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Kevalenoxx
(58 points)
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Is it bad to play with your cheeks puff out like a blowfish?
Whats a relaxed embouchure???
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Micron
(1760 points)
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It makes it impossible to get such a clean attack on notes.
For a clean attack with good control, you need very little space between your tongue(when it closes the air between notes)and your lip aperture. When you puff your cheeks, all that puffed up space is connected directly to the space between tongue and lip aperture. Huge! Velly bad!!!
<Added>
BTW, it is completely different for a trumpet player, or indeed aclarinet or sax player, because the puffed up space is UPSTREAM from the 'tap' where the airflow is turned off and on.
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Patrick
(1615 points)
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hold on, I play very relaxed, and, as a result, my cheeks puff out a bit when I play at times...if a beginner does this, it results in a embouchure without control, so that is what is to be avoided..
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Micron
(1760 points)
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I said nothing about an embouchure without control. My guess that you, as an accomplished player, do it sometimes, in order to especially get a softer attack to your tonguing.
The fact is that if you have a large air chamber downstream from your 'shut-off valve' (i.e. your tongue tip, then when you do tongue, you have to wait until that entire chamber builds up to the pressure required to make a note sound, before that note will sound.
OK for a deliberate 'slow-start' for the notes, but not for rapid, clean, fast attack when that is required.
I would say that for a beginner, the no-puffing is the basic technique, and the puffing is for special effect, because once a beginner starts puffing, they generally find it impossible not to. It is that that becomes an expression of lack of control.
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Patrick
(1615 points)
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I concur, I never want beginners to puff their cheeks, problem is they try to imitate sometimes, my kid does that on trumpet as well...
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rons
(1 point)
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As a semi-professional player for about 20 years I am always amazed at the readiness of some people to prescribe to others, especially in the case of the trumpet/cornet where so much depends on an individual's particular facial and muscular structures. When I think back to my early struggles with the trumpet, it took me some years to find my own adequate embouchure, mainly because I was trying to follow the rules set down by other people. In fact I eventually found that by ignoring most of the rules most of the problems I was having disappeared in a short space of time. One of the important rules I ignored was the rule against puffing the cheeks. In fact, I found that having tight facial muscles and heavy lips demanded I relax the face, the lips and everything else as much as possible and simply allow the blown air to shape an embouchure, all of which allowed me for the first time to gain the full range with a good sound in a relaxed manner. Mind you, this is only a slight puffing of the cheeks that would not be particularly noticeable to an observer, and I can always feel my cheek and chin muscles working despite this relaxation. I would suggest there is a fairly obvious moral to this and similar stories, i.e., let's say no to fundamentalisms of all kinds!
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Micron
(1760 points)
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The acceptability of cheek-puffing depends on how the tonging is done. For trumpet tonguing, against the lips, puffing cheeks has no effect.
However for flute, it introduces a significant chamber of air between where the air is blocked by the tongue, and the lip aperture. That in turn makes clean tonging impossible, because the air pressure in that air 'buffer' in the cheeks cheeks has to be raised before there is sufficient air pressure to start a note.
It might work fine on a flute if you tongue, as I initially did, against the top teeth, with the very tip of the tongue anchored against the lower lip. But that causes, and did cause, handicaps in other ways. I had to stop that and re-learn my embouchure.
Standard, traditional methods of doing something have usually evolved for good reason, but I agree, keeping an open mind to lateral thinking approaches has some merit.
For some (probably most) people, such as myself, puffing cheeks and blowing with high pressure blows air back through the parotid gland ducts, inflating the parotid glands with air, which is pretty darn uncomfortable. I used to massage that air out to regain comfort. Now I keep my cheeks in whenever I am blowing balloons, so that the ducts are blocked by my teeth, so that air cannot enter. I guess it would be the same if I played trumpet.
But not for some....
http://www.soundjunction.org/trumpetgiantsdizzygillespie.aspa?NodeID=1
But what exactly does that cheek puffing achieve. I would not like my cheeks to become permanently stretched like that. Ballooned cheeks remind me of lip-plated lips:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/18/68995748_5c3a5b6b02.jpg
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