Projecting Sound Efficiently

Projecting your sound isn’t the same as playing loud. What you actually want is to fill the room with as little effort as possible, so the person in the back row hears you just as clearly as the person in front.

As brass players, we buzz our lips into a small mouthpiece, and the tubing takes that raw buzz and turns it into the rich tone that comes out the bell. The trick to projection is getting that tubing to do as much of the work as possible.

Find the sweet spot. Every note has a frequency where the instrument itself wants to resonate. When your lips buzz at exactly that frequency, the horn amplifies you with almost no extra effort. To do that reliably, you need to hear the note in your head before you play it — not a nice-to-have, the whole game. I still use a simple check: while playing a note, pull the mouthpiece out slightly and listen to the buzz on its own. Is it the same pitch as the note you were aiming for? If not, you’re not centred, and your tone is paying for it. Play through the centre of the note and you’ll get twice the sound for half the effort.

Point the bell at your audience. Trumpets and trombones are directional — the sound genuinely travels where the bell points. Playing into the stand, the floor, or the back of the player in front of you undercuts your own sound no matter how well you’re playing. In rehearsal, pick out the person furthest away and play to them, not to the conductor.

Why resonance matters beyond volume. A resonant note is more efficient — more sound per breath. That efficiency matters most in long, loud, low passages, the biggest air-guzzlers on any brass instrument. Get the resonance right and you’ll find air to spare exactly where you used to gasp.

One more thing I say constantly in lessons: don’t blow into your instrument, blow through it.

From the comments: does buzzing without the horn change your embouchure?

A reader, David, raised a good point about the mouthpiece check above. Christian Lindberg once pulled his mouthpiece out while buzzing an F and heard nothing; when he buzzed the F on the mouthpiece alone and then put it back in, he got a bad sound. David’s view was that a mouthpiece on its own has less resistance than one in the trombone, which changes the aperture and embouchure setting — a controversial idea, but worth thinking about alongside the benefits of mouthpiece buzzing as a pitch check.

I agree with him: there’s no back-pressure when you blow a mouthpiece that isn’t attached to the instrument, and for most players that makes a real difference. The point of the check is only to hear the pitch you’re buzzing — if the buzz is on pitch, the instrument can resonate and project. A few things to keep in mind:

1. You can add resistance by partially covering the end of the mouthpiece with a finger. That makes the buzz feel more natural and closer to playing.
2. Players who use very little mouthpiece pressure are affected less, because in effect they’re already buzzing into the mouthpiece when they play.
3. Most players use some pressure, which generally gives a fuller sound — but it also means the rim is helping the buzz, so the more pressure you use, the bigger the role resistance plays.
4. For most players the embouchure will be slightly different buzzing into a mouthpiece alone than into the whole instrument, because the back-pressure is different. In theory, only players who use no pressure at all would see no difference.