Extreme Embouchures

Sometimes players get into what I call Extreme Embouchures. They might do several embouchure shifts to play a song or a scale. I had a player here in my house for a lesson that did this. I asked him to play a scale from Low G to High C. That is 2 and a half octaves. He told me beforehand that it was easily in his range.

He took a breath and started on Low G. He took a breath and set a little differently between 2nd line G and 2nd space A. He took another breath and set differently between 3rd space C and 4th line D. He took another breath and set differently between G on top of the staff and A above the staff. He could not play his range on one set. I even had him do an arpeggio so that he got through an octave quickly, but he still needed the breaths to reset his embouchure. He sounded like several different players who each had a part of the scale to play. He couldn’t keep a consistent sound because of the shifts.

I have seen other types of extreme embouchures also, like in this question posed to me in an online forum.

I play with my lip rolled over my teeth. I heard that you don’t like this embouchure. Why not?

The reason not to try an extreme embouchure is the same as not drawing another card at Blackjack when you have 20. It has to do with the odds of it failing exceeding the chances of it working by 1000 to 1.

We are not talking about a slight lip curl that stays in front of the teeth. That works for 98% of the people who work at it.

The question was about curling the lip over the top of the teeth. I have never seen that work well.

As for extremes in trumpet playing, There are 2 excellent players who both sell instructional information about their embouchures. They have both taught some people to use their embouchures, but they have very high failure rates.

I’ve had well over 100 contact me in the last year with playing problems caused by the extreme embouchure they were trying. One of these systems had several of their endorsement people from the webpage come to me for help. They are willing to make promises that everyone should be smart enough to see through. NOT EVERY player in the world will have a range from double pedal c to triple high c. Ye t one teacher promised this to people who were looking to get lessons from him.

You can play arpeggios 24 hours a day for 100 years but without the right embouchure / air support combination for your build it will NEVER happen. Claude Gordons Systematic Approach has been on the market for 25 years. Why can’t 5 million people play triple high c by now?

The fact is it takes more than exercises to get the job done. A year of private lessons you say. No, I know people who studied 10+ years with great players who were MUSICAL EXERCISE believers. Their teacher could scream but the student could not.

There are 2 reasons for this. The natural player never had problems to overcome. So, he never had to LEARN how to fix playing problems. He CAN’T teach what he does as he has no idea. The second is even worse. This teacher will NOT inform the student when a change is needed. That takes guts because a great number of them will leave and the teacher will lose $.

Don’t believe it. Read questions posted on the net. “I’m having trouble with ____. Don’t tell me about breathing or embouchures or tongue levels or pivots; just tell me some exercises to practice.” In other words, I don’t want to really fix anything I’m looking for a 5-minute quick fix.

I’m NOT talking just about embouchure. I find more breath related problems than embouchure problems. Again, a musical exercise with no other instruction will NOT cure a breathing problem either. That is the reason most of my books are mostly text.

I’ve had many college grads take a lesson and improve more in an hour than they did in 4 years of college. They had lessons every week. They played Arban, Schlossberg, Clarke, and Gordon.

How did I help them so fast? Learning proper breathing is quick and has big results.

Pops