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Re: How to develop a good Embouchure

Author: Eliot
Date: 2005-01-07 14:16

I'd been playing about 4 years and I thought I had a decent embouchure because I was told my tone was good. Then for some reason I got really aware of all those unreliable attacks on low notes, and unexpected drop-outs near the end of a diminuendo. My embouchure needed work!

By far the most valuable thing for me has been long tone practice.

In the first few years I'd read how you should be doing this all the time, but it had just seemed dumb - Ok, I can play a note and hold it for 10 seconds - what's the point??

So it was kind of wonderful to rediscover this practice and start doing it for real and paying attention: slow, pp - ff - pp, with vibrato (counting the beats in each second), chromatically down the first octave, 5-10 minutes daily. That's actually a good chunk of the time I had to allocate to practicing, so I guess to me it's just as valuable as pushing thru some scales or arpeggios.

It always used to crack me up to get suggestions like "Oh, just do a couple hours of scales in thirds to warm up". Yeah right if I could do that I wouldn't be asking, would I. So it occurs to me that just to get thru the tedium of a long tone exercise probably required enough of an embouchure to make the sound be controllable, variable, and interesting.

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