Playing In The "Red" Of The Lips: Why Players Do It And How To Avoid It

[Music] hey fellow trumpeters and other brass musicians this is Charlie Porter here back with another video and this one actually goes out to all you guys although it's particularly important for trumpet players and it's the subject of whether or not to play with the mouthpiece in the red of the lips so the subject of whether or not we can play in the red of the lips with the actual setting of the mouthpiece is definitely one that's hard for some to grasp and seemingly impossible for some others to do due to their large lip size trying to play on say trumpet sized mouthpiece so I know that this subject is a bit controversial for some but I really do stand by this idea that we want to try to get at least some of the mouthpiece off of the red of the lips and what I'm talking about is the top and the bottom of the rim of the mouthpiece for myself I know I started off playing trumpet all the way like this with the rim top rim deep inside of the red here until I had kind of my first backstage lesson trumpet lesson that is with Wynton Marsalis and he actually took me over to a mirror and lifted that mouthpiece up to get it out of the red and so I kind of made a change at that point unfortunately I put it up too high and then I started playing in the bottom red a lot of players that play with the rim in the red of the lip either the top or the bottom are suffering from endurance issues and one of the reasons for this is when we play on this this tissue right here let me get the name of it here it's called the stratum corneum and the thing is if you look this up and I'm gonna post this up for you guys by virtue of its protective nature the stratum corneum is harder than other layers of skin the lips however have a very thin stratum corneum this is very obvious all you have to do is touch your face if you touch here you can feel that that is much thicker than right here this is a lot softer this tissue right here the tissue right beyond the border called the Vermillion right there is much more suitable to applying pressure even if we're not pressing say a harmful amount but we're just pressing the amount that it takes to seal the mouthpiece correctly we're doing this for extended periods of time we want to make sure that we're allowing maximum blood flow to happen inside here where it needs to happen so that we can not damage our lips and and and cause them to to bruise and and swell and all those other nasty things that happen so in general keeping the mouthpiece out of that red zone is preferred I've only known one trumpet player in my entire life that's played in the red and has had exceptional range and exceptional endurance myself used to play deep in the bottom red and could play high but it was very painful and I just got kind of used to the pain and there are a lot of players that play that way on the bottom or on the top and I'm gonna also explain why that's a thing it's not just about lip size so you see a lot of players they think because they have larger lips which you know for the average white guy I got kind of big lips and so the idea for me I thought for many years I thought man my lips are just too big I even thought one point I thought about seriously getting a lip reduction operation which sounds absolutely ridiculous I know that but I was desperate I I could not find a way to kind of get my lips all inside of the cup without completely closing up the aperture so I did what a lot of other folks do and I kind of pulled out and played on the red here for many many years all throughout Juilliard all throughout Manhattan School music and and then throughout I guess half of my professional career in New York I'm just dealing with the pain and you know playing the high notes and stuff like that but it wasn't until one gig that I did in China where our drummer Alvin Atkinson he said you know Charlie you better look in the mirror so I looked in the mirror at the end of the gig and sure enough big blood blister right on the bottom lip couldn't play for about a couple months after that and then I had a big competition coming up man it was just like not good timing basically well it took me about another year to recover from that and I had to rework everything and figure out how am I gonna get my lips to stay inside and get that rim off of the outside onto the outside I should say let me tell you there's there's lots of trumpet players Armando Gaetano is a famous example he was a great soloist you might have heard his recording of the boom trumpet concerto he taught at Rice University he was a one of the teachers of one of my former teachers Raymond mace and he was pretty strict about trumpet players playing off of the red of the lip at least with the top and bottom of the mouthpiece obviously we can't avoid the sides but if he had a student that played in the red he would change their embouchure and I think this is a necessary change and one that will that the student will find is actually going to even though it's difficult of course to make any kind of change it's gonna be one in the long term that's actually gonna help your endurance and your sound quite a lot so back to that idea that you know what if your lips are too big how do you fit your lips into a tiny mouthpiece one great example of this Clifford Brown anybody that's looked at a picture of Clifford Brown knows that Clifford had very full lips but he also surprisingly played on a really tiny mouthpiece he played on a box 17c by most people's standards they would say that hey if you got huge lips you should be playing on a really big mouthpiece but unfortunately I think a lot of large lip players like myself when you go to do that you find out you got all this lip that has really no support anymore so it actually makes your job much more difficult to play because now all that lip mass you have to support it and if you don't you end up just mashing and playing really hard well this is kind of a crazy thing that I had done but I have a student that makes these awesome little mouthpieces here on its own 3d printing machine and so this one's about the size of say a seven C rim now if you look at that hopefully my camera will do its little job there there we go look at this guy this thing is tiny tiny tiny okay I can barely fit my pinkie into it in fact I can't the circumference of my pinky is wider than this mouthpiece now I don't have Clifford Brown's lips right but I can simulate a kind of similar scenario by taking a mouthpiece that's this tiny and fitting my lips into it let's say that I don't fit my lips too quite into the cup or let's say that I'm putting them in but I'm not fitting them in a way where I'm getting a really good aperture right so let's let's go through that I'm using by the way the four-step setup method which I've described in another video how to how to set up the Amish or I had a four man I'm sure and forceps so I'm gonna do that but let's say that I'm trying to get all my lips inside alright like I recommend doing and then I go to stretch out but then you get a scratchy sound and the only way that you're finding and this is especially true for thicker lip players the only way that you find maybe that you can get a sound is by pulling out more of the lip on the top or on the bottom and then you end up like this right so if I'm playing like this that might give me more open clear sound because of course I'm hitting that aperture now but it's really at at the peril of my lips and my endurance because you're not gonna have much endurance at that point if you're playing right on the red especially a red top and bottom so I'm gonna take this little mouthpiece and I'm gonna show you well first of all if I if I do the job of setting up better in this mouthpiece then you'll see that I can fit my lips inside ah and I don't get a scratch right so what's the difference here if I set them up and I pull them out and I create that space you have to make sure that when you create that space this is very important you see his face that I'm creating fact I'm gonna get a little closer right up in your grille okay see I space when I blow the air through if I hold the lips back against the teeth like this like when buzzing then that holds that excess amount of the red there back instead of coming forward right because we have all this soft tissue on the inside however if after setting the aperture if I start focusing forward I know a lot of you have been told the puckery lips forward but watch what happens when I do that it actually fills up the inside of that aperture from the inner red it starts to actually come for so all the work that we've done there to create that nice aperture gets ruined by filling up the hole with that inner red of the lip so if I play that same idea to this tiny tiny little mouthpiece so this is the four steps right first hide the red this this tissue right here or whatever color it is on your skin right for me it's kind of a pinkish color I'm gonna hide all that away right hide the soft part of the lips here then right here we're gonna create a seal that's all the way to the teeth okay and then I'm gonna pull the lips out until I create an aperture testing it making sure the air can flow through notice that there's no scratch in the sound all right look at how tiny this is and look at how large my lips are in comparison right so I don't need a huge mouthpiece to you know accommodate big lips all I need is a method to make my lips fit into any mouthpiece size that I want to play so if you guys want to get the feeling of what it feels like to play on that tiny little mouthpiece instead of using something like this as a visualizer little pair of scissors you can also take the end of your wire brush you'll see that it's really tiny if I use that if I do the same steps then I also get that clean sound even on something as Tiny as this and when you consider how small that is in comparison and that gives you definitely a good idea of what it feels like to play on a really really tiny rim but I'm confident that using this way of setting up I could play on a mouthpiece that was ridiculously small or large now let me explain exactly why it is besides lip size this is the real culprit of actually why most people are playing in the red of the of the lips with the top of the rim or the bottom of the rim and this is kind of mind-blowing if you didn't figure this one out yet but for me I didn't realize it until I played on a trombone mouthpiece so in fact I got this guy over here check this over these horns are really cool when you trumpet players that want to have a doubling instrument King made these things called the fluke Oh bones and I got oil abouts on this thing it's a beautiful instrument but here's the thing I noticed it when I was playing on this horn that I was actually playing still in the red not on the top but on the bottom alright and so it wasn't exactly this horn that I had at the time was a euphonium or baritone horn that I bought but I was playing here even with the mouthpiece that big could not get out of the red so I'm thinking man are my lips really that big so then I called silky and I had to make me a custom mouthpiece that was like the size of a trombone mouthpiece I'm not even kidding and I was trying to play that on the trumpet and then I realized well this is impossible I mean I'm kind of fitting my lips in but you know what I ended up still playing on the red so I had to ask myself is it really about my lip size and I figured out the answer it's not about your lip size a lot of people play in the red and the reason they do it it's as a crutch to play higher so let me explain what I mean there if you take your trusty scissors here and you think about what it is that the mouthpiece is doing if you know how guitar works and you know that you have the strings and that an addition to playing that your normal way you can also use this device called a capo which you clamp to the strings and to the fretboard and what that thing does is essentially recalibrates a new length through the strings right so if I clamp it here then the shrinks only vibrate from there to the end instead of the entire length right that's kind of what a mouthpiece does for us and if you look at the size of say a trombone mouthpiece versus a trumpet mouthpiece we essentially have different Capo's that we can put on our lips this is the full length of string all right or you're gonna look at it this way is the full length of string to put the trumpet mouthpiece on and I have a higher note why you hear that little trill that's happening there if I stop some of the length of the lip from vibrating it's gonna vibrate higher right because I have a smaller amount vibrating that's essentially what this is doing if I put the trombone mouthpiece on I don't get a fourth but I get maybe a whole step not even a half step [Music] okay so this is not changing the area very much just taking a little off but guess what can happen if we play in the top red or in the bottom red we are also basically extending that capo effect to isolate even more of the lip off so instead of actually going through the work of pulling the lip in and getting what I call the fretboard effect of the lips coming in towards the teeth right as the lips come in towards the teeth and less of the lip vibrates effectively giving us a smaller area vibration helping us to get the pitch up of course that's in conjunction with the teeth coming closer together and the tongue raising all these things are helping to build that perfect storm of faster airflow and faster vibration right firmer lips but in addition to that you'll see a lot of players set in the red right and maybe at first it's because their lips are too big and they haven't figured out how to you know sediment or maybe they're puckering forward like I was warning you guys not to do earlier but the other thing that they might have discovered is that if they pull it down or if they pull it up that they get a little boost kind of like a little nitrous oxide boost in their range because all of a sudden now they are playing on a smaller surface area of the lip because they've just used the crutch of using less surface area of the lip by way of playing in in the red of the lip and some players will do this on both the top and the bottom all right the problem again like I said before because this tissue is so thin the outer layer is so thin it's you're much more prone to damaging the lips and you're not actually resting on the orbicularis Oris which is a much stronger part of the lip to put your rim on so if you're here that's not a good idea folks you really want to see a teacher that can help you change that and kind of you know guide you through the process because it's not an easy process to go through I've gone through it a couple times myself and I can tell you it's really frustrating but in the end of the of the of the whole process you're really gonna be glad that you did that so anyway I hope you found this helpful again my name is Charlie Porter this is my youtube channel if you want to see more videos like this just hit the subscribe button and like the video if you liked it leave some comments another thing to consider is clicking that little Bell icon which will help to notify you of future videos that are gonna come out so anyway I hope this helps you guys try to keep the mouthpiece out of the red and and work on just having the best position possible that's that's going to give you longevity as a player and increase your comfort level anyway I'm out peace take care [Music]

Channel: Charlie Porter

Views: 233,259

Keywords: Trumpet, Charlie Porter, Playing in the red, mouthpiece placement, embouchure

Id: KOhOM1fNwvE

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020