In the beginning there was the smile.
I was first introduced to the smile embouchure by my first cornet teacher, Mr.Earl E. Youngdahl in Moline, Illinois when I was in fourth grade.
The lesson went something like this- “Mr. Youngdahl, how can I play the high notes”? His response went somewhat like this- “When you play the high notes, you need to stretch the corners of your lips outward as if you are stretching a rubber band by pulling on both ends at the same time”. And now you know why I have never been able to play with ease in the upper register for most of my life.
The smile system sounds logical when first hearing the process. As you get higher, you pull back on the corners of your lips which tightens the orbicularis ores (red part of your lips) and as you increase outward tension, your thin the muscle which forces the lip to vibrate faster; hence producing faster vibrations and in turn, higher notes. That is the logic behind the smile system. The down side of this method is the fact that you are reducing the vibratory material to the point that you start producing a thinner sound and eventually you end up with very little “meat” to work with.
Then we had the pucker.
An extreme pucker was thought to be the answer to the shortcomings of the smile embouchure. As with all reflex solutions to an immediate problem, it too has its problems. An extreme pucker is when you force the corners toward the center of your lip. In doing this extreme change, you do give yourself more “meat” to work with and in some cases, higher notes become bigger and fatter in sound. But, as you increase pressure the opening through which your air passes into the mouthpiece tends to diminish in size and eventually closes, stopping your buzz.
Next came the combination Pucker, Smile embouchure.
When this approach started to catch on, we all thought we had the final answer to all of our embouchure problems. The word was out- “anchor the corners as if you were holding the m sound when saying the word “dim”. This produced the ideal firmness and opening for the air to pass through and we all began practicing the “dim” embouchure. All was well for several decades until….
When playing higher, roll your upper lip in.
So…. Now we have firm corners to keep the “meat” in place, the aperture through which the air passes is secured and by rolling in your upper lip, we can more easily increase air velocity by narrowing and flattening the space between the lips. Hooray, we have finally found Utopia!
Or have we?
The perfect embouchure is the one that works for the individual and there is no one, perfect embouchure for every trumpet player. I remember when the great trumpet player Jon Faddis came on the scene and many thought that the abnormally large space between his upper front teeth gave him the edge over all the other trumpet players. I even heard stories of trumpet players inserting wedges between their teeth in order to duplicate Mr. Faddis’s super high skills.
Check out this video at the start (:13) before he said “You all stole” and notice this unusually large gap between his top, front teeth.
In order to close this segment on the “correct” embouchure, I need to add something of quality and this video of the great Mr. Faddis will add just the right amount of class to end this post.
In my next post I will try to cover a few changes in my own playing which have been a big help to my playing in the past couple years. One such change deals with the size of the aperture between my lips which has helped my playing greatly.
Who said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?
