Which Mouthpiece Is Right For Me?

(A Guide To Finding The Right One)

*The following is a short guide to finding both the right mouthpiece and the right method for getting results. Its purpose is also intended to dispel certain popular myths about mouthpieces and brasswind technique.

Big, small, deep, shallow, parabolic, screw-rim, cushion rim, narrow rim, flat rim, rounded rim, V-cup, oval, compound . . . how is one to know which mouthpiece is the right one?

The answer, if you're a beginner or a young, developing player, is remarkably simple. If your embouchure is average, and most are, pick a popular, generic mouthpiece that falls as close to the exact middle as you can find.

Remember too that all of the specialised aforementioned mouthpieces are for accomplished players, not for beginners or young, developing players. If you're having problems, don't make the mistake of thinking or believing that there's a magic mouthpiece out there that will fix your problems. If your embouchure is working right, it doesn't matter what mouthpiece you stick on it. If your embouchure is working right, you'll use a variety of mouthpieces properly, for getting different types of sounds and performance characteristics.

For example, if you're playing classical music and want a big, martial sound, you're going to be using the biggest mouthpiece you can handle, even for playing very high passages. If you're a trumpet player and your next gig is playing mariachi, out will come the very shallow mouthpiece.

Remember, the mouthpiece is a tool, not a fix.

If you're a trumpet or Horn player having problems such as embouchure destabilisation, the quickest way to get the embouchure working right is to switch to an instrument that uses a larger mouthpiece. That, or switch to the largest mouthpiece you can find. The trick is to get the mouthpiece out of the way so that the embouchure and air are doing all the work. Also, optimum resonance is gained by producing pear-shaped tones, hitting each note as low as possible without bending the pitch downward. Problems with flexibilities (slurs) are invariably a case of playing sharp while compensating by pulling out the tuning slide. Playing sharp favours the upper harmonics, which in turn means that your control over the standing wave (audible note produced) is weak. When this happens, when you slur it has the effect of making it feel as though you're struggling to drag the note around from position to position. Hitting the note as far down on it as possible causes you to favour the bottom of the standing wave. The effect this time is like pulling a piece of paper over the surface of a smooth table. Whatever you stack on top of the paper (the note's harmonics) is going to move with it. Physically, it's like moving a Christmas tree around. Move it by pulling a cloth under the base, it'll move. Pull it from high up and the base will stick to the floor, slipping erratically when you overpower the base's inertia.

There is a lot of baloney out there about how the embouchure supposedly works. Many educators will tell brass players to "tighten the corners", for example. The corners, however, are wholly irrelevent. They can be relaxed to the point where air and spittle are leaking out, without affecting a player's tone or control or playing characteristics or anything worth mentioning. Some educators still use mouthpiece rings to study their students' apertures. This approach is utter nonsense because the human eye cannot see what's actually happening, and what one sees is not what's happing to produce the sound. A very good player's aperture can appear absolutely awful, and a very poor player's aperture can appear perfect. What you can not see, however, is the thickness or consistency or elasticity of the skin or its underlying connective tissue, or the manner in which the skin surface undulates as it vibrates. You would need some very sophisticated miscroscopic equipment to see this in action, and from there you'd have to be an expert in physics in order to make sense of what you'd be seeing.

The best approach to making the embouchure work at optimum efficiency is to use a vocal approach, transposing vocal teaching methods to the embouchure. The reasons for this approach are many, but simply stated, vocal training is a distillation of a good many years of proactive methodology that is pretty much guaranteed to get your set of pipes working right. The approach is performance-based, not theory-based as so much embouchure dogma is.

For example, you can't feel your vocal chords and know what they're doing. You have to be taught the connexion between what you think you're doing and what your vocal chords are actually doing. However, the most common mistake brass players make is assuming they know what's going on with their embouchure, when in truth you probably know less about your embouchure than you do about your vocal chords. Taking a vocal approach, learning to produce pear-shaped tones, and treating the embouchure as a mini-voice box, will allow you to sidestep all the dogma and baloney, and get right to work on becoming the best player you can be.