Posted by Klaus on April 08, 2003 at 16:44:25:
In Reply to: Intonation Help posted by Matt on April 08, 2003 at 15:00:34:
(This is a long, boring, and tedious posting written in an idiomatic English lacking the right terms and presenting an off-the-middle-of-the-road point of view. If you feel you wasted your time reading it, you can't say you weren't warned off. So I don't want to be hit by dead pineapples afterwards).
There used to be some discussions about playing by ear or playing by feel.
The right thing to do is to co-ordinate ear and feel, so that the sounding result is true in intonation as well as in feel.
All brass players shall have a very good co-ordination of ear and breathing apparatus including sense of diaphragm placement. The latter can according to somebody not be controlled directly. No big problem as one can learn to work with related parameters.
The two long muscles running along the spine generally should be tense enough to make the body frame so steady, that it can be used as a stable frame of reference.
The more sidewards and forward you can place the outer walls (but for the backside) of your abdomen, the more you have lowered your diaphragm. Which equals a larger volume made available for your lungs to fill. Good for length of phrases, but also good for resonance space beneficial for fullness of sound especially in the low register. (Spreading ones ribs for a larger ribcage volume also is a part of the equation. It is just a matter of where one puts the emphasis. I feel, that the abdomen expansion approach is best for the hall filling non-obtrusive sound, which I prefer.
John Marcellus, the trombone Guru of Eastman-Rochester, in a clinic made a strong point about bad intonation being equal to bad sound.
If you are in doubt about your intonation, then try to listen to your sound in comparison to that of your musical environment (and that even if that environment only happens to be a sound imagination in your "inner" ear).
If you sound thinnish, you very likely are too sharp. Remedy: lower your diaphragm, or in controllable parameters: expand your abdomen walls. That will lower your pitch and make your sound fuller. You have found the right amount of expansion, the moment you blend with your musical environment.
If you sound fattish and unfocused, you very likely are flat. Remedy: collect your abdomen walls. Again you have found the right amount of collection the moment you blend with your musical environment.
If I feel, that I generally have to expand my abdomen more than I want to, I pull my main tuning slide. If I generally have to play with a tighter abdomen, than I want to, then I push in my main tuning slide.
This approach also calls for a strong co-ordination of embouchure and breathing apparatus. I train that by doing lips-only glissandos over the full range on the open horn or the horn with whatever fingering kept constant through the whole gliss. A technical skill hardly ever called for in its own right, but very supportive for almost every other aspect of a thorough technique.
Klaus