embochure advice, please

[Yamamartin59]

Help Please,
Ok experts, what is causing me to puff my cheeks out when I hit the pedal tones on my YEP321? I'm using a Vincent Bach 5 GS mouthpiece. This does not happen when I play my Martin Imperial trombone with a Vincent Bach 6 1/2 AL. Is this an embochure or mouthpiece problem? I was taught very early on (January, 1970) that you do not puff your cheeks out. Thank you!

[donn]

If it sounds OK, puff them cheeks. [I have zero credentials to be handing out advice, except this is the internet.]

Trumpet players need to put some cheek muscle into it, so they don't get essentially permanent injury that gives them an uncontrollable frog like cheek balloon. Not an issue for us. Relaxation is very important at the bottom of the tuba range. Go for a solid buzz down there, maybe push lips out farther into the mouthpiece than you have been.

[SteveP]

I've got zero credentials as well but I will say that I hate seeing cheeks puffed out when playing ANY instrument, including the tuba. It just looks ridiculous to me. Keep trying to keep those cheeks where they belong, not puffed out. Maybe someone who actually knows something will chime in with real advice. So far you're batting 500 from people who admit not knowing squat.

[donn]

It might help to know more or less how far they puff out. I mean, let's say you press your lips together and puff out as far as you can go, and then let the air all out. About where, in that range, is the low note phenomenon?

Or check out the video that should still be on this page of the forum where one of us who is a very fine player to say the least, treats us to an Austrian march excerpt. Yeah, his cheeks puff out a bit here and there. If you can do what he can do in the low range, you don't need to be asking us anything.

[bloke]

The muscles just below the cheekbones, I believe, control that, but – the more you open your teeth (in order for your lips to vibrate slower) – the more difficult it becomes to control those particular muscles.

analogy: Think of the distance between the two separately-vibrating blades of an oboe reed assembly vs. the distance between the two separately-vibrating blades of a (lower pitched instrument) bassoon reed assembly…
… so to get your separately-vibrating lips farther apart, your teeth open, and you have less control of those cheek muscles.

I'm not a teacher.

Teaching is akin to attempting to supervise someone else driving an 18-wheeler - while I'm chained to the cot the sleeper cab.

[Paulver]

Everybody has their own way of doing things.

Do a little of your own research........ start on a note just above where you notice it happening. Using long tones, work your way down slowly, and find out exactly where the cheeks puff out. When it happens, consciously work to pull them back in and pay attention to which muscles need to be used to control it. Also, be very aware of any...... and most probably a........ sound change that occurs.

All that said............ I know quite a few players whose cheeks puff/puffed out, and they play/played just fine.

Based on what I was taught in brass class, and what I learned throughout my teaching career, the only two issues I can think of that you may have down that low would be intonation and endurance. Intonation would obviously be cured by listening a bit more closely, then adjusting the lips for correction. The endurance thing, logically, would be caused by muscle weakness and breath control. That would obviously require more time, effort, and practice, to correct.

Tone quality should not be an issue due to the fact that your throat would normally be wide open, your jaw would be most likely dropped way down, and the resulting oral cavity would be as large as your mouth would allow. All good for tone.

[Mary Ann]

Go watch some videos of high level players. You WILL see cheeks "relaxed" for pedals. If you are "inflating" your cheeks and using them to hold in air pressure as you ascend in pitch, you do have a problem that needs to be fixed.

[Andy]

Arnold Jacobs had a saying, "embouchure is not a study of meat, it is a study of sound."

What he meant was that he was less concerned about the physical maneuvers of the student than he was about how they sounded. This did not mean he would approve of a completely off the wall embouchure. He believed that if the student had a reasonably functional embouchure, they should focus on producing their finest quality of tone, and the rest would more or less take care of itself. He believed that as the student develops over time, the musculature is strengthened through playing, and these so-called issues work themselves out on their own.

If the embouchure was not functional, and was inhibiting the student's ability to produce a good tone, he would prescribe numerous studies he accumulated over the years. The student would then work on these, with the focus always on playing musically and with their finest tone. Over time, the embouchure would become more refined and the function would improve. But the focus should always on the music and not the meat.

He also would advise his students to "sound better than everybody else, and they will copy what yoiu do."

[bone-a-phone]

Everybody has some sort of shift going on when moving into the pedal range. I drop my jaw and the horn moves, and I'm not paying any attention to my cheeks. If the puffing is causing some problem like bad sound or leaks or you can't move back to a normal embouchure fast enough to play other notes, you might consider seeing an embouchure specialist. He will likely make you play in a mirror and record your sound, and do scales and intervals shifting in and out of that range at various speeds.

Doug Elliott is a teacher, and an expert and can do this kind of thing over Skype or similar. If this is a real problem for you, I'd contact Doug. His contact info is all over the internet. He'll charge you, but in the end it will save you a lot of time working through your issue.

[York-aholic]

Teaching is akin to attempting to supervise someone else driving an 18-wheeler - while I'm chained to the cot in the sleeper cab.

What's the worst that could happen?

[Mary Ann]

Doug Elliott is a teacher, and an expert and can do this kind of thing over Skype or similar. If this is a real problem for you, I'd contact Doug. His contact info is all over the internet. He'll charge you, but in the end it will save you a lot of time working through your issue.

I took a lesson from Doug and it was really interesting; (and we found out that I was using the correct embouchure type; I took the lesson on horn, on which I have focal dystonia.) If someone is not sure their basic embouchure is correct, I would highly recommend a lesson with Doug. It will be ENTIRELY technical testing to see what your physical makeup indicates the *placement* of the cup should be (how much of each lip goes in the cup: more upper, more lower, how much,) and if that would bother you then he's not the teacher for you. Put the cup here, try that; play higher, play lower, see what you do and if it works, and likely some direction to try / do different things. An engineer approach, not a "play the sound you hear in your head" approach. (To those teachers who say that, my response has always been, if I could do that by myself I would not be here taking a lesson from you.) AFTER you have a working embouchure is when you dive into the purely making music part of it, but you HAVE to be able to do it physically. Different teachers work for different pupils. And he doesn't get into the mechanisms of what goes on in inside the cup with your lips to play the different ranges; it is about where the cup should be.

The reason this Reinhardt method would be so good for horn players in particular is that there is a "mystery school of the Farkas embouchure" in horn playing --- people will say there is only one right way to have a horn embouchure, which is the Farkas mostly-upper-lip embouchure, and that simply does not fit everyone's face because not everyone has Farkas's facial structure. One of the finest local players uses a low set embouchure, mostly lower lip in the cup, which is NOT a Farkas embouchure and yet some teachers would have tried valiantly to "correct" his embouchure despite his fine results with what works for him. I think sometimes people are moved on to different brass instruments because their natural embouchure doesn't fit the preconceived notion of teachers and they say the person has no talent on that brass because they can't play it with the embouchure setting the teacher is demanding. So they go to a brass where they can use what works for them without interference, or they give up entirely.