A PRACTICAL AID TO A BEAUTIFUL SOUND As every teacher knows, a good tone on any brass instrument needs a properly set-up embouchure; a good teacher will spare no effort to ensure that the students embouchure is as efficient as possible. These days one may assume that the young player will have a reasonable instrument and a sensible mouthpiece. To this one could add what many teachers would regard as the most important of all - good breath control. One aspect of the brass-blowing body machine which is hardly ever emphasized enough is the throat. By opening the throat area - or closing it - the tone-quality can be varied enormously. Although the differences are not quite as much as in singing, they can easily be heard on any brass instrument. It remains a problem, however, to put across to the young player the concept of open your throat. Many ideas like swallowing a football - yawning outwards or cooling a hot potato work to a greater or lesser degree, as I found in my own teaching, but needed to be said so many times! Then, I made my discovery, more or less by accident. It happened when I had designed a practice mute. This was intended just to make near-silent practice possible, but also to maintain good intonation and a feel not too different from normal playing. I discovered that by using my practice mute for loud practice, this tight throat problem could be eliminated in minutes. There was an additional bonus in that breathing became much more efficient when the throat was forced open by the resistance of the mute. The total result exceeded my wildest dreams! Here was a way of speeding up the teaching process, especially with young players. Even the smallest and weakest could sound almost professional in volume within a matter of weeks rather than years. I well remember a very little girl who suddenly was able to produce an amazingly loud fortissimo. I began to realize that I had stumbled upon a teaching technique that could help young brass students in a very positive way. Worldwide sales of practice mutes for trumpet, piccolo trumpet, french horn, tenor and bass trombones seem to show that other people think so too! We now have practice mutes for all brass instruments. Often, the difficulty that youngsters have with breathing well stems from the fact that they are hardly ever allowed to play a maximum ff and for good reason - nobody practices loudly! Trying to breathe well through a tight throat is fairly impossible anyway, so what one often hears is poor breath support and a rather choked sound. The problem can become worse if the player is at all nervous, when the throat automatically tightens.. Try the following: • THE BEFORE TEST (Remember exactly how this sounds) - play mp the first 5 notes of the scale of C major starting below the treble clef. • Play a loud low C with the practice mute. Take a deep breath, holding shoulders down, play louder. The note becomes less controlled with increasing volume. Try again much louder. Make sure that you play exactly as normal. Do not try to force the embouchure into a different shape. You will notice, as the volume increases, a buzz or rattle from the end of the mute. This buzz wobbles and fluctuates. Keep trying to play even louder, making sure that the wobbles become more even. Breathe as deeply as possible. Push the air through in a controlled way. Keep increasing the volume. If you begin to feel slight momentary dizziness - that is quite normal – the body is not accustomed to such deep breathing!. Now, with the same or more volume, play a semitone lower, gradually progressively descending a semitone at a time, until you are playing the loudest low F sharp you have ever heard, continuing to breath as deeply as possible. • Take out the practice mute, take a really deep breath and play the before test again, (only mp, remember) • Listen to the difference in sound - it should now be much more open and rich in tone, as the throat is automatically held open, thus creating an extra resonance chamber. Each day try this exercise for 15 minutes. After a few weeks, it should be possible to remember the open throat feeling as you breathe in, so that it can easily be reproduced for loud playing, especially in the lower register; it can and should also be used for soft playing in middle and upper registers. Brahms chorales for trombonists and espressivo solos for trumpeters can have a whole new dimension! Awareness of closing as well as opening the throat also makes a near-inaudible pianissimo very easy.
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 04:49:02 +0000
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