BE Playing Embouchure

[bachstrad]

I know the Roll-in's and Roll-outs are extreme exaggerations of the playing embouchure in Jeff Smiley's BE. I'm having trouble understanding what the playing embouchure should be? Any help or pointers on BE would be appreciated, i have yet to recieve any response to my question emails to Jeff himself =/

[Lex Grantham]

Maybe a reprint of an article I wrote will help. It was written about May 25, 2003.

The first time I saw Jeff Smiley was when I had a Balanced Embouchure lesson with him on February 9, 2002 at his home in Garland, Texas.

I saw him again this week at the International Trumpet Guild Conference at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. He was one of the many enterprises that were exhibiting instruments, printed music, recordings, and accessories. Jeff, of course, was in attendance to promote his fine book (with CD), "The Balanced Embouchure". In talking with him, the relationships between the roll-out and roll-in exercises (pages 60 and 75 in the book) were discussed. The ability to incorporate the two extremes into one continuous flow from low to high and back down is the desired goal of the trumpet player.

To me, the roll-outs have always appeared easier to accomplish than the roll-in exercises. In approximately 30 minutes, Jeff was able to view my embouchure setup and make a few suggestions for development and improvement. This is what he said:

1) Make the "old man" grimace (page 80 in the book)
2) Blow air (but do not allow a buzz) -and-
3) Put the mouthpiece (with horn) to the lips
4) Put mouthpiece as low as possible on the upper lip
5) Keep blowing until a sound (ever so slight) starts on its own
6) Repeat steps 1-5 if necessary, but keep the mouthpiece in place all the time, and breathe through the nose to maintain the setup.

With patience and about 5-10 minutes of this procedure for each practice period, one can look forward to success in improving his/her playing the upper register of the instrument.

I was very encouraged by the potential results with such a short amount of experimentation. Jeff did say that players are very individual, and different people will (may) take varying amounts of experience in order to attain the same types of goals.

Thank you, Jeff Smiley, for your continued interest.

Sincerely,

Lex Grantham

P.S. One important fact that came out of the conversation with Jeff was that a player should attempt to determine if he/she might be able to play on more than one horizontal position on the lips. It is very possible that a better, more efficient buzz point could be discovered. In my case, to the left of center was good for me. Rafael Mendez was quite astute at multiple settings. He did so because of an injury to his mouth that was sustained in 1929, when he was only 23 years old. He basically had to relearn the instrument, and that made experimentation an important requirement for success.