My embouchure

My embouchure remains the same throughout the range of the instrument. Everything is done by voicing. Everything. I developed some exercises in the 1970s which greatly helped me to learn this. I played only on the mouthpiece, learning to play scales and tunes, varying the loudness constantly, so as to make it very natural for me to maintain pitch at any loudness. It changed everything about my playing. For one thing, I had to push my mouthpiece in to make my horn sharper, because this ultimately resulted in my playing at a lower pitch level, giving my sound "headroom" to go up as well as down. That makes a huge difference. When blowing loud or soft, you can then maintain the same pitch. Vibrato can go UP and down, rather than just down as most people do. In other words, you can emulate the vibratos of flutes, violins, cellos, and vocalists, whose vibrato is CENTERED. A tight, biting embouchure usually plays at the highest pitch, so the only way to go is down. That is not a spinning vibrato, but a flat one.

How does this apply to altissimo? Totally. When you learn to play on the mouthpiece, altissimo is just part of the range of your scale. There is no change from high F to high G, or to the A above that, and so forth, all the way up to the top. Well, there's lots of change, but it's not in the embouchure. Altissimo becomes just another range in which to "sing" through your instrument. It's like you're always whistling or singing the pitch, whether you're playing an altissimo C or a low Bb.

You can find those exercises on the SaxFAQ, though they may be slightly butchered from the way I originally wrote them. I think some unintentional edits have been made. Originally I wrote about pitch, vibrato, altissimo, double-tonguing, mouthpiece exercise, harmonics on the horn, and a phonetic system I use to identify the position of my voicing apparatus (tongue, throat, whatever) and apply it to other exercises, as well as to convey it to other people without all this crap like "bright sound, dark sound, fast air, slow air, hot air, cold air, tight embouchure, loose embouchure," and many other methods that have little meaning to anyone but the person speaking. There has to be a way to convey such things, and we're fortunate to have one: the phonetic systems we learn as babies. We're virtuosic at phonetics. Why reinvent the wheel? Use what we know! Phonetics works for voicing, even if we have to fudge some of the sounds. The mouthpiece exercise gives us the exact positions, then we use phonetics to apply to those positions, and when we need to recall a position we can remember the phonetic sound we applied to it. That's how I learned a very facile altissimo and learned how important the harmonic exercises can be to pitch, timbre, and dynamics. Double-tonguing fits in there, too, for a proper double-tonguing technique comes from perfecting those phonetic positions and not letting your throat vary on the backswing.

I hope I've made sense here and given someone a little help. I don't come by here often, but if you have questions, you can reach me at shooshie -at- swbell -dot- net. Please do not print that address anywhere, as I don't want all the spam that happens when you print your address in any public place. (thanks)

best wishes

Shooshie