Embouchure

[Anonymous]

For the benefit of any beginners, i copied one of my old posts into here,
it may or may not be of use to a beginner
=========================================================================

Visit a Sax Teacher, it’ll take you less than 15 mins to establish a correct embouchure, then revisit your sax teacher a month later, to recheck your embouchure, it is so easy to slip back into the wrong embouchure weeks later (been there got the tea shirt).

Just start out with a basic mouthpiece (yamaha 4c will do), and any soft reed size 1 etc..

Embouchure is embouchure it has nothing to do with mouthpieces, it’s to do with muscles around your mouth, lips. Run your finger round your mouth now, if you haven’t played a wind instrument before, all the muscles around your mouth you can feel, need to be strengthened. The only way to develop those muscles around your lips is by PRACTICING every day.

The reason for using a yamaha 4c or similar mouthpiece, is not to get a great sounding tone (because it wont), it’s to strengthen those mouth muscles, as well as play in tune. When those muscles have strengthened months later, then start looking at a better mouthpiece just to improve the intonation using roughly the same reed strength.

If you play for over an hour, your lip muscles will get tired (if you don’t believe me see how long you can smile at someone before your mouth gets tired), STOP playing and start the next day. OTHERWISE you will resort to using your bottom teeth to support your lips to get the same sound out of the mouthpiece, and this will only give you SORE lips. It’s a complete and total waste of time exercising tired muscles, they need time to recover.

If you have the correct embouchure, then test this out – relax your mouth, just breathe out like you normally breath out, but breath out into the mouthpiece (don’t blow air into the mouthpiece, just breathe out instead ), you should hear the loud sound of air going evenly down and out through the sax, if that’s not the case, your embouchure is completely wrong. See a sax teacher now, as you are stuffed.

That relaxed way, is how you should be playing the sax, when those mouth muscles get stronger, Then you get more control of playing the mouthpiece consistently. So that every next day you play the mouthpiece, it doesn’t sound different on different days.

if you have to play with some material in your mouth to protect your lips, a sax teacher will tell you straight away you have the wrong embouchure, the embouchure in that case is preventing you from developing those muscles around your lips.

If you have to play for hours and hours, lip muscles (ie your embouchure) will get tired, then you will start using those bottom teeth to keep the bottom lip firm, only resulting in a sore bottom lip. However the more you practice, the stronger those lip muscles will get over time, and eventually you should rarely be getting sore lips

have fun, welcome to the sore lip club

[Author]

Posts