Whaaaat?
Yes, you heard me correctly why you should bite.
The science of biting
I often hear people say you shouldn’t bite. I see this quite a bit on the forums, e.g. when a beginner complains of jaw pain they are told to stop biting. If they have a problem with high notes, “stop biting.” If they are getting a lot of squeaks, “DON’T BITE!”
But the thing is you have to bite in order to get a good sound. Or any kind of sound for that matter. It’s like telling someone to eat a piece of meat or an apple without biting – it’s not very easy is it?
Even worse is when people try to tell you to stop biting down onto the mouthpiece with your upper jaw. Think about it – try doing a repeated biting motion using your upper jaw only (ie without moving your lower jaw). Is it actually possible? I don’t think so because your upper jaw is obviously fixed to your skull, and in order to bite using your upper jaw, you’d be moving your entire head up and down. In other words if you are to bite with either of your jaws, it’s going to be the lower jaw. When you are biting (or chewing) it’s your lower jaw doing all the work. Your upper jaw is involved only inasmuch as it is just being there for the lower jaw to push up against. It has to be there or you wouldn’t be able to bite at all. Whether it is actually exerting any pressure is probably a scientific argument we needn’t go into but was well covered by Sir Isaac Newton in his law Action & Reaction (for every action or force in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. If object A exerts a force on object B, object B also exerts an equal and opposite force on object A. In other words, forces result from interactions).
Applying this to the saxophone
OK, enough science, back to the saxophone.
Now think about this in regard to an embouchure. First hold it in place without touching it with lips or teeth(either when attached to the saxophone or you can just try it by holding the mouthpiece). You can even try this without a mouthpiece and use a thumb or finger. You will find that you can then easily add pressure either from your lower lip or your lower teeth. But now try adding pressure from your upper lip or teeth. You’ll find the only way to do that is to make your whole head move downwards and guess what? This will restrict your larynx which we know from the article on breathing is a bad bad thing. This isn’t something that I found to be a very common fault, most students get used to the concept of action and reaction even if they have never heard of Newton’s third law. Besides it is (or should be) something that is taught right at the very start when thinking about posture, even before thinking about embouchure or breathing.
So we have established that any pressure is upwards, and the downwards is basically “collateral” reaction to the upwards force.
If you put no pressure at all on the reed there will be no sound. That is also arguable (see what the great teacher Joe Allard had to say about pressure from the teeth and lips. One thing he encouraged was to play with no teeth or top lip, although I believe this was an exercise to demonstrate the concept of less pressure rather than something that is meant to be used as a permanent embouchure. Maybe somebody who knows bit more about that can put me straight.
So now we’ve discussed a bit about biting why do people say it is a bad thing. I think it should be obvious by now that you need to bite in order to play. So the only conclusion I have is that what they mean is that you shouldn’t bite in the wrong way, or more likely that you shouldn’t bite too hard. That is the most likely thing, I don’t think but in that case why not say so? maybe because it’s easier to repeat the mantra don’t bite don’t bite than it is to get into the specifics of what it actually means to bite too hard.
One analogy that I can think of is brushing your teeth . When I recently got a new dentist, he pointed out that I was brushing my teeth too hard, so causing my gums to bleed. he showed me a handy tip which is to hold the toothbrush just between on finger and thumb. This way it is not possible to exert too much pressure. Once you have got used to the feeling the correct amount of pressure by doing this you can revert to just brushing normally. This could be the reason for Joe Allard’s suggestion to try playing with no pressure at all, but it’s not a perfect analogy because (a) I don’t think Joe Allard espoused the idea of literally doing that while performing and (b) I think that in order to get a wide range of dynamics and expression there is no “one correct amount of pressure.”
Applying the toothbrush analogy.
One wayI suggest in order to replicate the dentist’s advice is to (temporarily) try some of your practice using a much softer reed. I know you will often hear that as you get better you play should harder reeds, almost like it’s weight training – the harder the reed the better you are. That is nonsense. I’m not saying that you should immediately switch to using a soft reed, but just to try using one as an exercise. You may well find that you put it in your mouth and as soon as you start to play it closes up. So to combat that you need to use less pressure from your lower jaw.
Play a few exercises like that, then go back to your usual strength reed. By alternating hard and soft you will gradually gain a more flexible embouchure. You may well find another benefit in that in order to compensate for the softer reed you need to work on getting better air support. This may be especially true for higher louder notes – so that’s is a really advantageous side effect to this exercise. I did find at first that it was actually quite difficult to sustain notes strongly and evenly with the soft reed but the fact that I was therefore forced to work on air support was a real eye opener. So I decided to adopt the use of a softer reed and ended up being overall much more versatile.
So next time somebody advises you not to bite while playing, try to find out exactly what they mean. If it boils down to meaning don’t bite too much, it’s time to find out what it means.
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