Posted by Jeff Miller on January 05, 2000 at 19:52:55:
In Reply to: developing the upper range for tuba posted by carrie on January 02, 2000 at 15:36:08:
I realise that this is considered heresy by most low brass players, but I had a realisation a few years ago which totally opened up my upper register in terms of range, sound, and flexibility.
I spent years trying to play in the upper register (I'm talking about middle c and up here) with a big warm sound, using relaxed, slow air, keeping the throat open, etc, and was never able to do it to my satisfaction. My chops got tired, I couldn't center the pitches, and found that I was struggling to get up to a g above middle c.
Then I listened to some John Fletcher recordings. He could play incredibly high, but with a beautiful tone and total control. It sounded deceptively effortless.Try playing along with his recording of the Waltz from Sleeping Beauty (for 4 tubas - no euphoniums!) and you will see what I am referring to.
Fletcher was also a french horn player; this got me thinking that Fletcher must have been using a horn concept of sound, air, and chops to play up there. Arnold Jacobs also mentions this in the Song and Wind book in two places: when refering to his time at Curtis when he used a trumpet embrochure to play a tuba, and in his discussion of the similarity of intra-oral pressures within different brass instruments playing the same frequency pitch.
I think we often over compensate in our attempts to avoid playing with a tight or pinched sound. I think that there is a certain danger that we sometimes use these words ("big warm sound", "lots of air", "relaxed", "singing tone", etc, etc, etc,) in the same thoughtless way that generations past referred to "tightening up the diaphragm", "blowing harder", etc, without focusing on the actual sound itself. It is easy to slip into a trap of describing something by rote without actually focusing on the something itself.
I am not referring here to the words that describe the sound, but the sound itself. Does anyone else ever think this?
For that matter, is anyone reading this?
Jeff