[The Balanced Embouchure Jeff Smiley.pdf
Bok Mull
I think you know about the approach of Jeff Smiley in his book the balanced embouchure. What are the similitudes et differences with WindWorks.
And have you ever tried the technique described in TCE (Tongue Controlled Embouchure by Bahb Civiletti)? It seems to me that it is a little like tongue arch but with the tongue between the teeth.
Hi Francis,
I did quite a bit of study of the Balanced Embouchure many years ago when it first came out and found it to have a lot of benefit.
It terms of describing how the lips work when playing it is quite different from Wind-works as BE describes more of rolling in and out to achieve the shape change. More of a focus of top and bottom lip coming together and it advocates for playing with a very small aperture.
Hi Alistair..good questions you raise about the lips. Below is a quote from Michael (Prof of physics N Z if i remember right) from Trumpet Herald forum. He was a big fan of BE. He wrote this back in 2006. Unfortunately i think he has passed away..unlike the challenges of mastering the trumpet. At least the Roll out pedals element of BE focuses on this pushing away feel..which I guess is akin to Ahh Oohh? Stay safe for Christmas..steve
Michael writes:
I was just about to stop, because my lips were starting to lose focus and thin out, then my corners kicked in with the double pedal inward feel, my embouchure focused inwards and forwards and the horn opened up. WOW! What a feeling. This HUGE tone came out of the horn, even up to high C, which would easily have fitted in to a symphony orchestra. This was playing on a mouthpiece with a cup volume similar to a Bach 7E. The other curious thing about this setting is that the sensation is of the lips pushing the mouthpiece away, not of the mouthpiece pushing into the lips. Michael
I spent months primarily playing with Passively released air. I have no playing commitments, so that was a luxury I could afford. I think that helped me break some bad habits and helped me stop tensing up in the throat, neck, shoulders, etc. I still have to watch myself, but I rarely catch myself doing that anymore.
Then, once we have a concept of Shape, we can circle back and work on filling that shape with more Air, Actively supported air to increase the volume of the note, which will require a slight modification of shape (i.e. more open aperture).
His book, "The BalancedEmbouchure",is now available.
It is the core text of a projectedseries of books dealing with unique dynamic range of motion exercises.These exercises tend to enhance every player's embouchure development -often dramatically.
Oddly enough, I was also teachingtrumpetthroughout this period, and was having tremendous success. I hadlearned a wide assortment of techniques (bag of tricks) that enabled meto help just about anyone, although the laws underlying thosetechniques(universal principles) were yet a mystery.
Eventually my chops improved,through nothingbut persistence. I was your basic 5 hours a day, 365 days peryear type of player, with an ability to focus on one thing for a longperiodof time. My chops still weren't great, but at least I could perform.
For many reasons, collegeeventually becamea dead end. So, I joined the Army as a trumpet player. Duringthis time, I met and studied for a year with Claude Gordon. To me,he was an archetypal character, larger than life, and a fabulousstoryteller.Just being around him was fun, which, I realize in hindsight, wasactuallythe main benefit I received from studying with him. Certainly, Iimproved very little during that time. His own early life as atrumpeterhad been filled with turmoil from faulty embouchure instruction.As a result, he later shied away from attempting to teach any specificsregarding lip position. The problem was, I needed those specifics!
After the Army, my whole lifechanged.My original plan was to move to L.A. with some friends, continuing withmy music education. Instead, I had an epiphany, a sudden claritythat my life was moving in a direction which was ultimately never goingto be satisfying. This led me on a long search for self knowledge,the kind that is not easily found in books.
Now, years later, the searchcontinues,but several issues are much clearer. I have chosen to put most of myenergyinto trumpet teaching rather than playing. In life, you takeactions which always have an effect on your environment and thosearoundyou. Will the effect be more positive or negative? I have foundthat when I give service to others, as in teaching trumpet, I don'tneedto worry about it, that the effect is always predominately positive.Plus, I enjoy giving service! There is a level of satisfaction inhelping others that was never present for me in the performanceenvironment.For others, performance may be the right choice. It wasn't for me.
By the way. Those that think thatperformance skills translate into teaching skills are sadly mistaken, apoint that I cover in great detail in the book. In my opinion, mostinefficienttrumpet instruction is the result of failed attempts by pro players toreverse engineer their embouchures. All of them play unconsciously,often from an early age, and do not understand the stages ofdevelopmenta typical player must go through to make progress.
The book has the title,"The BalancedEmbouchure." What does that mean?
We observe all of existence in termsofa polarity, that there is an opposite to anything that we can conceive- life/death, hot/cold, open/closed and so on. But what most of usdon't consider is, opposites define each other. For example, therewould be no way to grasp the quality that we call "light" if darknesswasn'taround to give us a point of reference. The same goes forhappiness-sadness,or tension-relaxation.
A trumpet embouchure offers aperfect exampleof this coexistence of opposites. Lip tension/relaxation, air power/airresistance, and so on. In the typical embouchure, all of these opposingforces are present. But which ones are most important for thedevelopingplayer?
The real answer is, they are allcomplementaryto one another. Tension is just as important as relaxation. Airresistancemust be there along with air power. In short, a balance must be struckin order for the activity of playing to take place.
Any state of balance has acentral point,a fulcrum. To me, the central fulcrum when playing trumpetis the position and movement of the lips. They are responsible foran astounding array of activities, sometimes even in opposition tothemselves!And all too often, they are wholly inadequate to the task, as mostplayersunhappily discover.
To remedy this, I developedexercises designedto exaggerate the normal lips range of motion, thereby increasing thelip'sability to form more complex combinations of opposing motions (shapes)which more effectively promote a continuous state of balance within thecontext of dynamic activity. (whew!)
How did this book projectstart?
About ten years ago, I sat down towritea trumpet method book, and quickly discovered that I still had morequestionsthan answers. Then, a couple of years back, I awoke one morning withthe Balanced Embouchure method in my head, clear and complete, rightdownto the title.
It's funny how things turn out.Thewhole thing would have never crystallized without the varied andsomewhatunusual fields of knowledge that I've explored in recent years(includingNeuro-Linguistic Programming and consciousness-based developmentsystems)which sometimes pulled me away from the trumpet for long periods oftime.
Anyway, my first reaction was,can it reallybe this simple? Since I was already teaching the bulk of the method,I added the newer ideas to my student's lessons and watched whathappened.The results were truly unbelievable. Over a period of several months,all of my "problem students" - the one's whose complex embouchures usedto be a major challenge to deal with - resolved their basic lippositionissues. Again, I don't mean "most" of them, or "a high percentageof them," I mean ALL of them! It may sound impossible, or seemmore likely that I just got lucky. But, since I work with between50 and 60 students per week, the odds of it being the result of sheerchanceare close to zero.
Naturally, I wanted to share thisknowledgewith other teachers. But I learned long ago that people in general tendto be resistant to new ideas - look how long that Farkas has dominatedour trumpet education! - and that the only way I could ever convinceanybodythat all of this was more than a crazy idea, would be to write a book,with lots of specifics and details. In that way, the sheervolume of information would be almost impossible to dismiss, whether ornot the reader decided to follow the program.
In the acknowledgments, yousay thatwithout the help, inspiration, and genius of others, this book wouldneverhave been conceived. What do you mean?
I think that it was Isaac Newton whoexplainedthat he saw further than most people only because he had "stood on theshoulders of giants", such as Kepler and Copernicus. Although I amno Newton, I am sure that if this book enjoys any success, it islargelybecause of those players and teachers like Jerry Callet and LouisMaggio,who spent lifetimes figuring out stuff that I now take for granted.
The goal of every embouchuredevelopmentprocess is the same, which is to positively affect the coordination ofthe lips (and tongue and air), fully integrating them into a systemthatoperates unconsciously, at the highest level of efficiency.
A target is an action or goalintendedto help the student more easily synthesize several smaller puzzlepiecesinto a larger one, and not have to be conscious about every littlething.For example, the instruction "blow faster air" is a common targetphraseused with beginners in hopes that it will automatically trigger acoordinationof air, lips and tongue that spontaneously results in the ability tohithigher notes. This particular target, by the way, is often ineffectivebecause there are a lot of ways to blow faster air, some obviously moreefficient than others.
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