Questions about Tone Quality

[PiccoloTrombonist1]

I’ve been trying to increase the quality of recently, and have been wondering 2 things. What in specific creates good tone quality (ex is jaw strength helpful, does the way you buzz, or your tongues position in your mouth make a difference), and what exercises can help improve tone?

[Doug Elliott]

All of it "makes a difference "
Jaw strength is not relevant however. Efficiency is not about strength.

[Burgerbob]

Before you can make a good sound, you need to know what a good sound... is.

Listen, listen, listen. Listen to recordings, but preferably to great players live and up close.

Your practice is in service of finding that sound for you. Much of that is experimentation- change things to see what they change in your sound and response, to find the most efficient, best sounding setup.

[GabrielRice]

What Doug and Aidan said.

I will add that I believe good tone come from playing as "naturally" as possible.

Of course, there is nothing truly natural about playing trombone...it's not like walking or breathing or anything else we evolved to do over millennia. But I subscribe to the idea that if it looks or feels overly complicated it probably is.

Here's a good start: form the letter M with your lips. Put the mouthpiece on top of that formation. Inhale from that position through the corners of your mouth, without losing contact with the mouthpiece. Exhale gently to start the lips vibrating.

[ghmerrill]

Efficiency is not about strength.

+

Before you can make a good sound, you need to know what a good sound... is.

= progress

(I'm going through this now with respect to low/pedal range. Getting there takes work and is frustrating.)

[norbie2018]

Listen to all the trombone related music you can get your hands on (all music is valid to listen to but we're limiting this to tone improvement). Listen to some before you practice. Have your favorite sound(s) in your head and play a bunch of long tones, slurs, arpeggios - whatever, always trying to emulate that sound. Check out Suzuki and the mother tinge method and/or Inner Game of Tennis for insight as to why this method works.

[ghmerrill]

I confess that I don't really listen too much to what others do. Maybe I should. But first, I have a sound (in my head) that I want to produce -- and that's partly relative to what my equipment seems to be able to produce, given that I'm blowing into it -- and that's what I work on. Long tones, slurs, arpeggios, etc. work because they're programming your neural network (in conjunction with your embouchure, breathing, etc.). It's pretty much like learning how to hit that jump shot from the 3 point line.

[Doug Elliott]

Recordings of great players are good to listen to, but even more important is to hear them live. Anytime to have a chance to hear a player live, do it.

Meanwhile, here's me:

[Burgerbob]

Recordings of great players are good to listen to, but even more important is to hear them live. Anytime to have a chance to hear a player live, do it.

Recordings are neat, but they are, at most, 20% of what someone sounds like.

[ghmerrill]

For bass trombone (or trombone in general), not much opportunity around here. The people in the band at Ft. Bragg/Liberty have been good to listen to, but in recent years they just aren't doing public performances much. I have managed to hear Oystein Baadsvik (tuba) a couple of times at master classes, and Demondrae Thurman three times in the past ten years. Two of those involved him playing euphonium in quintet (Greensboro), and once trombone at the big band fest in Kentucky. Years ago, I took my daughter to a master class at UNC by James Galway, which was great -- but I haven't played flute for decades.

Oh, yeah, and the times we've gone to Asheville to hear Tuba Skinny! And the Army tuba/euph conference.

[robcat2075]

First, I agree you have to have the mental concept of a good tone before you can get closer to it.


That dispensed with.. over the last ten years or so of putting my playing back together I have become quite convinced that forming the wrong vowel in the airway for the pitch being attempted should be the first suspect in cases of poor trombone tone.

Poor trombone tone is often mis-diagnosed with vague talk about

breath support!
the diaphragm!
columns of air!
velocity!
intensity!
aperture!
direction!
long tones!
upper lung/lower lung!

I say often because I and fellow students heard them many times from various instructors and clinicians. I say misdiagnosed because none of them were the real problem for me. I say vague because none of these teachers could go much beyond those buzz words to explain what was supposed to change.

I had to discover "right vowel" for myself. There are probably many players out there with good tones who are not consciously aware they shifting the vowel form as they move to different pitches. That would explain why they are so helpless at passing on their own good playing to their students. Indeed it has only been recently that I have become consciously aware of what I was doing and when I was doing it wrong.

I can reproduce any of the characteristic bad trombone tones by using the wrong vowel for the wrong pitch and I can fix it by using the right one.

"Vowel" is mostly about the shape and position of the tongue. But it is much easier to tell someone to use "tah" or "tee" or "tow" etc, than to tell them a shape their tongue should be making when neither of you can see your tongues while you are playing anyway.

[ghmerrill]

breath support!
the diaphragm!
columns of air!
velocity!
intensity!
aperture!
direction!
long tones!
upper lung/lower lung!

Agreed. Without actually helpful and direct instruction and correction by an instructor, using this sort of vague and broad jargon that describes the physics of the system is a waste of time (and sometimes based on a real misunderstanding/ignorance of physics and anatomy) -- except, of course, that you can never go wrong with long tones. But ...

I say often because I and fellow students heard them many times from various instructors and clinicians. I say misdiagnosed because none of them were the real problem for me. I say vague because none of these teachers could go much beyond those buzz words to explain what was supposed to change.

I'm unwilling to tar instructors and clinicians too broadly with a single brush, and I'm sorry to hear that you had that sort of experience with all of your teachers. Between 6th grade and college I had five instrumental music instructors from whom I took individual lessons (in addition to three of them being band, big band, or orchestra teachers for whom I played). Of those, two were duds: my original 6th grade music teacher and a local professional jazz musician (saxophone) who owned a music store and gave private lessons. The other three were just great (two public school teachers and one grad student at Eastman) -- good musicians themselves and excellent instructors who gave very specific and helpful instruction in the ensembles in which I was playing and in the individual or small group lessons -- including intensive preparation for competitions at the regional or state level (both solo and ensemble).

I think that pretty clearly there's a real difference in the experiences that different people have had, and that's often dependent on what environment or location you were in at the time and what opportunities were available. As time passed, I realized more and more how "lucky" I was. But I also think that my experience was hardly unique, and that there are a lot of excellent instructors out there who don't just spew jargon.

[ghmerrill]

Another thing I find helpful -- in my isolated self-instruction -- is, at a certain point of development, to record my practicing and listen carefully to it. I'm really working on the (bass trombone) low and pedal range now, and based on prior experience I know that the sound I get as I'm blowing from behind the horn isn't quite what the sound is elsewhere in the room. So I've just retrieved my cheapy Tascam DR-05 out of the drawer and set it up with the external (better) mic to see a bit more accurately what I'm sounding like.

First impression is "Not as bad as I thought."

This is a bit tricky because there's not much point to it unless you can be pretty sure that what you're hearing in the recordings is at least very close to what someone else would hear in the room -- which can depend on how you have the recorder configured. But I have some ways of determining that, and so find self-recording to be pretty helpful.

[hyperbolica]

When it comes down to it, I think listening and imitation is the only way to really develop your tone. You can't tell someone to "be more disconnected from the sound" or something abstract like that. You have to try a whole bunch of different things, and hold when you hear the result that you're trying to get to. I developed a good sound early on. I didn't have much other talent, but I got where I got mostly based on a really nice tone. I got that from listening to my teacher or some other pro play, and then fiddling around at home until I could make a sound like that. My main teacher was a bass player, and I think imitating his sound really helped me develop a good sound. I re-did my embouchure during that time, and the instruction around that was "push as much lip into the mouthpiece as possible, like a pucker". I followed all the instructions, and I just got a terrible result. But over the course of a couple of, I worked through it, and kept what worked, and what worked didn't even come close to resembling the instruction, but it did resemble the end result example - imitation.

People who have been playing for decades can't really describe what they are doing especially to a learner because half of it is simply unconscious habit and the rest is instinctive autonomic muscle control. You can't tell someone to "flex your obicularis orbis muscle 50%" - we can't control muscles like that. It has to be done through visual and aural examples. When it feels right and sounds right, it is right.

Specific exercises are of course to start by watching and listening to someone who already has good tone. And then try to duplicate. Long tones have been mentioned several times. Cannot be overstated. Articulation is also part of sound, so articulated scales. And then I would also add lip slurs, because tone is nothing without pitch control. Then go back and play duets with the person who's sound you are imitating. That gives you a real comparison and progress check.