Last week I returned from a vacation over Thanksgiving to visit relatives in Florida. My accomodations were pretty spartan, basically a tiny trailer with no air conditioning, but my family and I had a good time. I had orchestra services immediately upon my return to Ohio, so I needed to hit the ground running and stay in shape. I did bring my horn, and I ended up practicing about 40 minutes daily every evening in a practice mute, staying in shape by making tiny sounds in a tiny toolshed in a tiny trailer. When I returned home after the trip, after some long tones to get my air working normally again, I was surprised to find that I was playing better than when I left. How did this happen? I attribute it to the fact that I have revamped my maintenance routine, adding exercises from Jeff Smiley’s Balanced Embouchure after a brief warmup.
As I mentioned here and here, I’ve been working on the book for a few months. I originally was doing the exercises at the end of the day because I was worried the exercises would interfere negatively with my normal playing (they ARE intense). That seemed to be going well, so during some of my off weeks I decided to try to put them at the beginning of the day to see what would happen. It turned out that everything improved.
The RI/RO exercises make perfect range and attack studies, and the TOL (tongue on lips) exercises allow one to experiment with articulations and air speed, making for a complete maintenance routine. When added to a brief warmup and a few scales, it’s a perfect 40 minute routine for me. Ironically, the weirdness of the different embouchure sensations allows me to tune out how things feel and instead focus on what I want to sound like. The vast differences between the RI and RO embouchures have fine tuned my regular embouchure, making it more streamlined, with no unnecessary movement. The overall effect has been very freeing. After playing through my new routine, I feel like I can play anything, anytime and anywhere. I play my warmup, the BE exercises, and then forget about it all and just play music.
Being able to play in any range using either a rolled-in or a rolled-out embouchure has given me the flexibility and confidence to know I can play anything under any conditions, no matter how my chops feel. The TOL exercises have been especially groundbreaking for me. They have reminded me of the importance of tongue position in ease of range and tone color, along with articulation, and now I have another tool to work on those techniques.
When I’m having difficulty with an excerpt or passage, I find myself relating the passage to a specific BE exercise. For example, I was having trouble with the mid-range intervallic leaps in the beginning of Bruckner’s 4th symphony. But a mid-range interval of an octave or a tenth is by no means as large as a 3 octave leap in and out of the pedal register! So, by reminding myself of what I have to do to play the interval leaps in RO #3 and RI #4, Bruckner 4 has become much easier.
I’ve decided that in my own development, the ALS (advanced lip slur) exercises weren’t really doing anything for me. I found that I was able to play through all of them right away, so it wasn’t advantageous to keep playing them. I find that I get plenty of advanced lip slur practice in my normal playing, so I’ve decided to just keep working on the other exercises. I may decide to work on the ALS exercises later, but extending them into the trumpet ranges.
Overall, I’ve been thrilled at the results I’m getting from BE, which I was not expecting at all. The exercises are fun, challenging, efficient and mercifully brief, allowing me more time to work on what I really care about in my practice sessions. I look forward to even more improvements in the months/years to come.
*For a more detailed explanation of the Balanced Embouchure and RI/RO/TOL, see Valerie Wells’ website at http://www.beforhorn.blogspot.com/ .
Hi Julia!
Would you care to share more details on your specific BE routine? I’d love to hear about it!
Thanks!
It’s very simple really- just the straight RO-RI #1-#4 as presented in Valerie’s edition of the BE exercises, including the TOL exercises in #2, using all recommended zips, etc. I don’t take breaks in between, so it takes about 15 minutes.
Thanks Julia! Just curious
Wow, Julia! Nobody can say it quite like you can! This is why I love promoting The Balanced Embouchure. It always brings positive results when the program is followed correctly.
I think you would do well to practice the original advanced lip slurs that are written for trumpet, transposed to horn in Bb alto. The ones I wrote for horn are designed primarily for beginning to intermediate horn players.
Thanks ever so much for sharing your experiences openly and honestly. I’m humbled and touched by your generosity.
Warm regards, Valerie
Thanks Valerie, for the advice that I move to the trumpet ALS. I will do that when summer comes, as I have a very busy practice schedule as of late!
A very worthwhile presentation. I particularly like the approach of using BE to extend one’s own exploration of embouchure, for example, to learn that one can develop more than one way to play in a particular range.
Re: Larry’s comment. I didn’t understand that idea the first few years I studied BE. I just did the exercises & got better. It wasn’t until the last couple years that I realized how useful it is to be able to play several octaves with three different embouchures. It gives me tonal options I wouldn’t otherwise have, but the most critical for me it how it helps me navigate challenging interval leaps within phrases.
Julia, How about some pictures or your roll-out and roll-in embouchures? Are you that brave? It might be fun & useful to see your extreme embouchures compared side by side to mine and Steve Park’s!
I’d be interested to see that too, especially since I have no idea what I look like when I do RI/RO (I avoid mirrors when I play). I’ll get on it!