Mouthpiece Buzzing: Benefits, Risks and Sound Production

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congratulations on wanting to take the shortcut to easier brass playing good day I’m Greg Spence founder of mystery to Mastery and the windworks trumpet Academy I’d like to address one of the most controversial parts of playing brass instruments for years and years we’ve been told to either Buzz our lips together or buzz on our mouthpiece so if you’re someone who enjoys mouthpiece buzzing there are many benefits from doing it can use it as a warmup tool for prepar preparing muscles for a performance or for a

rehearsal you can use it for doing phrasing or for doing intervals and learning pitch and all kinds of things and in fact above about a high C the instrument becomes an amplifier of the mouthpiece Buzz so what happens below that high SE I hear you ask well the way in which we get the vibration of course sound is vibration and the lips are involved but the way that we uh the general psychology and the way that we get taught is blow a raspberry Buzz your lips

together and I was taught to do that and of course all that did was make me overexert with my abdominals and it would close my throat I call it Thro ulation when you cough and you make this sound clicking sound in the throat and that all came from uh overexertion thinking that I need to force the lips to buzz and then of course we get the mouthpiece and I was told go away and get a sound on the mouthpiece and I can do that but of

course you’ve all heard what beginners sound [Music] like and it’s all very hard work and it’s all very closed off and the bod’s concert hall here where the sound should be happening is very tight we don’t want to play like that the psychology about how the body instrument system works is generally confused because believe it or not I call it the tickle spot the bottom of this bottom lip here the inside wet bit and the milk spout exercise of getting the air through the lips the

energy through the lips then we use our aperture corners and the top lip is just like a bad sheet responding on the clo line imagine a bed sheet and the wind comes through and it vibrates Arnold Jacobs in song and wind goes the psychology of the lips vibrating sympathetically on an Airstream and I call that sympathetic oscillation because what happens when the air is going through the lips if we use the Aperture Corners correctly rather than trying to create the vibration with the lips a real

tight lip buzz you can let go of that put the mouthpiece on then as you put the instrument on the lip will vibrate on its own sympathetically thanks to the movement of the air the velocity of the air through the lips themselves rather than vertically trying to pinch down to make the vibration which ultimately is really hard work our mouth is horizontal so I I’ve developed the horizontal brass playing system when you understand how the aperture Corners work in and outwards ow that movement of the

lips changes the the aperture which therefore changes the velocity the air through the lips and of course when the velocity changes the speed of the vibration of the lip changes as well so so once upon a time where I would have been very active and you know that St that strain even thinking about it makes me choke that strain in the chest here that’s the uh collar we got a collar here and we got a noose around our neck that’s what I used to feel like

all the time when I was playing because I was using this vertical up and down to try and create faster vibrations and of course that’s going to top out you can only squeeze them so much until you get the Complete Air lock so we don’t want to pinch the lips down we want them to be vibrating at really fast tempos and if you have a very close look here when I’m changing pitch what do you see changing outside of the mouthpiece Rim so once upon a

time I would have been rolling that bottom lip back over squeezing down and blowing really hard and choking off to try and play that where now it hardly even feels like I’m blowing and in fact I’ve got a little statement brass playings no harder than humming talking or singing and I can demonstrate that to you right now if I take a great breath fill up my lungs like a balloon and then just change [Music] pitch there’s actually no blow there that’s a passive movement of energy

I call it passive velocity the body just reducing here so all of these elements are very very important to get you playing to the level that you want to play to you’ve got a desire to play better than what you are now and otherwise you wouldn’t be watching so if you want to improve your playing you really need to do some serious research on what’s the role of the lips I had to pull out the physics books and anatomy books and put it all together let

me save you the time of doing that once you figure out how the aperture Corners work you will say good bite to buzzing for the rest of your life playing will get a heck of a lot easier a lot Freer and then there’s plenty more gigs to get have a great day hey guys if you’re wanting my help to develop an efficient 3 to four octave range with consistency confidence a killer sound and a virtuoso technique I’ve put everything I’ve learned over the last 35 years

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