My confession

How and what to teach and learn.
Post Reply
imsevimse
Posts: 1537
Joined: Sun Apr 29, 2018 10:43 am
Location: Sweden

My confession

Post by imsevimse »

As the title says...

When I was a student I changed to larger and larger equipment to overcome problems. I confess I had bad sound as well as bad range :shuffle:

To change gear was what I was recomended by my early teachers and in the end I felt I couldn't go larger.
They adviced me to change mouthpiece and also to get a large bore trombone. It did change things, however the real problems I had didn't go away.
For me the larger mouthpieces and larger bore just masked the problems I had. After a honeymoon with a new mouthpiece I just played as bad as before. Not even the change to the Conn 88H helped. It is a real good horn that I still have but as I think now it wasn't right for me at the time.

Things were bad until I finally got a real good teacher and did a complete change of my emboushure. I changed over night from an upstream "smile-embuschure" to a downstream and "pucker-emboushure". I worked hard but it took at least five years to relearn all bad habits and it didn't help I started to study at the Royal Academy of Music, because at such a school you do not work on technique, you work on repertoire.

After I quit the accademy I was fed up on how things were and stopped to play that Conn 88H and also that Denis Wick 6BL I had. I settled on the 6BL because my teacher at the accademy sold it to me and it was considered at least large (not today :biggrin: ). The others who studied there went for Bach 4G's. Instead of he 88h I began to play my old King 3B and returned to the Benge 12C mouthpiece I had when I first started to play. I went back to the tools I had before I started the route of larger and larger equipment.

It got easier now to work on technics since I didn't need to play the repertoire anymore. I knew I once and for all had to fix that smile embouschure, because what remained of it wouldn't go away by itself. The old habits were deeply rooted and I got tendencies to return to it as soon as I touched the lower register. When I did I got some terribly disturbing movements in the mouth corners. It worried me a lot and it had to go.

The Benge 12C was educational. It didn't mask my errors. I sounded just as bad as I was, and had to deal with it without help of a larger mouthpiece that only gave me a "woofy" sound. A diffuse sound without any edge that I mistakenly thought would become a solid and sonourous sound just by more practice. In time I did overcome the terrible "smile-emboushure" and today I can not play like that at all. I consider myself repaired. :D

I've kept the habit to practice my smallest mouthpieces and return to them daily. It''s only if I need a bigger sound or if I need trigger notes that I switch to larger mouthpieces and larger trombones, but next morning I always return to the small equipment, because that's were I feel most comfortable.

/Tom
Post Reply

Return to “Teaching & Learning”