How To Form a Trumpet (brasswind) Embouchure in Four Steps, by Charlie Porter

a trumpeters this is Charlie quarter back with some more trumpet tips for you and today this is this is a big one this is the topic of how to form an officer and by the way this applies not only to trumpet players but also to the rest of you brass players out there as well so if you play French horn or trombone baritone tuba cetera even though our instruments are different in a lot of ways they are basically the same in terms of forming an embouchure the embouchure functions basically the same on any brass wind instrument so hopefully this advice can apply to you and you might find something helpful in this as well what I'm going to do to start off with it's going to be a little bit strange but I'm not going to talk about the trumpet in fact I'm going to talk about the drum okay so if we look at a drum or if we look say at a saxophone mouthpiece or if we look say at a guitar we're going to find that there's actually some commonalities between how all these instruments work nuts and bolts wise and understanding how the vibration works on those instruments can actually help us to understand how the trumpet embouchure works as well how the lips are going to vibrate and what certain properties they need to have in order to to achieve everything that we want to be able to do with the embouchure so here we go first thing we have to have on tot vibrating material notice the material here on the drum head is taut it's pulled tight it's not just sitting there you don't just take the drum head and plop it on and attach it you stretch it into position why this creates a readiness for vibration the material wants to vibrate that's something that's very important to remember if you're not setting the lips in a way that they want to vibrate then they're going to be kind of dead imagine a drum that somebody plays like this where it's ready to go and they get a big sound right I'm at a German that's much bigger than this with very little effort you can get a big sound however you have a drum that's set up where this is not taught and it's just kind of sitting there maybe it's sealed around the edge but it's just sitting there well you're going to get much less sound out you'll probably get more of a thud and then the player playing met drum in order to equal the sound that the other players is getting they're going to have to play with a lot more force so inevitably a lot of trumpet players end up in the same circumstance where they're forcing to get a lot of sound out because the material that they're setting up to begin with is not ready to vibrate um same thing by the way with the guitar string okay it's taut it's cold it's stretched from one side to the other okay so that the middle can vibrate nice and freely and so that the string it has a readiness to vibrate the degree to what how much it's taut is going to affect the pitch so same thing with a drum hit the degree to how much this is stretched is going to affect the pitch with the trumpet embouchure we have the ability to actually change at will the amount of totnes that's in the lips and that that is part of the ingredients of how we actually change the pitch on the trumpet let's look at the other example here saxophone mouthpiece well on the sexual mouthpiece we can't stretch wood but we can carve it thinner and that's exactly what happens at the edge of the reed where the vibration occurs much easier because it's carved thinner and again when you stretch something you're also thinning it out to a slight degree you want to thin out the lips too much when you're playing but there's a certain degree of flatness that needs to be achieved all these things also have that in common all the materials are flat ok the guitar string as well maybe you've ever taken a piece of grass from from the lawn and put it between your thumbs and made a sound out of it so actually a lot of fun to do you have to take it and attach it between here and here and you'll see there's that space right here in the middle and then you you have to stretch it out enough to get that taut readiness to vibrate and then you can get a really cool sound out of a piece of grass so and the more you stretch it without breaking it you'll start to get a higher pitch so if we now think of another principle that these are instruments all have together which is that they have a preclusion of vibration happening somewhere so that they can have a maximizing of the vibration somewhere else if that sounds complicated let me explain right here we have a seal around the edge of the drum around the circular outer part of the drum right here there's a seal there's no vibration that happens here I can touch this and I don't get a vibration however here I get a very easy vibration right so no vibration around the perimeter that's a preclusion of that vibration so that we can get maximum vibration here and like I said before we have a readiness of the material to vibrate so that's going to make for a nice perfect storm of vibration and also projection right the more seal we have here the easier it is to project the sound here because we're not letting any of that vibration escape on the outside we look at the guitar we have the same principles and play right we have preclusion of vibration here right actually here at the last fret right there and then all the way here right so that is stopping vibration from happening outside of that length of the string and in fact every time you push your finger down on the fret you're creating a new point of preclusion of vibration so let's go to one other thing let's see the saxophone mouthpiece same idea the ligature right here holds down the Reed nice and tight no vibration happening here so we get maximum vibration right here these are two important principles that pretty much everything that vibrates and makes a musical sound have to adhere to that there has to be a preclusion of vibrations somewhere to have a maximization of crack of the vibration somewhere else Plus that material has to be either flat has to be flat and either taut or carve spin in the case of being wood so let's move on to actually showing how we can set these principles up and a brass when so I'm going to show you an approach that's not my own approach it's just one that I have seen the best trumpet players in the world use time and time again and it's very middle of the road and I believe that playing this way with this approach and I'll back that up by showing also video clips and still images of some of the best trumpet players in the world using the same approach but I believe by using this approach that you can achieve everything that you want to get in terms of playing higher louder softer being able to do technical passages having lots of flexibility having great articulation getting the best sound maximizing vibration all these things can be accomplished with a very good setup however keep this in mind a mouthpiece is set up really well it's not going to make it's not going to make the saxophone sound great you have to have the combination of not only good setup knowing how to create a good setup but also knowing how to play and transition from note to note correctly and not in spite of the good setup have bad habits which are going to basically nullify that good setup anyway so really there's two parts there's the part that we're talking about right now which is going to be how to have a good setup how to make sure that the lips are set ready to vibrate where they have a good aperture and they're taught and there's a good seal that's what we're going to go over right now but on top of that as a player it's how you support the muscles your concept of how you go higher and lower knowing how to support the muscles correctly and not clamp down too much and actually ruin the good setup that we created just like on a mouthpiece saxophone mouthpiece if you were saxophone player you know I have the mouthpiece set up good with a nice tight ligature and a good open aperture and the reeds in good position and you wet it and all that stuff but let's say that I put it in my mouth and immediately I I clamp down I bite on it with my teeth well there you go that's an example believe it or not there's trumpet players that do a similar thing they might set up correctly and both as soon as they go for that high note they start to clamp down too much they crush the airstream can't get any vibration in the lips and they're wondering what's going wrong anyway will gets in fact I do get to that in some of my other videos if you watch the straight-line approach or if you watch three compressions there's lots of useful information in there that will help you on the playing side of things but right now we're going to focus on the setting up side of things making sure that your lips are set for readiness for vibration that they're set with a nice airway for the air to get through that they're set with a good foundation on the teeth so the lips are between the teeth and the mouthpiece so that there's a preclusion of that vibration or otherwise a seal right so that we have maximum vibration in the middle that's what we're going to accomplish with the four-step setup and I'm about to show you next so the setup that I'm about to show you right now you'll notice that there's a PDF available down below for a nominal price boy if I could have had this PDF and had this information back when I was a kid searching trying to figure out embouchure stuff it would have been priceless to me so for the price I'm selling it if you want to buy it it will help me out and you know put this information out for you guys for free anyway you don't have to buy the PDF however it's there and there's lots of information in it to break down of everything I'm explaining to you right now plus some photo skills and lots of good useful information and please share it with your friends and just get the word out about how to create a good embouchure because ultimately that's really what I want for this video to do is to help lots of you to hopefully fix embouchure issues issues that you have and to clear up a lot of the misconceptions of how to form an option okay so first thing first you're going to want to have a visualizer a visualizer is an object that allows you to see the rim of the mouthpiece but it doesn't have a cup or the or the the shank of the mouthpiece getting in the way so if you see right here this is a very easy to find poor man's embouchure busier lives so you don't have to go out and buy an expensive one and I know in the previous video that I made I had a really fancy one that hooks up to the trumpet allows you to blow the air stream through the trumpet that is not necessary in order to learn how to form a good embouchure it's a useful tool for some other things and we can get into that maybe later but right now I want to focus and I'm just going to use a pair of scissors but I'm going to focus on doing these four steps and I'm going to use a pair of scissors actually because this is more closely probably related to an object that most of you will have in your home's already you'll notice that it's not even exactly the same size right here because I can get in on there too slow okay it's not quite the same size as my mouthpiece but it's relatively in the ballpark and that's what's going to matter the most when you're trying to find a pair of scissors don't get one of those big bulky orange ones with a crazy you know oval-shaped handles that's not going to work there are other objects that can work the end of shish kebab stick for example some people have used a wedding ring even if you have a removable ring right here on your trumpet you might be able to take that out and use it but you don't want it to be too sharp okay so I'm going to get nice and up close and I'm going to show you these steps and I'll kind of go through one step at a time and and I'll also show you some photo stills later on of some great famous crippled players that you probably know and if you don't know you should check them out including with Marsalis and some others doing basically the same thing that I'm showing you right now so you know that it's not just my method but in fact it's something that a lot of great trumpet players in fact I would I would wager most great trumpet players in the world do so here we go step one is going to be to simply push your lips together on top of your teeth which should be closed and touching not closed all the way but touching the tips like this to create an alignment you're going to create an alignment with the teeth and then you're going to push your lips together so you hide the soft tissue right here like this now I call that hide the red for most people this is more of a red or pink color but if it's not for you then you can replace red with whatever color you got here but you're going to hide the soft tissue or hide the red looks like that it's very simple make sure that you're not putting the oops over the teeth like that in fact that's the main reason I tell people to touch their teeth together first so you create an alignment also that's another reason where you can create that alignment and you're going to press the lips together and it's okay if the chin bunches up and everything pushes in in fact this is a very inward motion okay that's step one you okay step two this is where we're going to take our visualizer okay and we're going to on top of step one while we're holding step one we are going to press firmly to create a nice feel this it should not be firm enough to hurt your lips okay let me make that very clear but it should be a firm amount of pressure so we're going to be creating a seal all the way around the perimeter of this little piece of metal you can kind of think like we're forming a drum and basically imagine that this is the skin that's going on the drum we're not stretching it yet but we're just going to attach it first okay we're going to make sure that we get a nice firm seal all the way around the perimeter that's also going to feel like it's resting equally on your top and bottom teeth now it might look a little weird but if you do this first that's essentially what's going to be happening here we're going to be on the teeth with equal weight top and bottom but we're going to be on the lips which are on the teeth so we're creating kind of a sandwich if you will of lip mouthpiece and teeth or in this case visualizer not mouthpiece right that's going to create a nice little sandwich here so without further ado let's show you what that looks like hmm notice that I don't relax my lips as I'm putting this on especially people that have been playing trumpet already they're going to have an inclination to do this see I'm opening up my lips as I put the visualizer on don't do that the whole reason we're putting them together is to make sure that a we're getting the lips really inside the red of the lips totally inside the circle so there's no chance of getting the rim on the red ellipse this really is effective for players that have larger lips and they're trying to figure out how to fit them inside the mouthpiece the other reason is we want somewhere to stretch from right so if we're not actually together than in step three where we stretch the lips out we won't actually have anywhere to go from because we're already be there but then we're not going to get a nice taut stretch the way we're trying to do it so I'm getting a head but anyway step 2 simply put the pressure on so you feel the weight on the teeth beneath the lips and you'll notice that the middle will bulge out a little just from that pressure if you're doing it correctly watch the middle here I'm going to do that up close for you guys there we go now I'm going to do it up close for you guys so you can see the same thing a little bit closer step one step two so four step three which is the most important of the four step setup process we want to make sure that we are creating room between the lips for the air to vibrate for the air to move through and for the lips to vibrate that room that space called the aperture or hole is very important in fact if we don't have a consistent way of setting up an aperture every single time that we play then we don't have consistency as a player some people just put the mouthpiece right on and they don't have a consistent way of creating an aperture they also don't have a consistent way of creating a taut lip position where the lips want to vibrate so if you don't have a consistent way of doing it you're kind of playing a game of Russian roulette with your embouchure setup and your embouchure is going to be really affected by good days and bad days however if you wake up one day and you have swollen lips for one reason or another maybe you're dehydrated and who knows if you have a consistent way of setting up the lips and configuring that space then it really doesn't matter what state your lips are in from one day to another because you have a way of getting it into the right position that's that's really going to be important for the longevity of your career as a trumpet player as a brass player in general okay so let's go into step three remember to do step one and two first and step three is going to be to pull out the lips and when you do this the first time I actually want you to overdo the action this is going to look a little strange but it's hard to pass this feeling on to people of how to do this the correct way and the most successful way that I found to do it is to have them over do the action the first time and it's going to look a little bit like this okay and you notice that I end up landing on the teeth right I don't land in between the mouth in between the teeth like this okay in that case I just opened up my jaw way too much we want to make sure that the rim is always in front of the teeth that the teeth are always supporting the rim again this is important to create that sandwich that I was talking about earlier so you want to make sure that it's not just your jaw opening that's creating this opening between the lips but that it's the muscles here pulling the lip up there called the lever turn muscles okay if you show your top teeth you're using those muscles and these muscles here showing the bottom teeth those are called your depressor muscles they depress the lips down these muscles levitate the lips upward right they're basically getting the lips out of the way so that you can get an air stream in fact when you blow air you instinctively start to use these muscles okay just try it on your hand and see if you do that another way that you instinctively use those muscles is when you're trying to show your teeth like when you're smiling all right when you smile you also sometimes well you'll use these muscles here I think they're called the buccinator muscles anyway you don't want to be pulling out with those muscles when you're creating an embouchure but otherwise pulling up and pulling down this is important to get the lips out of the way and get them set up the pressure that we're keeping from step number two should remain the entire time that way anywhere that you pull with the lips they're going to be kind of immobilized in that position and that's how you want this to be so let me show you this again I'm going to do the overdoing way of doing it and then I'm going to do just about an eighth of an inch to a quarter of an inch and then I'm going to stop and then you'll see that whatever position I stopped at is going to be held by the pressure that I was applying so here we go and I'm going to show a close-up of that okay and then here's the same idea but this time I'm only going to go to about a quarter of an inch to an eighth of an inch of space to make sure that I have a nice good airway and after I do that I can relax I can talk to you it's going to be set in place you and step four we're going to want to wet the middle of the lips one time with the tongue and then take a nice breath and blow okay eventually the breast can be taken in step three where you're pulling the lips apart like this and at that same time you can actually poke the tongue through and wet the lips in that step but we're not going to do that right away I want to make sure is that all these steps are nice and separated first to allow you to really concentrate on step three before you do step four eventually when you start to meld all these steps together it's going to actually happen very quickly and you won't even notice that you're setting up in a four step manner even though these steps are all going to be there and they're all going to be part of it so let me show you that one more time step three okay and then we move on to step four in Step three we have this nice space okay don't move on to step four until you see that nine space staying there if you go to move the lips open but then they're closed afterward you then stretch them enough or maybe you did one of these ways which I'm going to show you right now which are not advisable in step three so first one some people just open their mouths but they don't actually feel the lips moving on the rim okay they'll do something like this okay you'll notice that when I close the mouth back up that I'm left with the same non-existent space between the lips so that's important to note right there don't just open the mouth you actually have to pull the lips out okay they'll also sometimes people I'll see them do this pulling out to the side to stretch the lips out that's not going to get the lips outward up and down you want to make sure you're not pulling out to the side that's just going to thin your lips out it's going to start you on to a trend of using what I call smile embouchure okay another thing you don't want to do pucker the lips forward to try to get them to come out of the mouthpiece so I'm literally doing this okay when I do that you can see this excess protrusion of lip mass coming out around the sides we don't want to see that we want the lips to stay flat to the teeth the entire time so moving on to step 4 step 4 after we've set step one two and three into motion we should have a nice clear airway established and nice taut lips so basically everything is almost ready to go the only thing we have to make sure of at this point it's the same thing we have to do with the actual mouthpiece we have to make sure that the reed is wet right this minimizes friction if you set up everything correctly but then you have really dry lips that actually can throw everything off okay there's a lot of little parameters like that we want to make sure our in check so number one number two number three okay number four I'm going to wet the middle the lips okay and then I'm going to take a breath through the side don't worry about opening the jaw when you do this you see I'm talking to you I'm opening my mouth it's not distorting the setup that I've created it's being held in place by that pressure this is one important reason that we have the pressure and that we have the teeth behind the lips okay so I'm going to take a breath know what the lips I can get a vibration but I can also just get air that's going to be very important in determining whether or not we've created a good set up you want to make sure you can just get air by itself that tells us the lips are far enough apart that they're not going to get in each other's way and that they're not going to create excessive disturbance in the vibration okay however we want the lips to be close enough together to be able to create the vibration so for example if I set up too far apart I can get air hmm but it's very hard for me to give it a vibration this is a less common problem most people have the problem of not getting the lips far enough apart in fact there's a lot of talk out there about a closed aperture embouchure and really think about it folks a closed aperture doesn't make sense an aperture by definition is an opening so what we'd rather have what I think is a better option is to have an aperture that can be as large as you want it and also as small as you want it but in order to have both of those possibilities you have to start with an open aperture so if you watch this we're getting that after nice and open open enough to do this this air no disturbance but in the same position I can also do this I'm going to wet the middle and notice that there's no disturbance in that vibration if I don't open up the lips enough let's say that I did this but I didn't have that result let's say that I did this well number one I'm going to test can I just get air by itself you hear that disturbance as I was trying to get the air to come out so I got air but I had this to start off with and then what happens when I try to get sound with that same setting okay there's the air now you hear that's not a good vibration that's because the lips they're touching we don't want the lips touching we want them apart we want them to be able to create vibration without rubbing up on one another so if you can get air by itself and you can get a good vibration then congratulations you have a good setting for your aperture if not then that means you're going to have to to work with a little bit try opening it up more or if it's too open try doing a little bit less but one thing you can also think about is opening up until the edge of the red meets the edge of the rim you can go all the way to that point folks if you still have a lot of the of this part of your lip showing inside not the red or the soft tissue but the part out here if that meteor part is showing inside the rim you can get rid of that you can go and expose more of this middle part think of this as being the the nice juicy part of the drum head where you're getting that the sound versus the outer edge of that rim okay this I believe is where the best part of the sound is not here okay so for players that have really thin lips they're going to be working to expose that red inside for players with really thick lips they're going to be trying to make sure that when they undo or pull the lips away that they're not going beyond the edge of that rim with the red of the lips for example that's right here notice that I pulled to the point where the rim is either in the red on the upper part or in the red on the lower lip right that's going to lead in my opinion to endurance issues because whatever pressure you do have to apply to the lips it's better suited to this part of the lip then to this softer membrane right here in the middle some people will argue that fact but the facts speak for themselves if you look the majority of players in the world especially the ones that are the best players that have the best range and endurance they don't play on the red of their lips I'm not saying there's not some exceptions out there but the exceptions don't make the rule right the majority makes the rule in this case so again I'm teaching you guys middle the road embouchure that applies to most of the best players in the world so I'm not trying to be dogmatic and say that there aren't other possibilities but by and large the way that I'm showing you is what I've observed the best players in the world doing you okay so let me show you all four of these steps one more time notice that I can go from the air right into the bus right so any note you play on the trumpet you should be able to start with just air and then go to sound this is a very important thing to realize if when you go to play a note you're going PAH that means you're starting with the lips closed instead of doing that think of ha that means you're starting with Airstream right when the lips are closed first and then they have to go pop then that means every time you start a note you're getting an articulation with your lips so what happens when you try to do an articulation say with your tongue well now you're going to have a dirty sounding articulation because not only is the tongue trying to articulate or stop the air briefly chop into it and allow it to go through the lips but the lips are doing the same thing so you're kind of getting a double articulation of sorts which is not going to be clean it's going to be instead of right so if we want to have a nice clean articulation we want to make sure that the lips are always open and that the tongue is doing the articulating in fact most problems with the tongue aren't problems with the tongue they're problems with the admission of the sound coming out from the lips so you want to make sure that when you are omitting the sound that it's far okay so every time you go to do this after you set up everything make sure it's not you see even though I set up correctly I can now as a player not as the set up okay there's the set up and then there's the playing side of it as a player I could say I'm going to push everything together just like I got this mouthpiece I could say I'm going to push push on the reed and then open up right that is not going to work so well for articulation on the saxophone either okay it's a principle you can apply to two other things not just just the trumpet so this is the first step in terms of having a good setup these four steps are going to get you on the right path to getting the vibrating material and a readiness to vibrate and to making sure that that you have the accurate space or aperture between the lips so that you have good airflow and just to show you one more thing now when you set up the lips nice and large in between you have a good aperture some of you out there might be saying well how do I go higher right well now I'm going to dip into one other thing here this is not the set up side of things this is more the playing side of things how do you go from a large aperture to a small aperture correctly well this is related to the setup so and that's why I want to explain this briefly but it's very important so what I call it is set and then we have transition so we've just been working on the set and now we're going to talk briefly about transitioning from a lower note to a higher note and you can actually practice doing this with the visualizer so first let's just practice those steps one more time together make sure that you got them one two three and four I can do air and I can do a buzz but notice that the note that I'm buzzing right now let's see it let's say I do a middle C that's a relatively low note on the embouchure okay on the trumpet and you'll notice that the aperture is fairly large when I do that in fact I'm just going to do the air for it okay now comparatively if I was to do a G on the top of the staff that's going to be a much smaller aperture but I want you guys to notice what's happening here when I transition from a low notes to a higher notes there's two ways that I see people do this and one way is not very efficient and the other way is okay both can have results one has limited results but is a little bit more intuitive usually for folks and they end up doing it even though it's not the best thing for them to do and I'm going to show you both of these right now one after we set up see I have a good set up nice airway okay wet the lips now I'm going to do a low note and I'm going to transition to a high note just the air I'm not going to actually buzz it do it again let me show you a close-up of that Oh God notice that the muscles here and here as I described in Step three when we're pulling away that they pull up here and that they pull down right there creating a nice airway in the middle those are the same support muscles that we use actually when we're playing higher to make sure that the muscles in the middle this open culeros horas this muscle here does not clamp down so tight that it closes up the airway all all the way we can kind of represent this with our hands in fact if you take your hands and you clamp them together versus pulling them apart if you do both at the same time you'll find a balance so the higher we go the more the lips are going to be inclined to press towards one another but at the same time we have to pull them apart an equal opposition if this is not done then the airway gets strangled and that leads to something that looks a little bit more like this let me show you so you see this chin is pushing up and here is pushing down and I'm able to blow the air through but I really have to fight it that's going to create faster air yes faster air equals higher notes but at the same time it's also putting the lips into a position that's not flat anymore and it's also starting to strangle the air so it's going to be very hard to get good volume up there especially when we're playing higher it's also going to be very hard to get good articulation because if the lips are doing this then they're creating that hot environment versus FUP right so we're going to be running into some problems down the line especially with range and especially with soft playing when we play soft we have to have greater focus but when we're doing this it's very hard to play soft when the gates of your lips of the airway are closed right because that means you have to create an explosion just to open the lips so I'll show you I'll demonstrate how this is effective in terms of playing soft or high in terms of having starting with an open setting and then going to a smaller setting the lips they actually function more like this they don't function like this so again let me show you this this is again we've talked about set now we're talking about function or transition how do we go from a lower to higher note so here we are we're set support muscles open aperture when this is relaxed and more closed aperture not closed but a smaller aperture when we are firm around here okay you'll notice that if I'm buzzing on the mouthpiece I do the same thing watch the outside here okay and now another way that people do this and this is the way that it's limited and that you're going to find you run into problems is like this okay and the way that sounds like this [Applause] notice that the sound as I go higher doesn't stay nice and open in fact start to have little issues of little noises starting to speak that's the lips actually starting to rub in fact if you hear that sound as you just ascend on the mouthpiece maybe you've been playing for a while you probably have the habit of pushing the lips too close together right you can squeeze out some high notes playing this way but you're going to have problems with articulation you're going to have problems with with playing and loudly in the high register you're going to have problems playing really soft as well in general on the whole horn so what I'm advocating is to have a nice open setup that works for everything right and we can see that here the clear airway when I'm playing nice and open or low right or loud or when I'm playing soft or high there's no disturbance which means there's going to be clear tonguing which means I can get really soft notes or I can play high so here's the thing how do you put all this together you have to have a system of practicing these things so the first thing you're going to do is number one do it on the visualizer more times than you do it on the mouthpiece okay you want to make sure you're seeing what you're doing here make sure you're getting all four of these steps happening okay make sure you can do both of those things you can get air and you can get a bus separate these steps you're going to do this over and over again then I want you to play with actually trying to go from a wide aperture to us to a smaller aperture the way you're going to do this it's by firming up the muscles around here and this but they're going to be imbalanced the way that we talked about okay it feels more like a flattening motion where you're pulling the lips in towards the face in fact if we look at this I'm going to show you guys a buzzing from low to high and you'll see that the lips actually move in this manner okay watch this okay so if you watch that that's a larger view of how the lips are working across the whole span of playing from the tuba range to the trumpet range but even within the trumpet range the lips are making that same kind of emotion in fact another thing you might want to consider is the fact that when the lips come in this represents the teeth and my lower teeth and this represents my lower lip when the lips come in the teeth actually acts as a dampener okay when the lip comes in towards the teeth the teeth actually create a stopping of that vibration so as I do this as we go in higher and higher and higher the part of the lip that's vibrating say we're playing nice and low like this lots of lip is vibrating it's like a long string vibrating we put our finger in the middle that string what happens we get half half the length of that string which creates a faster vibration per second right which creates a higher pitch so if we think about it as the lips come in we're actually getting a smaller string here a shorter length of string and as that length of string is is shorter it's going to vibrate faster okay we can actually prove this if you take some kind of implement a pencil I'll just I'll use the edge of these scissors for right now if I brought vibrate my lips nice and low it's going to cancel the vibration out if I bribe right a little bit higher and I touch the same area no cancellation of the vibration because the vibration is happening in a smaller area here because as I bring the lips in that's cancelling out some that vibration already that's one reason why when we play a higher pitch dish we have a smaller mouthpiece we don't need all this room for all the lips to vibrate for all the mass of the lip to vibrate we only need this part of the lip to vibrate okay so if I was to keep doing this experiment if I touch there now it's not going to do anything I have to go in further if I go even higher the higher I go I have to be almost in the very middle the lips because that's where the vibration is happening folks but in order for that vibration to happen nice and successfully the lips have to be in a flat position and they have to move in this kind of a manner okay not like this so if we're talking about transition I'll have more videos on this subject of how to correctly transition from low to high but in terms of doing this if you're a beginner or maybe if you're changing your embouchure you want to practice just going from a wide aperture to a small aperture just on your visualizer just with air like this making sure not to bunch your chin up like this you'll see here that I'm not using the support muscles here or here but instead pushing everything together so you're going to want to do this many times on the visualizer and then do it say a ratio of five to one you do it five times on the visualizer then you do it here you give you setup hmm air first air to sound what's the middle of the lips notice that the sound is good because I've set the lips in a way where they're ready to vibrate but they have plenty of space between the lips so that the air can move through right the necessary ingredients of the embouchure so we do this we don't have an issue if we have this happen the lips are too close together you got to get them further away which means you got to go back to this and you got to look and check out the lips check out what they're doing try to get them open do the same thing on this once you can do it successfully on the mouthpiece hmm then it's time to do the same thing on the trumpet so air and as you see I'm getting a good sound and I'm not really doing much in terms of effort in fact the lips are ready to go they're set it's kind of like a bike horn or car horn right or bike horn so if I was a Philip Philip my cheeks were there and just push on them that Reed is ready to go I really don't have did a little out of work oh okay that wasn't even coming from down here the reed is said it's ready to go so I'll get a clear sound even if I do something silly like that the point is when you set the lips with a readiness to vibrate you don't have to do so much work on the trumpet half the work is done at that point so then the lips really become of not something that you have to think so much about you'll hear a lot of players say it's all about the air I don't think about your lips that is totally true assuming you have your lips set in a good position otherwise your lips are actually causing a lot of problems to the air that's trying to fight to get through them and if the air is fighting to get through the lips you might start having a neck issue especially if you lift your head up to try to get your horn up your neck might start to bulge out because the air can get through your lips so it's starting to push your neck out or lots of other issues you might get headaches because of the buildup of pressure not being able to get the air through the lips so again this is one of the most common problems that I see that people just don't open up their lips enough when they're playing they don't get them set open enough to start with you might be saying well geez if I do that how am I going to be able to play high it's just the way I showed you before all right so if you do this that doesn't mean you have to play open all the time it means you have more room to go more closed so you see with these support of these muscles that's very much like playing a saxophone mouthpiece you never want to press down so much that you press the reed against the mouthpiece you'll even see their great saxophone players also support with these muscles they want to make sure that they're firming up but they're not closing down and they do the work here they're their body is not part of the reed right so we in a way we have to think of our lips as not being part of our body anymore they're set once you set them you did a good job setting them then you got to focus right here this is where you're going to focus so you see as I'm going from low to high these muscles you can see that they're working this might look a little different on different folks depending on how their facial structure is but essentially these muscles are flattening out okay and as I go higher you're going to see more definition happen here and you're going to see a more taut chin in this u-shape in fact I got to give a shout out to Farkas who has a book called the art of brass playing it's one of the best books ever written on the subject of brass playing because it's very objective it's very scientific it is not a French horn embouchure book as many have discredited to be it's a brass embouchure book he doesn't describe in detail to force that method that I'm talking about but he does talk about a lot of the facets of the embouchure in a very explanatory way which i think is the most concise and clear of anything that i've read out there on the subject so I do want to recommend that the art of brass playing by Farkas FA are Kas but back to this if i message is the same flexibility like this versus i can do a complicated flexibility with ease when I'm playing nice and flat because I don't have to worry about the lips doing this kind of motion it's simply this motion which is much more efficient right if I'm playing like this that's going to give me a lot of chopping in the airstream because I'm constantly changing I'm constantly changing the vibration point of the lips and at the same time I'm really mashing the lips together okay so you want to make sure that you're not doing it like this and you're staying flat when you're doing your transitioning one last thing to talk about as you're going higher you want to make sure that you're really getting focused and you're not pushing the lips together if I try to go higher and I start to push that down too much I'm going to squeeze off that vibration and going to be very hard to get any kind of real sound coming out the horn but if I can manage to keep the lips open okay then I can start to get up there and start to create more sound and in fact that time I was playing softly but I wanted to prove a point also that when you do go up to these notes that you are going to want to approach them as a soft note to start off with and fattest is words today's squeek is tomorrow's note [Music] right so if you find your middle gene ah your GG is not so far away from your middle gene in fact it's right next door and by backing off the air and pulling the lips back in the motion that I'm showing you even on a this is a balk one straight back one it's not a high note mouthpiece high note mouthpieces don't create the high notes the lips and the air creates the high notes in the tongue I can get more into that in other videos in fact I've probably already gone over the scope of this video which is how to set up an embouchure but I did want to give you guys a little bit of tips in terms of transitioning and moving around so in any case I'm going to cut this video short at this point and hopefully you've gotten a lot of information out of this again that PDF is going to be available with a four-step method and how to set up the lips and the process that you have to go through including nice photographs of yours truly with good stills of each one of those steps so hopefully this has been a valuable tutorial for you please spread the word and subscribe if you like what you heard and I guess also follow me on Instagram since I just got on Instagram Hot Lips Porter alright good luck with all this and hope you guys are all well out there and thanks so much bye

Channel: Charlie Porter

Views: 668,832

Keywords: charlie porter, trumpet embouchure, how to forman embouchure, trumpet lips, wynton marsalis, doc severinsen, clark terry

Id: lLE_-ly8hrQ

Length: 52min 8sec (3128 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2017