81–83 of 83 posts
This seems a decent introduction. The only thing mentioned that I wasn't really aware of is the effect of the tongue in addition to the lips on the embouchure of higher notes. Can anyone recommend some more info on that?
The role of the tongue is heavily emphasized in modern brass pedagogy. Try Claude Gordon, Physical Approach to Elementary Brass Playing, 1977
I loved playing trombone in school. It's such a simple mechanism, it invites a lot of curiousity, and this piece captures that well. Instruments like piano, violin, and guitar are very visual, essentially wysiwyg. Instruments like saxophones, clarinets, flutes, take a long to mentally map and reason through (this combination of keys achieves note X). Trumpets, and other 3 valve instruments map exactly to trombone pos…
> But learning trombone, and then mapping that knowledge to a euphonium, trumpet, tuba, etc, gives you a knowledge about that instrument (eg ok if note X is 1st valve, and note X+1 is 1+2, then i know adding 2-to-1 adds a half step, because position 3 is a half step from position 4). I don't think intervals are unique to trombones. If you understand that X+1 is a half step above X, and you know note X is 1st valve an…
- 1+3 (6)
- 2+3 (5)
- 1+2 (4)
- 1 (3)
- 2 (2)
- open (1)
All I mean to say, sliding a little bit at a time up the slide is easy to map to "short slide higher pitch" in a way that valves don't
This seems a decent introduction. The only thing mentioned that I wasn't really aware of is the effect of the tongue in addition to the lips on the embouchure of higher notes. Can anyone recommend some more info on that?
Dave has been building on the work Donald Reinhardt started in methodically categorizing embouchure types and figuring out how each type best functions. They seem to be part of a minority in the brass community who actually care to approach things scientifically - I could go on about my own experiences of brass teachers who aren't interested in furthering their understanding of embouchure mechanics, but Dave covers that topic pretty well already [2]. Reinhardt's stuff can also be worth reading, but Dave simplified some of the categories that seemed unnecessarily complicated.
[0] https://wilktone.com/?page_id=5619