Do you know where your air is? Do you know what it’s doing and where it’s going? Let’s get real and ask how much influence you really have over the sound you make. If you pick up the horn and blow air in the middle of the mouthpiece and wait to see what type of sound comes out, you have very little influence on that sound. What probably comes out is what the maker of the mouthpiece and horn decided your sound would be.

That’s because when the horn comes from the factory it wants to be a laser beam loud and a fog horn soft, and we have to fight against that. Also if your air enters the mouthpiece somewhere half way between upper and lower rim on everything from piano to fortissimo, you’re letting the mouthpiece decide your sound, and it will be dull in piano and edgy in fortissimo, the opposite of what should be desired.

How do we completely control the sound we make at the extreme dynamics and ranges required to play anything technically challenging? By strategically aiming our air in different parts of the mouthpiece to reverse the tendency of the horn to be a laser beam loud and a fog horn soft. Nearly all of us are downstream players (I have yet to see a truly upstream low brass player). That means if our air enters the mouthpiece midway between the upper and bottom rim, it will not directly go into the throat of the mouthpiece because of the downward angle of the airstream. This will make the size of the mouthpiece sound larger because of the indirect flow of air into the throat. This angle will take the focus out of the sound from mezzo-forte down to pianissimo resulting in a “dark” sound, something which should be undesirable in these softer dynamics. Conversely that lack of focus should be something desired in the loudest dynamics where too much focus produces a harsh sound. In fact a better way to take even more focus out of the sound in the louder dynamics is to move the mouthpiece up on the embouchure which will cause the airstream to hit even lower in the cup, resulting in a rounder sound quality. 

So we’ve taken the laser quality out of the sound in the loudest dynamics. Now it’s time to put the laser quality (focus) into the sound from mezzo-forte all the way down to pianissimo. (remember that’s not what the horn wants to do.) We do this by moving our airstream up in the mouthpiece, (moving the mouthpiece down) so that the air hits high in the cup, making the mouthpiece sound smaller than it actually is. This puts the focus back in the sound at the middle and softer dynamics, something the equipment doesn’t want to do naturally. This moving the mouthpiece up and down slightly to affect the sound is not an embouchure change.

It is only a slight moving of the airstream up and down to direct it to flow into a certain area of the mouthpiece, which is the secret to a complete control of the sound.

A good way to think about these subtle movements of the airstream is to think of the mouthpiece as a clock and aim the air into certain time periods to achieve a certain type of sound. Generally speaking, the best way to play the middle and softer dynamics is to aim the airstream into the hours from 10 to 2 o’clock. This makes the mouthpiece sound smaller because the air only fills the upper half of the mouthpiece and flows much more directly into the throat. For the loudest dynamics moving the mouthpiece up, (airstream down) from 4 to 8 o’clock takes the focus out of the sound, producing a warmer, mellower quality. By doing these air direction changes we can take more control of the unwanted tendencies of our instrument and make this collection of brass tubing make the sound we want instead of what it wants.

If you’ve been a middle of the mouthpiece player forever, it will take some time to get used to moving the air slightly from low to high and reverse in the mouthpiece. It also helps to play a mouthpiece with a larger rim and cup to be able to move freely inside the mouthpiece for different types of sound required for the infinite dynamic changes we are asked to produce.