TromboneChat

After a decade of, I guess, good luck with being able to pick up the horn and everything working well very quickly something finally slipped (no pun intended-that will make sense soon). My high end just wasn’t speaking as freely as it usually had. And articulations were beginning to be an adventure.

But as circumstances would have it I was videoing my playing recently, and when I went into my YouTube videos to store a file, I came across an older video from a time when everything was working very well.

When I compared the recent with the past I immediately saw that for some reason my placement was much lower in the more recent videos. (It had SLIPPED!) The old video also happened to be a free buzz- mpc buzz to horn routine I used to do. Doing that helped me find a great placement then and tonight. My super Bb (an octave above the Bolero starting note) is back and speaking freely. A lot of other things popped back too.

If this post needs a thesis’s, I suppose it would be, it is likely a good thing to know what right looks like and feels like, so when it slips, getting things back is not a big deal.

I have also had a moment or two where I realized my placement had moved lower than it should be. I think the weight of the horn over time (during individual sessions and over a period of days or weeks) can just slowly move it down.

I may have been reverting to an older setting without thinking about it. In 1995, I was on a sabbatical and took the opportunity to make an embouchure change that was 12 years overdue. After I got my new (no radical change around the sixth partial) way of playing started I took a year of lessons. The fellow I worked with didn’t teach embouchure, but the exercises he had me do and the instructions about the results I was aiming for (connected sound through the ranges) led me to developing a slightly higher setting and a useful, controlled movement through the ranges.

Without enough regular practice these days I think I just forgot how to do it. It seems back in order now and I know how to find it if it slips again.

When I was finding playing very easy, I didn’t known what I had figured out. I thought it was just the result of the ton of practice I had been doing. Well it was, but what the practice had done was accidentally teach me my placement and shift. It’s amazing to have a firm idea of what those things are now.

Yup, i've found the high placement (and other useful things) on accident many times, and lost them just as many. It took knowing that stuff on purpose to stick!