Struggling to keep a flat chin

gabriel127 · Posted: Wed Jan 03, 2018 1:00 pm Post subject:

Harry lip-synched in movies, he wasn't actually playing. If you look at footage where he is actually playing, you'll see him bunch the chin.

If that's not convincing enough for you, watch Carl Fischer play anything high. Watch him play his solo on Maynard's King Cat Theatre DVD on Misra De Nuka. His sound is as big as a house and his chin is bunched more than you'll ever see a chin bunched anywhere else.

It's a good thing no one ever filled Carl's head with this nonsense about having to play with a flat chin.

If you want to sit practicing in front of a mirror for the rest of your life and getting nowhere with it, then go right ahead and strive for the flat chin.

Look, Reinhardt and Farkas are dead. They made some good contributions to brass pedagogy, but they weren't always right about everything. Time to get on board with the 21st century and stop carrying that monkey around on your back (the flat chin fallacy). If playing with a flat chin was going to work for you, you would have seen some progress by now. Free your mind of that burden.

Steve A · Posted: Wed Jan 03, 2018 3:16 pm Post subject:

TrpPro · Posted: Wed Jan 03, 2018 4:03 pm Post subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsBf8Y6jQVU

Check out 2:42 of this vid. It sounds like 4 or 5 more notes after the mouthpiece comes off the lips.

Steve A · Posted: Wed Jan 03, 2018 4:23 pm Post subject:

noahbenson · New Member Joined: 10 Jul 2017 Posts: 6

My old teacher always had me hold a finger on my chin, though you've probably already done that. I agree with what others have said though - you should stick to the music and not focus too much on what you're doing with your chops. I've noticed that my chops are starting to bunch up when I play as I'm learning to pinch my corners right now.

gabriel127 · Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2018 11:23 am Post subject:

The ability to play with a flat chin is dictated by physical characteristics including a combination of the bite and jaw structure (underbite vs. overbite) and the angles of the teeth, both upper and lower. I'm talking about the up and down (occlusal) angles here, not the side-to-side angles.

So the bottom line is that if you try to play with a flat chin but have trouble with it, chances are, you don't have the kind of physical structure required to play with a flat chin. So stop beating your head against the wall trying to play with a flat chin, just because some people from the dark ages had preached this long ago and this fallacy is carried on today.

I'm so strongly opinionated about this because I WAS IN THE EXACT BOAT AS YOU many years ago. I tried and tried and tried to play with a flat chin and I just simply could not. I drove myself nuts with it for YEARS! I'm trying to throw you a rope here and save you from further frustration and for some reason, you want to be insistent on playing with the flat chin.

I later discovered with the help of the other sources that I've already mentioned on this thread that it is entirely possible to have a very powerful extreme upper register WITH a bunched chin! With that said, there were some things wrong with the original embouchure that I played on and when I corrected those things, I solved my problems, but the bunched chin remained. So the moral of the story is that the bunched chin was not the reason for my originally limited range. So stop blaming the bunched chin!

Did you look at Carl Fischer on the King Cat Theatre DVD as I recommended?

http://i64.tinypic.com/2hcq73o.jpg [/img]