This Guess the Embouchure Type is a tough one, sent to me by Steve M. a while ago to check out. The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra posted an online masterclass given by trombonist Alain Trudel. One of the interesting things about watching him play throughout the masterclass is that he often uses an Ergobone, a support system that helps hold the instrument off the player’s chair. I’ve never used one before, but it doesn’t seem to be slowing Trudel down at all.

Take a look at this video and skip around for clips of Trudel demonstrating things and see if you can spot his embouchure type. Some of the best spots to watch are about 30:00, 48:00, and 1:07:08. This one is tricky, my guess after the break.

This one is difficult. Trudel’s mouthpiece placement has enough upper lip inside that it’s certainly one of the two basic downstream embouchure types, but his embouchure motion is difficult to spot. The fact that his embouchure motion is so minimal suggests to me that he might have a Medium High Placement embouchure type, since those players often have very minimal embouchure motions compared to the other types, but that’s not a definitive clue.

I *think* that I see him pulling his mouthpiece and lips together down to ascend, particularly at the 1:07:08 time that I mentioned above. But at other points I’m hard press to see that and it looks as if he might be pushing up to ascend. It’s tougher to spot the embouchure motion when the player moves around or has grainy video, which makes it more difficult to say for sure here.

So my best guess, for now, is Medium High Placement, partly because of the difficult to spot embouchure motion and partly because his placement looks a little too low to belong to the Very High Placement Type.

I looked around for some other videos of Trudel playing to see if I could find a clip of him playing that would be more obvious and I was surprised to find a couple of videos of him playing jazz trombone, which I wasn’t aware that he also did. I know him as an orchestral style performer, particularly his solo recording of trombone concerti. Here’s a video of him playing All the Things You Are.

What do you think? Is my guess that Trudel belongs to the Medium High Placement type accurate or am I missing something? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.