{"id":4787,"date":"2014-05-12T05:30:27","date_gmt":"2014-05-12T09:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wilktone.com\/?p=4787"},"modified":"2014-05-12T05:30:27","modified_gmt":"2014-05-12T09:30:27","slug":"bill-bing-on-playing-on-the-red-and-guess-the-embouchure-type","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/?p=4787","title":{"rendered":"Bill Bing on Playing On the Red and Guess the Embouchure Type"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Regular readers may already know that one of my <a href=\"http:\/\/wilktone.com\/?p=2792\">pet peeves<\/a> is\u00a0the huge number of brass teachers who (ignorantly, in my opinion) discourage all students\u00a0from placing their\u00a0mouthpiece in a way that the rim is contacting the red of the lips. It&#8217;s fairly common to hear players talking about the &#8220;evils of placing on the red.&#8221; I recently came across another example of this by trumpet player Bill Bing.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/fi8AxkpIDUc\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Bing is skeptical that brass players (or at least trumpet players) can play successfully with the mouthpiece placed in such a way that a lot of rim contacts the lower lip. That said, other than a brief mention at the beginning, the rest of this\u00a0video doesn&#8217;t mention placing on the red at all. \u00a0Nor does he explain why he feel&#8217;s it&#8217;s a bad thing other than that he&#8217;s never noticed it before. The closest thing to explaining why this is wrong is when he comments that he didn&#8217;t personally find it successful.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">My personal experience happens to be the exact opposite of Bing&#8217;s.\u00a0He found it didn&#8217;t work to place the mouthpiece on the red of his lips and made a correction that made things better. On the other hand, I found that after being instructed to play with a centered mouthpiece placement moving my setting onto the red of my upper lip actually worked best. It really depends on the individual player and is something that I don&#8217;t like\u00a0to generalize.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">At any rate, watch Bing&#8217;s\u00a0video (particularly at around <a href=\"http:\/\/youtu.be\/fi8AxkpIDUc?t=4m51s\">4:51<\/a>) and take a guess on Bill Bing&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/?p=7337\">embouchure type<\/a>. My guess after the break.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><!--more--><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Bing&#8217;s mouthpiece placement is high enough on his lips that I figured &#8220;very high placement&#8221; embouchure type from his first notes, but watching him ascend from the pedal register up to C above the staff made me strongly suspect that embouchure type. Watch his <a href=\"http:\/\/wilktone.com\/?p=41\">embouchure motion<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/youtu.be\/fi8AxkpIDUc?t=4m53s\">here<\/a> and you can see him push his mouthpiece and lips together up towards the nose as he ascends.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">One thing that I appreciated\u00a0in his discussion is that he does acknowledge that if something is working it&#8217;s not necessary to try to &#8220;fix&#8221; it (and if I&#8217;m interpreting Bing correctly, this includes if you&#8217;re placing the mouthpiece on the red). Bing also mentions James Stamp&#8217;s warm up routines and how Stamp would cater the routine to individual students. Bing is\u00a0not a &#8220;one-size-fits-all&#8221; teacher who tries to conform all musicians\u00a0to his own\u00a0way of playing.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">While I personally <a href=\"http:\/\/wilktone.com\/?p=4400\">discourage trumpet players from going out of their way to play pedal tones<\/a>, I do find\u00a0Bing&#8217;s advice about playing them to be better than the way many trumpet players play\u00a0them. He points out that he likes\u00a0to keep the mouthpiece on the exact same spot on the lips where he plays his upper register.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">It&#8217;s interesting to watch him play pedal tones in two different ways on this video. Bing demonstrates that he used to pull the mouthpiece to a slightly lower position on his lips to get the\u00a0pedals out, which made it difficult for him to ascend again. Personally, I would discourage brass player&#8217;s from adopting his solution, lightening up on the mouthpiece pressure enough to slide the mouthpiece back up on the lips to where he wants it for the normal playing register.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Anecdotally, it seems that &#8220;very high placement&#8221; embouchure type trumpet players are better able to get benefits from practicing pedal tones than the other two basic embouchure types. My thought\u00a0is that trumpet players belonging to this embouchure type seem to be less prone to the issues that can develop from excessive pedal tone practice, but to the best of my knowledge there hasn&#8217;t been\u00a0any research that supports that yet.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">What was your embouchure type guess for Bill Bing? Did you guess a different type and why? While you&#8217;re at it, take a closer look at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/slidegrease\/featured\">his YouTube channel<\/a>. He&#8217;s got a lot of vods up there about trumpet playing that you might find interesting and helpful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Regular readers may already know that one of my pet peeves is\u00a0the huge number of brass teachers who (ignorantly, in my opinion) discourage all students\u00a0from placing their\u00a0mouthpiece in a way that the rim is contacting the red of the lips. It&#8217;s fairly common to hear players talking about the &#8220;evils of placing on the red.&#8221; &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/?p=4787\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Bill Bing on Playing On the Red and Guess the Embouchure Type<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15350306,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1362,1369,1390,1392],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brass","category-embouchure","category-trumpet","category-very-high-placement-type"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peFHCc-1fd","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/15350306"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4787\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilktone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}