Tuba Embouchure Tips

Video Transcript

On behalf of Expert Village dot com, I'm Eric Williams, and I'm here to tell you about the tuba. Lets talk about how we are going to actually produce our first tones on the tuba. It's pretty much a three step process, I try to work with my students and have them do what's called "lip buzzing" first. Now it's not very glamous, ok, and with the younger kids, they usually laugh about it quite frequently, because all you do is put your lips together and go blblblblblblblblbllb. What you are doing is buzzing your lips in a rather vigourous way making that sound and sometimes spittle will come flying out of your mouth, that's perfectly normal for tuba players. And what you do is you just keep doing that. You can experiment with different pitches, go real low. Then you can go a little more tight with the lips, and a little bit more higher pitched. But it's all called lip buzzing and its how you get started playing the tuba. Now if you are not used to doing any of this because you've never played a brass instrument before, you may notice that your lips tingle and even tickle a little bit and its kind of a weird sensation. Just bear with it because you will build up a tolerance to it. And as you play more and more you actually your lips do get a lot more tone and a lot more like muscle control in your lips. So, then you take the mouthpiece for the tuba, and this is a number 25, they have different sizes, cup depths, and so on. What you need to do is get a mouthpiece that feels comfortable. You put it up and then you do the same lip buzzing that you just did, only with the mouthpiece. Ok not that that sounds that much better than what we were just doing, but that's what you do. It kind of sounds like a duck call to some people. What you do is you put the mouthpiece hopefully to where your lip buzzing is happening mainly in the middle of the cup. You don't want it too far down, you don't want it too far up, you want it right in the middle. And you can experiment with different pitches while you're lip buzzing. You can go higher and lower with the tightness of your lips. Along with that, please be aware that because the tuba requires so much air to really make it sound right, you need to be breathing from way down deep, down in the diaphram area. So the diaphram is that muscle right below your lungs and whenever the diaphram goes down a little bit it allows the lungs to expand down low, and that gives you that full body of air you need to propell the lip buzzing and propell the mouthpiece.

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