BRAVO! Im thrilled to see this product.

As the one who

introduced these exercises on the net in 1994, I can only
hope that more people will use them (with silencer!) to
learn how it opens the door so easily to advanced
techniques. Search for Shooshie Mouthpiece Exercise
on Google to find the SaxFAQ where the exercises were
originally posted. There you will find the background and
detail that bring them to life. And get a Silencer. Its a
great idea! (Ive no connection with it, btw.)
Shooshie

The mouthpiece exercise

This exercise, in my opinion, is one of the finest ways to
improve your tone you can try. Its not meant to be easy but if
you can do it, youll notice the results pretty quickly.
Experienced players and newcomers should at least try this for a
few days because its not a common thing to come across by
word of teachers and so on. Its worth the time. Its also the
crux of several other methods, notably circular breathing and
vibrato, which are covered elsewhere.
Ok, there have been a couple of requests here, and a couple in
email, so here goes again. This is pretty simple. It is not
something that should ever become a source of anxiety. If you
have an inflexible airstream right now, it may seem frustrating
at first, but you will discover the methods through practice.
While at first you may want to spend a little time on it fifteen or
twenty minutes seems excessive to me, maybe ten would be
more like it from then on you probably dont need more than a
couple of minutes of it as a warm-up exercise to get your
bearings.
The objective of this exercise is to put you in touch with the
muscles which control your airstream and teach you the
coordinated movements of them which enable absolute pitch
and timbre control at any volume level (within reason), which I
will call velocity from here on out, borrowing the MIDI term for
attack rate. Velocity, then refers to the speed of the airstream,
not the tempo of the music as in Czernys exercises for piano.
Along with the muscular coordination and control, we will need
to learn a way to remember specific positions of those muscles
so as to enable their quick recall when attempting to practice a
difficult passage for consistent perfection. I use a phonetic
system for this, since we each have learned phonetic systems

since birth to enable us to perform the miraculous muscular

acrobatics of speech. The tongue is a free-form muscle, and
very few of us really have any idea what its shape is at a given
moment. Ive seen people do fiber-optic cable photos and videos
of the tongue so as to determine these shapes, but such studies
have little practical applications for three reasons:
1) the people doing the study do not necessarily know which
positions are right for airstreams.
2) the subjects being studied (saxophonists) may find it difficult
to produce the proper positions with the apparatus in their
mouths
3) even if the above two points are corrected for, a picture
doesnt give us any connection with a physical means to
produce the positions in the photographs.
So in response to that last point, I searched for a means of
locating and coordinating the airstream positions necessary to
play the saxophone, and a means of describing and recalling
them. The solution was extraordinarily simple. We have both
right here in our mouths the mouthpiece and our ability to
speak.
Here is the exercise, and following the exercise a description of
the phonetic tools to help you recall certain positions, and then
a discussion of how to apply the exercise to your other exercises
and to playing (also, how NOT to).
For first-timers: Holding only the mouthpiece (with reed and
ligature mounted and fully ready for playing), play a sound,
keeping your hands away from the back of the mouthpiece. This
will all be controlled by voicing the airstream. Find a pitch that is
comfortable and begin by attacking that pitch a few times with
different velocities. Now that you have a feel for playing on the
mouthpiece alone, try lowering the pitch. You may at first just
imitate a slide whistle until you get some control over it.
Immediately upon success of this little glissando down and back
up you will be aware of at least two things: something is at
work with your tongue and throat positions, and you have to
support the sound with a lot of diaphragm pressure. No nambypamby little toots; you will need long, broad lines of airstream
sitting on top of a solid set of stomach muscles. (Later you will
need to learn to do it with minimum effort, but were just
getting started.)
Now that youre an expert slide-whistle-duck-calling mouthpiece
tooter, its time to control it and learn coordination. Play a
comfortable pitch. The pitches will depend on the size of the
mouthpiece: soprano: anywhere from a concert A to C alto:

concert A tenor: concert F-G (some small chambered mps

may do well with A) bari: I honestly dont remember. Its been
10 years since I sold my bari.
Using the above determined pitch as your starting point, set
your tuner to that pitch (playing an audible sound, not
measuring your pitch) and begin playing a scale downward.
Match each interval as closely as you can, listening for beats
between your sound and your tuners sound. (A synthesizer will
do if you dont have a sound-producing tuner). Attempt to play
an entire octave. As you get down to about a sixth below, your
jaw position will change, and you will go to something like a
subtone embouchure. These lower notes represent extreme
flexibility and changes, but I think they serve a purpose. Dont
feel lost if you cant get them, though; the real meat of this
exercise can be had even if you only can play an interval of a
fifth or sixth.
Now that you have accomplished the scale, or at least the
beginnings of it, lets move on to the real stuff the part that
gives you control over some coordination: dynamic control.
Begin your scale again. At a tempo of approximately quarter
note = 126, make each note 8 beats long (or longer if you like).
Begin each pitch rather forcefully, being considerate of your
neighbors, though, and again match the pitch to your fixed pitch
reference tone. Now decrescendo to PPP over four beats and
then crescendo back up to your starting velocity over the next
four beats. Keep the pitch constant. Then repeat it for each note
of your scale, always keeping focused on the pitch. Consistent
pitch is the key to this exercise.
Ok, thats it. Now youve done it. Do this exercise as a warm-up
on a daily basis, before you do your harmonic (overtone)
exercises.
Ok, now that you have learned to play scales (and a few of you
have probably even been playing tunes) on your mouthpiece
alone, what can you do with it besides surprise your friends with
a mouthpiece serenade? Plenty. If you have mastered the
velocity/pitch control, then you have accomplished a lot. You
already found out that as the velocity of the airstream
diminishes, the pitch goes up, and vice-versa. You learned that
you could control it, though, without necessarily even having to
know what you were doing. Its just a natural and intuitive act
of compensation. You also learned that tightness and reliance
upon jaw pressure alone (biting) is the enemy of airstream
control, and yet it is very much a part of the overall act.

Learning to coordinate these actions is what makes you a

virtuoso.
Now at this point, I could launch into a lengthy dissertation of
exactly what is happening in your mouth, and give you exact
descriptions of tongue positions, and thus-and-so, and do this
and dont do that, and if its not precisely my way then its not
right, and blah, blah, blah. But I wont, and for good reason,
too. I dont really know. Well I kinda know after all these
years, but its really not important, and I sure wouldnt want
anyone out there going around saying Shooshie says it has to
be this way, and starting a whole new school of thought.
Schools of thought are good ways to lock you up and inhibit
your ability to learn. As soon as someone points a school of
thought at you, get ready to run or be shackled. Not that what
they tell you may necessarily be wrong, but simply because
theyre liable to say its the only way. School in this sense
translates into something like a cult.
So, instead of telling you whats what, Id rather tell you how to
use this to find what works for you. That is, Id rather give you
some tools than to tell you what to build with them. So here
goes:
What is it that enables you to change pitch on the mouthpiece
alone? Is it lipping down? No. I can bite the reed nearly shut
and still do the scale. Your lips are involved, and must be
supported with muscle, but it would be wrong to say that we are
lipping down. Are we opening our throats or closing them?
Maybe. Its not so important to know this, since whatever it is
happens automatically in order to successfully do the exercise.
But one thing is for sure. The tongue and other things do move
as you get softer or louder or change notes or correct the pitch,
just as they do on the horn, and they do so in a coordinated
dance just as they do on the horn. This range of motion,
whatever it is, and the positions of things in your mouth and
throat are all important in finding what will work for a given
musical circumstance.
For instance, you are playing in the lower middle register and
have a quick leap into the altissimo and back. You can play the
altissimo note fine by itself. You can play the middle register
fine by itself. But putting the two together you always squeak,
squawk, and get all tense. How can you nail it as if nothing
happened? Simple. Remember the positions of each one.
Reduce the changes between those positions to the very barest
minimum necessary to accomplish it. It is much less of a change

than you might imagine if you are playing correctly to begin

with. Now comes our trick.
Determine the phonetic positions of your mouth for those two
different ranges on the instrument at the volume you want them
to happen. Now put them together. Its as simple as saying a
phrase like any ann. Notice what happens when you say any
ann. Your tongue locks quickly into two different positions and
back. It is not difficult at all, but it produces completely different
sounds. That is how simple it should be on sax. But you may be
like a baby when it comes to speaking on the sax. It takes a
little time to learn, therefore you should practice things slowly
until you get the hang of it. Soon you will be talking full speed.
Back to the mouthpiece exercise. As you play the scale,
determine the phonetic positions for each pitch and volume.
Notice that you will be addressing three parts of the tongue at
least thats how Ive divided it up: Back, Middle, and Tip.
The back of your tongue stays the same pretty much all the
time. Youve heard some people say that you keep your throat
open, while others say that you close it down. Some will talk
about warm air or cold air, fast air or slow air. There is a great
deal of confusion about this, and nobody seems to agree.
Theres good reason for that. Nobody really knows whats going
on back there. But you do know, even if you cant put it into
words, because youve done the mouthpiece exercise. Rather
than speculate on all these dichotomies, lets focus on
practicality. In order to successfully render the mouthpiece
exercise, the back of the tongue is in a position to create the
sound of K at moments notice. It doesnt actually create that
K, but its close. Its kind of in between a K and a hard G (as
in gate). You could articulate a sound with this position. This is
very handy, since when we begin double tonguing, our tongues
will already know how to do it. The position is a bit stretched for
either of those consonant sounds, but we are going to use K
or G to describe the position, since they are pretty close.
Remember, were using the letters to describe something we
actually are doing. Were not trying to make what we are doing
match the letters as we would normally speak them. The
mouthpiece exercise is the authority to whom we turn in order
to tell us the proper positionings. We just apply the phonetic
symbols as tools to help us remember those positions.
Now lets skip the middle of the tongue and come back to it
later. Lets look at the tip of the tongue. It seems to function as
a focal point for the airstream before it enters the mouthpiece.
When it is focused, it adopts a kind of pointy shape somewhere

between English R and L. It is able, at moments notice, to

pop up to the reed and make a T or D shape which can be
very handy for single tonguing. (Gee its just amazing how all
this is working out, isnt it?)
Again, remember that you take
what works (from the mouthpiece exercise) and use the
phonetic symbols to describe them, not vice versa.
OK. For the middle of the tongue, we have our vowel sounds.
The whole range of them. You can feel them for yourself as you
do the mouthpiece exercise. Play a pitch and freeze into that
position. Remove the mouthpiece and vocalize whatever comes
out without moving from that position. Theres your phonetic
position for that pitch. You can even write it down! At least you
can write an approximation that has meaning for you. That
helps greatly when youre trying to remember how to make that
two-octave altissimo leap on a sixteenth note.
One other important position to note is the sides of the tongue.
When correctly in place, the rails of the tongue slide forward
and backward between a pair or two of the upper molars. Its
not a big slide, but just enough. This helps create an actual
chamber for the air to travel through. In doing all these different
things with the tongue, we have created a space to act as a
resonating chamber to help reinforce the desired overtones and
pitches which emerge from that other resonating chamber
known as a saxophone. Put the two chambers back to back and
you get harmonic reinforcement. Your resonating chamber can
also act as a detriment to the sound by not reinforcing the
harmonics of the tone you are trying to produce. On the
mouthpiece alone, this will cause squeaks, grunts, or just a
locked-in high pitch which you cannot control. The shaping of
this chamber is very subtle, but ultra-important. Without it, you
could not do overtones, altissimo, or pitch correction. You would
have trouble tonguing some registers of the horn. Youd have
trouble with large-interval leaps at speed. Sound familiar? Then
youve probably been needing to do this for a while!
Lets review our phonetic positions. If you put together our
back, middle, and front positions, you get something like [K(G)]
+ [a,o,u,e,i] + [R(L)]. You wont mind if I simplify a particular
position to something like [KAR]. Or how about [KIR]? We know
that the K is not a real K, and that the R is really more of an L.
Were just using these symbols as shorthand for what we want
to remember.
Now you have a tool to help you recall specific airstreams, and
you have a reference exercise the mouthpiece to coordinate
those airstreams into dynamic, practical usage.

Next, you will want to apply the same airstream positions to

your harmonic (overtone) exercises. Simply do the same thing.
Play each harmonic on your horn and change velocities.
Crescendo and decrescendo (or vice versa), noting the changes.
Work on getting the timbres to match the sound you desire.
Note the phonetic positions. Now play the regular fingerings.
Apply the same phonetic positions. You may have to
compensate, but very little.
Youre ready to use these exercises, now. Applying them to your
actual playing, you should notice improvement and greater
control in your pitch and pitch correction after an attack, vibrato
(shape, speed, depth, flexibility and consistency) dynamic
control (and its relation to pitch), tonguing, double tonguing,
timbral consistency, altissimo, and general playing in all
registers. Anywhere that you find problems you will be prepared
to isolate those problems and work them out with your newfound tools. In each case, you will:
1) figure out exactly where the problem lies
2) play individually the notes giving you the problems
3) determine the ideal position for each note
4) note the phonetic positions and their changes between notes
5) practice for the minimum change between them
6) make the change as fluid as speaking
7) apply it to the music and increase the tempo until perfected
Now, were talking a lot about changes. Havent we all been
drilled with the idea that nothing changes? That were supposed
to play everything in one position? What about Daniel Deffayet
(and others) who delight in public demonstrations in which they
have a student blow the horn while the clinician stands behind
them fingering the horns? Its amazing to see that the student
really CAN play the music if someone else is doing the
fingerings. Thats because the student cannot predict a change
and respond to it in their (bad) habitual ways.
What gets demonstrated is that students typically change the
wrong things, and change them too much. I can also do
Deffayets trick, but if someone does it for me, I can foil them
by not changing anything. Just try playing a low Bb and freezing
in that position and playing and altissimo G, or a high F. It wont
come out most of the time. The secret is the three parts of the
tongue. The back and the tip do not change. This is where we
get the idea that nothing changes. But that idea is not entirely
right: the middle changes. The demonstration trick is possible
because if the back and tip do not change, nearly any note is
possible with the middle of the tongue in a neutral position. In

fact, some of the correct changing will happen naturally. But

control over the precise pitch and velocity present a whole set of
problems not demonstrated by this public exhibition. This new
set of problems is pretty much completely addressed by the
mouthpiece exercise when applied to harmonic exercises and
altissimo studies, and then applied to music in general.
So what it all boils down to, once youve established all the right
positions, is that a little portion of your tongue the same part
that makes all your vowel sounds is of utmost importance in
aiding your flexibility on the instrument. It determines your
pitch, timbre, and harmonic reinforcement of the sound. And its
as natural as speaking or whistling. In fact, you might think of
this whole thing as whistling while you work.
The same stuff applies to flute, clarinet, and all other
woodwinds, as well. In each case, the feel is dramatically
different, but the principles are the same. The changes on flute
are ultra-tiny, but even of more importance since you cannot
lean on octave keys to do part of your work for you. On clarinet
the air column overblows at a twelfth, so the feel is again very
different, but its there. Oboe is like flute very subtle. I cant
report on bassoon, since I never played one outside of a
woodwinds class. But the same principles apply to brass
instruments as well. In fact, you couldnt play brass instruments
without these principles.
In closing, let me reinforce the fact that these tools enable you
to find what works for you. Maybe your sound ideal and
mouthpiece and the shape of your mouth, not to mention your
colloquial speaking accent (Brooklyn comes to mind), all require
that you do something way different from what I do. But still we
use the same tools to find them and apply them.
Shooshie