Great video, Bill and thanks for posting and sharing your experience. Some of the audio kind of cut in and out, but it was helpful. It was hard to hear you clearly when you played, but I could tell you are a great player, as Greg mentioned.

It seems to me that you’re probably not too far away from where you need to be; it’s probably more of a subtle adjustment than what you’re attempting.

Take my $.02 with a grain of salt as I am not qualified to instruct you and my intent is not to contradict anything on WW or what Greg has said. I’m just an amateur / comeback player doing this for fun, with limited time to practice. And lately I’ve been struggling again–hoping for good sensations this weekend. I do think I’m learning from the struggle though, so I’m grateful for that–I think I’ll come out of it more solid.

I agree with Peter, it appears to me that you’re too puckered. Again, I don’t want to contradict anything but when I have had success I was not that puckered to begin with.

I could be wrong, but you might be taking the MmmmwwwwaaaaOooohhh setup thing too literally. My take on it was that was to get us setup to put the mouthpiece on our lips and have the sensation of an open throat, easy air and engaged corners.

I don’t usually have that much red on the mouthpiece rim, my setup is more like your “normal” setup than what you’re trying with WindWorks, FWIW.

I suspect that your normal setup isn’t that far off from ideal, you’re probably just clamping a bit top-to-bottom as you play.

I suspect that there is a spectrum that players are on–one one end, there are players like I was that weren’t engaging the aperture corners much at all and were doing other things to tighten the aperture to ascend (rolling my bottom lip under, tilting my head back, etc.). On the other end, there are players like Greg who primarily engage the corners as they ascend and tighten the aperture around the air column optimally and are able to play very high. You’re probably somewhere near the left of middle, which is great; but that probably makes it even harder to perceive of the “point of difference” than if you were someone more like me who was drastically at the other end.

You may not need to approach this quite so drastically; it might be as simple as having your lips a bit less puckered as you place the mouthpiece on your lips but still with a gap then really think about that Oooohhhh and feel those corners and play with that as you ascend–I can see now from the video why you weren’t able to do that and what you mentioned in one of your posts about your bottom lip. It does look to me like your bottom lip is a bit too open/low/red on the rim; I typically have mine kind of tucked into the bottom rim of the mouthpiece in what I guess is a more typical setting, just naturally flat against the mouthpiece.

I was tied up at work today. If I get a chance this weekend / have good sensations and come up with a video that has a chance of adding something meaningful, I’ll share it.

My $.02 is to slightly tone down your approach–which for the most part was all very good and thorough as far as I could tell. But it did look like you were a bit too far forward when you place your lips on the MP. My understanding, FWIW, is that the forward pucker happens as we tighten the aperture by tightening from the corners/sides inward and keeping the top lip relaxed–lately that’s seemed like a knife’s edge for me, I’ve been walking a tightrope fluctuating from one to the other.

Good luck–I’m glad you’re getting some good support from a number of folks. I’m sure you’re close to a big development with your playing.