Question About Medium High Placement Embouchure

Jeff stopped by a while ago and left a comment on one of my pages. I wanted to take a bit of time and try to get to his question. Jeff writes:

I have been typed as having 3b chops (I am a trombonist) and have benefitted from several Skype lessons. . . One subject I have been unable to get a clear answer on is this: As a 3b, what should I be good at (eg, good sound) and what will need extra effort because of my downstream type? The reason I ask this is because it would be helpful not to beat myself up over certain areas of my playing if, in fact, it is an area that needs extra study because of my physical make up!!

First of all, I prefer not to use Donald Reinhardt’s embouchure designations, as they are internally inconsistent and also simply confuse too many people. Instead, I use the embouchure types that were first taught to me by Doug Elliott, a former student of Reinhardt’s. Doug’s types are descriptive and simple enough that even non-brass players can understand and make use of them. So for the remainder of this post I’ll talk about your embouchure type as belonging to the Medium High Placement embouchure type.

Secondly, while you many get some benefits from online lessons, I would be cautious. I try to remember to qualify my advice whenever I’m not able to watch someone play in person. Skype lessons are nice, in that you can see and hear things that you just can’t spot through words, but they are still flawed. You may very well be a Medium High Placement type player, but you may also have been mistyped. The closer to 50/50 you are, the more necessary it becomes to watch you play in a transparent mouthpiece to see for sure. Even if your embouchure type fits the Medium High Placement type, it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the type that fits your anatomy best. Caveat emptor.

Still, let’s assume that you’ve been properly typed. What sort of things are typical? What are the strengths of a Medium High Placement embouchure type and what are the weaknesses? What sort of things do you want to practice?

Every player is different, even players who have very similar looking embouchures. That said, there are some tendencies that seem to apply to most Medium High Placement embouchure type players. It’s very common for players of this type to have a naturally dark sound. Flexibility is also something that these players have to work less on. This doesn’t mean that you don’t need to practice tone and flexibility, but that you might find you need to spend less time on those things than players belonging to other embouchure types.

Those playing strengths, however, sometimes lead Medium High Placement players to go after the big and dark sound and easy flexibility to the detriment of their upper register. Lots of players of this type hold their embouchure formation too loose. They can “get away with it” in the low and middle registers, but this tends to destroy their high range (Reinhardt wrote in a number of places that the typical high range cap for this situation was a D# above high Bb for trombone, an Eb above high C for trumpet).

In order to combat this tendency you’ll want to spend time working on playing with your embouchure formation firm, especially around the mouth corners. Reinhardt had an exercise he called the “Spiderweb Routine” (which if you’re not familiar with already, you can read a more detailed description of here). This exercise is particularly useful for Medium High Placement embouchure type players. You start on middle B flat and slur both up and down, expanding outward by half steps (you can vary the amount you expand to whole steps, minor 3rds, etc. to get through things quicker as needed) and gradually increasing the intervals until you’re slurring octaves.

As you practice things like this, concentrate on keeping your embouchure formation as firm as possible while descending. Keep the mouthpiece pressure up as you descend as well. It’s harder to get the big and dark sound this way, but you’re training yourself to learn to descend as low as possible with embouchure firmness before you need to resort to collapsing the embouchure formation. Decrescendoing as you descend will help you learn the feel of this.

One other thing to watch out for as a Medium High Placement player is that you don’t dig into your upper lip with the mouthpiece as you ascend. Using the Spiderweb Routine, try to keep the weight of the mouthpiece more on the lower lip on the ascending intervals and fight the urge to raise your horn angle. This is something that players belonging to any embouchure type want to pay attention too, but Medium High Placement players seem to have a harder time with this (it may have to do with the typically receded jaw position/slightly tilted horn angle of the Medium High Placement embouchure type).

Beyond that, what you want to spend time practicing depends a lot on what you’re already doing well and what you still struggle with. In order to get into any of that I’d have to watch you play in person. A video helps, but there are things that are easy enough to miss in person, let alone via a video chat. If you get the opportunity to work with an experienced and knowledgeable teacher in person it would probably be worth the effort.