Embouchure1
Regular readers of this blog (both of you) will know that I recently went to visit Paul Archibald, of world class trumpet teacher fame, to see if he could help me a bit with my rather obscure embouchure (how my lips touch my trumpet). He said that I should stop ensemble playing for a period of time and reconstruct my embouchure from scratch. This process involved forming a correct embouchure and playing up and down C major, then C# major then D etc… up to about G major. This I have now been doing for a couple of weeks and the fruits of my efforts a slowly begining to think that they might appear one day.
For those of you who no nothing about such things, an embouchure change is a quite fundamental thing to do. The web is littered with opinions on wether it is a good idea or not, and similarly my aquaintances in ensembles have ideas varying from “you’ll never play again” up to “this will do you the world of good”. I am basically learning to play again. Some skills I have remain pertenant – musical ear, sense of rhythm for example – but any prowess I had on the instrument has been undone – my lip flexibility and range need to be completely rebuilt. This is, however, proceeding slightly faster than I had anticipated.
This is what I used to sound like : Old Sound. Its a simple scale, but suffices. Compare that sound to the sound I was making moments later when playing with the new embouchure : 21st March Sound. As you can probably hear, the sound is a lot thinner and the notes are less secure. I basically sound worse. Now, 9 days later, I sound like this: 30th March Sound. This is a comparable sound to where I started from. I’m playing the scale a bit quicker, so it makes comparison difficult, but the improvement is marked in just 9 days.
My next lesson is next thursday so we shall see what happens.