Tongue Arch - Trumpet Solutions

Hello again, guys. This is Wayne Cameron again at my next installment of some information that may help you do lip slurs. Now, there are two kinds of slurs. There are lip slurs, which mean that when you put your vowels down, that you don't move your vowels. So you're going to low E as one and two, and you're going to slur to an A, which is one and two. That's a lip slur, okay? The other slurs are when you change the vowels between the notes. Like if you're on a low D, which is first and third, and you slur up to an A, that's not a lip slur. Lip slurs for many, many young players especially are very, very difficult. They were for me when I was a young player. Unfortunately, the secret to it is available, but in my experience, it's not pushed by many, many trumpet teachers. That is, you have to arch your tongue. I'm going to write that down so you understand what I'm saying. You have to arch tongue. Now, what that entails is you're on the E, and when you start to go to the A, you enunciate T and then the E sound going up to the A, okay? Now, to show you what it feels like, if you could whistle, or even just with pitched air, if you can do this, a glissando, whistle from a low note to a higher note, and pay attention to what your tongue does. It arches up. You cannot do it without arching your tongue up. Now, do this like a trill. You'll see your tongue doing this. You can't do that without moving your tongue. It's impossible. So, if when you're playing, your tongue doesn't touch anything, so it's very difficult to feel. If you can't feel your tongue arching, then try those two whistle tricks until you can feel it when you play. Now, many people do it naturally. If you do, you're one of the lucky ones, but many students do not. Now, to prove what I'm talking about scientifically, I think it was in the early 60s at North Texas State University, they did a study. John Haney was a trumpet teacher there, very, very famous at the time. In conjunction with the medical school, they used an x-ray machine called a fluoroscope, and what that is, is a shield, and you stand behind it, and you can see your muscles. You've seen it in cartoons, where they stand behind there, and you see the heartbeat, and all like that. So, that was an early type of x-ray. Anyway, what they did, they invited many professional trumpeters, very famous people, including the French virtuoso, Marie Sandré, to come and do an experiment. What they did, they had them drink some dye, so it would dye your tongue, so you could see the muscle, and they had them play a series of different exercises, doing slurs. I saw the film when I was very young. This is how I found this out. On the chromatic scale from low F sharp to high C, Marie Sandré's tongue arched on every half step, all the way up to high C, and then lowered, coming back down. When he saw the film, he was astonished that that was happening. He wasn't even aware that he was doing it. So you can extrapolate from that, that obviously he wasn't teaching it. If he didn't know he was doing it, then he wouldn't tell his students to do it, okay? Now, there's a French horn player named Sarah Willis, who plays in the Berlin Philharmonic. If you go on YouTube and look up chamber music with Sarah Willis, she is doing the same type of thing inside an MRI machine, and she does all these kinds. She has a horn in there. I mean, it's outside, but you'll see how they rigged it up with hoses and everything. Anyway, in there, she does a whole series of tonguing, slurring, dynamic changes, and you can see her tongue. It's amazing what it does. If you watch it long enough, you'll see and understand how you can diminuendo from a loud note to a soft note without it going away. It's amazing to watch. You must watch this, okay? Now, the easiest thing to do, to start learning how to do arching your tongue, is to do wide slurs, like fourths and fifths, like low C to G, low B to F sharp, G to C, those types of things where you don't change the vowels. The smaller the interval, the easier it becomes, and also, you must not forget what we talked about last time about air support has to increase. You have to increase air support as well as arching your tongue at the same time. So I hope that gives you some insight. Try it. Let me know how it happens. I'll be seeing you again soon.