Month: August 2010

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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Bob Brookmeyer – A Closeup Look At His Chops

~ wilktone ~ 2 Comments

I’m going to play Guess the Embouchure Type again.  Today it’s the great valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer.  Here’s a video of him playing with guitarist John Scofield.

There are a couple of moments in the video (1:31-1:41 and 2:52-3:03) where the camera focused on his embouchure.  Based on such a close look, I can take an educated guess about which embouchure type Brookmeyer has.

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Drawing Expressive Movement Out of a Student

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Sometimes a student musician’s performance comes off as “wooden.”  The right notes and right rhythms may be there, but the playing lacks life and expression.  How can you draw out the music from a student who already plays well, but hasn’t been able to take this next step?

Piano teacher Natalie Wickman recently offered some suggestions at her blog.  Reading through them, I was struck by how well these ideas can apply to brass pedagogy.  Wickman’s list of 5 things to try are:

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Psychology of Masterclasses – Bobo the Hypnotist

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The other day I came across this video excerpt from a masterclass by the great tubist Roger Bobo.  In this short clip Bobo explains that focusing on technique when you should simply be playing can work against you.  He then, using a volunteer, sets up a powerful demonstration that shows how thinking too much can screw you up, even while doing something as simple as carrying a bowl of water.  Watch the video and try it out yourself.

A dramatic effect, and Bobo has a good point about focus, but I’m going to call shenanigans on his demonstration.

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Charles Ives

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One of the most original American composers of the 20th Century was Charles Ives.  Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut on October 20, 1874.  Ives’s father, George Ives, was a bandmaster – the youngest one in the Union Army during the American Civil War, and was a bit of a free spirit himself. George Ives passed that quality on to his son in part by forcing his son to participate in strange musical experiments.  One night George stood outside in a thunderstorm listening to the church bells ring in the wind. He spent the rest of the night trying to find the pitch on his piano, only to discover that it wasn’t there (the bells were out of tune).  This led George to build a device made up of 24 violin strings and a series of weights and pulleys which he called a quarter-tone machine.  This device was able to play the notes “in between the cracks” of the piano keyboard, notes out of tune with the normal tuning system.

George Ives would compose melodies on his quarter-tone machine and make Charles sing them.  Ives would later say that his father “gave that up except as a form of punishment.” Another experiment George subjected Charles to was to make him sing a popular song in one key while George played the accompaniment in a completely different key.

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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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Finale Trick for Composers and Arrangers – Explode Music

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While I started out composing and arranging by sitting at a piano with pencil and score paper, these days I tend to only sketch out a couple of things by hand, but do the bulk of my composing and scoring directly into the computer using Finale.  There are a few tricks I’ve picked up using Finale in this way that make some of this process easier.  In this post, I’ll show Finale users how to use the Explode Music feature to separate parts after putting them into a single staff.

I’ll be using a salsa composition of mine, El Ayer, for this particular example.  It was originally arranged with a two trombone horn section, but for an upcoming show there will be instead two trumpets, tenor sax, and trombone.  Here’s the horn soli with the original melody line in the lead trumpet while I’m inputing in my new four-part harmony just below it in the second trumpet using the Speedy Entry Tool.

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Online Ear Trainer

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I’ve been poking around I Was Doing All Right for a couple of weeks or so.  Rick posts about jazz trumpet, ear training, and the jazz scene in Atlanta.  Somehow I’ve been completely overlooking an excellent resource he put together, an Online Ear Trainer.

Here’s a screen shot of it, to tempt you to go check it out for real.  Notice that it is highly customizable.  You can restrict it to certain intervals, have it display in different transpositions, play the intervals in different ranges, select ascending, descending, or random, play both pitches simultaneously, play melodies, set up a rhythm section accompaniment with call and response patterns, etc.

An outstanding resource, Rick.  Thanks for making that available!

Be sure to check out some of Rick’s other resources on his web site.

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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