Technical

Absolutely not. The sound is different, and the way you use your lips and set your embouchure is different. It sounds as a balloonpeeeeep or a mosquito.Free lip buzzing tends to pull the lips out of the centre. LCS is the other way around. This is an extremely centered way of producing a tone. I think free lip buzzing is counter productive if you want to benefit from BE.

The point is: can you do it? If you can you have the basic lip setting for the first Roll in exercise.

Yes, it is correct if the sound is correct. You can practice until the sound comes from the centre of your lips, but this is not absolutely necessary.
 

LCS is mostly an exercise to get the basic, rough lip setting for RI. Some people really need the lips to squeak to make a sound in RI #1, and other people (including myself) don't need this, or are unable to do it that way. In that case LCS is too closed.The basic setup is right, but you cannot really make a tone out of it. Loosening a bit causes the squeak to become a hiss (rolled in air hiss) and this is also a good way to get your first rolled in tone.

I don't know. If it sounds as on the CD and your lips are rolled in, if a high note pops out without pressure, or even wants to go higher, you pretty much got it., You can only find this out yourself.

Use air pockets if you cannot get a squeak. Basically the Lip Clamp is the setup to begin with, and if no squeak emerges, 'blow up' your face, cheeks, lips. This will help getting the squeak easier. Some people make the mistake that they tighten the mouthcorners to get the squeak, but this is counterproductive. Ther is some air between corners and teeth.

This is a good way to start LCS and RI. No red of the lips showing in the second picture, bunched chin, air pockets everywhere.
The same goes for RI. In the beginning you shouldn't be afraid to use air pockets. Maybe you will play them that way forever, maybe they will go away. I, myself, started out with huge air pockets, and now I play RI with almost no pockets anymore. The feeling and sound is what counts. Easy high note, no arm pressure. Rolled in lips.

It is great fun the first time it happens. BTW If it doesn't happen it is OK, too. My advice would be to always go for the G top staff. If this tone is really 'too low' in the beginning, a high C is also a good starting point.E top staff is the lowest starting point.The exercise is meant to gain control over this extreme set up.If you try to make high E your starting point, the risk of forcing is high. If you get tired (and you will) high E is a high note even RI. If you still want to use this as your starting point, eventually you are going to force it and miss the point. Merely trying to find and play a G top staff is a great workout and makes your lips eventually do the right thing. It may take a while but it is a great coordination exercise.

No, there must be something wrong. Probably your lips are not properly rolled in. Is the LCS working or is this still a problem? This is the first indication whether you should be doing the RI exercises already. E or G top staff are the only notes you simply CAN play in this setting.When you do it right it is hard to play lower notes.

Check your lip setting. Can you do LCS, does your setup resemble the LCS? If this is the case then patience is the word. Experiment with mpc placement and air pockets. A week is a very short time to be able to control RI. There are people that can do it easily, but it took me two months to get a reasonable G top staff.

Use everything. Air in your cheeks, under your lips, loose corners, whatever. If it sounds like the CD you got it.

No, then you are totally missing the point. RI is an exaggerated motion exercise to trigger a certain lip movement. The sound does not have to be particularly pretty. It is more about feel than it is about sound.

Unless you have a fat, stable high G I would suggest to stick to the exercises.The goal is not to learn how to play rolled in, the goal is to make the lips move in more or less the right direction and thus to play more efficiently. It is very well possible that small elements of RI are already part of your 'normal' embouchure.That you do not look like the kids on the cover of BE is not important. BE is not an embouchure but a set of exercises. If, on the other hand, your playing is exectly the same as a year ago, then I would advise you to check if you are doing the exercises correcctly. A year should give some results IMO, however small.

It is not a good idea to do RI inbetween 'normal' practice.I think BE works best if this is a seperate session first thing on a given day.. If you take a short break and go on with other stuff, you will be fine.

That will be your experiment. For some Jeffs order is best, for some the other way around is better. You can even switch every other day or whatever. Do what feels best at a certain moment.

Make RI#1 stable. In RI#2: are you able to play the lowest tone? Then I think you can try #3.

RO#1 requires a double pedal F#. This should be no problem before you proceed. Before you move on from #3 to #4, #3 should feel pretty easy and flexible. RO#4 is an advanced exercise. RO 1-3 should be stable and I suggest a stable RI # and #2, also. Don't do #4 too early.

You can always experiment with this. If it feels good, you can do it. It is absolutely NOT necessary to do ALS this way. RI and RO are independent exercises.Look at ALS as a kind of integration exercise to get the ' continuous flex'.. If you are getting more proficient in RO and RI then elements of both will already be part of your normal embouchure. It is much more important to listen for the 'snaps' then to try to play them rolled in.

It is very well possible that your teeth are too close together, so your tongue does not get through. In that case you should open your mouth more (make the gap between your teeth bigger). . Another possibility is that your top lip is hidden in front of your teeth, or that you pull up your top lip when you ascend.One of the reasons you do TOL is to bring down the top lip, and to free it from being squashed between mpc and teeth. By doing TOL this is mostly an unconscious thing if you just try to hit your top lip squarely.

You can actually move this whole setup down in order to bring the top lip in reach for the tongue. This might not be easy at first, but it is possible and necessary, for that matter.

With some practice (watch the process in a mirror) it is possible to keep your bunched chin.. If this does not work use two steps: move your whole embouchure down. If this causes a flat chin, don't bother, Step two is to bunch your chin without bringing the whole embouchure back up again. Don't forget to look in a mirror! You can also check with your tongue. If you can still feel your top lip after these two steps you are on the right track.

Jeff also describes this. Some people just have another muscle structure and will always have a flat chin.. Just like other BE elements: air pockets, TOL, the bunched chin is not absolutely necessary. The point is: how is your progression in those two years? If nothing happened, something must be wrong. Doing BE gives different results for different people, but I think everybody benefits from it. BTW. I do BE for three years and I still look pretty flat chinned, too.

No, some people tend to move their jaw forward when doing RI (The danger is that it is an unconscious thing. Once you are aware of what is causing the pain, it is easy to overcome). This is not necessary.You can easily get rid of this by moving your jaw when playing RI and bringing it back into a more relaxed position. There are people that benefit from bringing the jaw forward a bit (not only in RI) for a better balance in mpc pressure on both top and bottom lip. But if your jaw starts to hurt you are definitely overdoing it.

In the beginning you are waking up muscles that you might not even know they existed, even if you have been playing for years before BE. Occassionaly your muscles may ache. Best thing to do is to take a day off.

There are three major parts: RO, RI, TOL. Next to that there are some important integration exercises, as I would like to call them. Lipslurs (snaps!), staccato(zips!), double tonguing and crescendo-decrescendo tend to coordinate and integrate the muscle movements learned in RI, RO and TOL.In the process you will find out which part is the most difficult to learn. This automatically needs the most attention.This does not mean that the other parts are not important anymore. You should always try to balance your practice of BE which means that all the parts get attention.

Congrats. You are one of the majority of trumpet players who can do this. You can focus more on RI and TOL, but don't forget to do RO. RO enhances RI and TOL, and to balance your practice also do the RO exercises. I could do RO #1 and 2 without ever having done this before. Now I know that RO has contributed much more to my progression than I had ever dreamt of.

You know it when you feel it, but that might not be the answer you are looking for. The best way to describe it is this: imagine your tone is a very thin thread. You try to grab this thread with rolled out/puckered lips. This focused feeling is the RO feel.. In normal playing your lips will not be as rolled out or puckered as in RO, but the focused and forward feeling towards the centre stays.
The inward movement of the corners is also an important part of the RO feel. You will discover that to ascend you need the same muscles with which you do the RO.

The bottom lip takes a more normal position, so back in the cup again. The RO feel stays as much as possible. Even if you play more towards a RI feeling if you ascend. The power of RO #4 is that RO gives room to RI. To see what I mean: try to roll in your lips with a big smile or while your lips are against your teeth already. My experience is that RO makes RI easier.

Look also at question 16. It can be potentially dangerous to do so. What you are trying to do, if you do as desrcibed is a direct embouchure change. One of the big advantages and IMO THE most powerfull thing about BE is that it is indirect. Your lip muscles get a chance to incorporate and get used to different movements. If you do this too fast, you risk total breakdown. The best advise I can give is: be patient and if you play music, do it with what feels best at that moment. Chances are that after a couple of months this might not be your 'old' embouchure anymore.

That is not wise. Your old embouchure is the fundament of your new embouchure. Don't be afraid to slow down the process if you play a lot on your 'old chops'.This way the new muscles get a lot of opportunity to integrate with your way of playing, which is a great thing. You can always do a couple of 'only BE' days, but always go back to normal playing after a while. Normal playing is an important part of BE.

I often see that people think they do the exercises right but actually go on much too fast. More often than not they are not following the instructions carefully enough. The best thing you can do in such case is to check every part of BE very carefully with what the book says. Even if this means that you start all over again. Is your Lip Clamp correct and do you do it every day? Is your LCS correct: listen to the sound, a squeak not a buzz. Are you doing RI correctly?
A lot of people fall into old habits again to make a tone happening in RI.There is no room for fumbling, there. It is either good or useless.Put your mouthpiece on the LCS setup (both with squeak or hiss is OK) and try to produce a tone this way. Is your RO sounding weak? RO is not a loose embouchure, it is an extreme forward and focused way of producing a tone. Is your TOL squarely against your top lip? Is is possible that you have no idea what and where and what you touch with your tongue? (This is a not uncommon phenomenon. To check this, start with putting your tongue against your top lip-check it in a mirror-place your mpc, blow and release the air by moving the tongue downward or slightly backward. This is where you should place your tongue in TOL). Check your sound with the sound on the CD and read the text carefully again.

Failure can be caused by using other embouchure methods . Things like free buzzing or mouthpiece buzzing and Gordon/Stamp-like methods, can be counterproductive. When you start with BE it is better to use only BE as chop development and play normal studies, concert pieces and play-alongs to integrate the new chops in your regular playing.
Of course there is a possibility that your playing level is very high already (you are already playing 'balanced' without knowing it). In that case the effectibveness is probably nihil.
If you are able to do all the exercises exactly as described in the book, then it is hard to believe that this doe not have any effect on your normal playing, but of course, I have not seen it all.

Also 29.. No, this is not good, indeed. In order to give some advice it is important to know exactly what you do - how long you do it - what mix of other exercises than BE you do? Just like any other method, BE can be overdone. Probably one or more of the things mentioned in 29. are not correct in your practice, but if everything seems to be OK, it is very well possible that you simply overdo it.. Also, doing BE and nothing else can be counterproductive in the end.You need to play on 'normal chops' to incorporate the newly learned things in your normal playing. It is also possible that you suffer from a short period of instabilty (mostly from a couple of days to a week).. Of course things are changing in the way you use your muscles and the way you play. Maybe you are in a phase of transition. For me, most of the time these periods are a prelude to a breakthrough.

It is possible that you still look upon BE as an embouchure. This can lead to too direct a change, which can lead to a lot of problems. It is very important to practice on 'normal (=changing/developing) chops and not work towards a certain lip setting. BE IS NOT AN EMBOUCHURE AND WORKS INDIRECT!!!

If this instability continues, you might need to take a few steps back in your lesson plan. You can also cut back on the time you spent on BE or try experimenting with doing BE every other day or three times a week. Just skipping a week of BE can be wholesome. Muscles need time to adjust to the new way of using them.

In BE everybody is a beginner, unless you have a great embouchure already (but then there is no need for BE, anyway), or you have a way of playing that is very similar to the way BE makes you play. If that is the case you still might want to begin with the first exercises and probably your progress will be very fast.

If your playing is improving and you know that you are doing it correctly, then chances are that you already play a bit BE-ish. Many beginning trumpeters also find them easy to do.Well trained trumpetplayers often find them hard, because they have so many bad habits they have to get rid of (yes, this is my own experience. Almost all of my students have a better sounding RI than myself).

Yes. If TOL is not your normal way of playing, it is hard to play with a lot of control and range is non-existant. TOL is not a high note exercise.The only thing that counts is to touch your top lip squarely. Range is not your first concern.

If you do lip slurs it is important that you feel and hear a 'click' from one note to the other. A good way to get this clickfeeling is to play the snaps. So the snaps are a 'soundbased trigger' for the right lipmovement. If the sound is good, the lipmovement is good. Some people asked me how I do the snaps and slurs, and to be honest, I haven't got a clue. I take care of my posture, breath in low and full, make sure my lips are set up right and then I play them. I am not aware of what the tongue does or what my air is doing. I think that whatever someone tells you, it's just a personal story of what this particular person feels and thinks he is doing. I suspect that everybody with good sounding (clicking, slotting) slurs does it the same way. I have no proof of that, but I do know that the snaps are a good way to get the right feeling.