Thoughts about mouthpiece placement

@flugelgirl said in Thoughts about mouthpiece placement:

Got him into a pickup the horn breathe, play, put it down and repeat exercise, and and by that afternoon his world had changed. I hope he never went back to that teacher!
Another player I went to college with decided to experiment with his mouthpiece placement over the summer for no apparent reason and ruined his playing for about 3 years. A big shame - he was an amazing player before that!
Sure, some people need help, but 99% of them need more help with air than embouchure.

ABSOLUTLEY!
There seems to be this idea (fallacy) that the horn needs to be perfectly straight on the lips or the teeth need to be perfect. That's a bunch of horse hockey. Mendez played on a Bach 10 1/2 C and I've not heard too many people that can keep up with him. My teeth are no where near straight but people like my playing and I earn money performing for them.
You hit the nail on the head when you said "help with air". Just about every time I have a new student, the first thing we end up working on is how to use the air. Generally, when they play, their faces go red, they exhibit a strained face, they are gasping for air at the rests and appear that they are trying to blow a hurricane through a tiny hole. Once we get past huffing and puffing through the horn phase, then comes one of the strangest concepts; It takes "less" air as we ascend. Yes, 99% of the time just put it to your face. The 1% that needs a little tweaking for me is usually when they are playing in the red. I have them to say the letter "M" when they play and maintain that "M" as they play. By saying "M", the lips curl in just a little which helps get them off the red.

GeorgeB

@Dr-Mark said in Thoughts about mouthpiece placement:

@Tobylou8
Damned! Is that a peanut allergy!?! Kinda looks like two bottom feeders.

Ha, ha, I just fell out of my chair laughing...

@Kehaulani said in Thoughts about mouthpiece placement:

To have something consistent to compare results to?
That aside, wouldn't a natural placement fly in the face of some of the most popular embouchure placements aims (upstream, etc.)?
I'm not proposing this, necessarily, but asking the question.

If you're going to have a control group, what would be your independent and dependent variables when comparing the dimensions of male to female lips.

Tobylou8

Clark Terry played wherever his lips weren't tired!!

Kehaulani

@Dr-Mark said in Thoughts about mouthpiece placement:

@Kehaulani said in Thoughts about mouthpiece placement:

To have something consistent to compare results to?
That aside, wouldn't a natural placement fly in the face of some of the most popular embouchure placements aims (upstream, etc.)?
I'm not proposing this, necessarily, but asking the question.

If you're going to have a control group, what would be your independent and dependent variables when comparing the dimensions of male to female lips.

Simply, to evaluate a large group of women and a large group of men and see if there are any commonalities in characteristics. In other words, are there any common lip configurations that one can find in one group and what similarities or dissimilarities there are when comparing one groups with the other.

Obviously, if all women have lip-configuration X then you can say that's what a typical formation is. But if there are too many dissimilarities to come to a common description then there is, well, none.

ROWUK

In my world, we are creatures of habit. I am convinced that the „where“ is secondary, what we need is „stable“. This gives us a reliable target for development.

Recently, I have been spending a lot of time on the natural trumpet. The mouthpiece there is huge(19.5mm) and the proportion of upper to lower lip far different than with my „modern“ trumpets. This seems to be insignificant for playing. We just need a very stable base in everything that we do.

Generally, embouchure questions only come up when something is not working. There seems to be the blind assumption that we change one thing and are cured. This has NEVER worked. In my teaching, body use and breathing come first, then a relaxed exhale into the note. We build stability over time by strengthening the foundation and not moving too fast to get an octave more in 4 weeks before an audition. The attitude about preparation is the biggest reason that we get into trouble. We need to play things out of our scope because we did not improve the scope when we should have.

Generally, a good program with lipslurs can improve the embouchure by evolution instead of cold turkey revolution.