, actually majoring in piano.  He had played tuba for quite a while, though, and was continuing to perform and study tuba as a secondary instrument.  While a fine player, this subject complained of some difficulties playing in tune at a couple of points while taking this video footage.  He had some difficulties with his high range and at a particular point in his range chipped a lot of notes.

Continue reading “A Tubist’s Embouchure: A Case Study” →

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.

Continue reading “A Brief History of Brass Instruments” →

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.

Continue reading “The Composition Process: Sonatina for Brass Quintet” →