When I taught woodwind methods, I found myself working day and night attempting to answer the following question: “What is the difference between a saxophone and a clarinet embouchure?” The answer to this question was one I was quite keen on obtaining because my partner and I were completely overhauling the Woodwind Methods curriculum that year, so we wanted to make sure we were getting correct information. However, the answer I found confused me. When I was reading “The Art of Saxophone Playing” by Larry Teal, I found this little piece of information.
"The clarinet embouchure is based more on a ‘smile’ position and rests on the front of the lower teeth...The embouchure is not transferable [to the saxophone]…"
Here’s the thing though: most of it is transferable and the differences between the two are not what you think.
To be fair to Mr. Teal, he wrote this book in the early 1960s and we have learned a lot about pedagogy and efficient playing since then.
The problem with the “smile” embouchure described by Mr. Teal is that it promotes biting. When you pull the corners back, the only place you have to support the mouthpiece and reed is your teeth. Today, we think of forming your lips like a rubber band and pushing the corners inward, so his advice is outdated. Unfortunately, some textbooks still promote this as fact, like Frederick William Westphal’s Guide to Teaching Woodwinds which was published around the same time as Teal’s saxophone text (I think I’m noticing a pattern here).
Rest assured, there is only one single-reed embouchure. The differences between clarinet and saxophone are very minor and as a result, it should be understood as one embouchure. Now, what are those differences?
1. The lower lip is slightly lower down on the clarinet - This is mainly because the clarinet mouthpiece comes into the mouth at a more acute angle. Because of this, the lower lip will sit lower down than where the top teeth are. Try this exercise.
Keeping your head straight and looking forward, take your mouthpiece and reed and put it into your mouth at a “saxophone” angle. The top teeth should be aligned with the lower lip.
Measure this with your fingers and take the mouthpiece out to see where everything is.
Now, with your head in the same forward-looking position, put the mouthpiece into the same position and slowly move the mouthpiece down to a more acute position, a “clarinet” angle.
Measure this with your fingers again and see where everything is. Notice how your top teeth slid upward while your lower lip remained either stationary or moved down slightly?
Now, the final difference is actually not related to the embouchure itself, but to the tongue position for each instrument.
2. Tongue Position - Clarinet needs a high tongue position in order to focus the air. This is why a band director should never ask their clarinet students to blow with warm air. This lowers the tongue position too much and results in an unfocused sound. The vowel that gets the tongue into the appropriate position is “eee”. I like to tell my younger students to hiss like a cat and this amuses them a bit. Saxophone, in contrast, requires a lower tongue position, but it’s not as low as flute or oboe. The vowel sound in “word” is a good approximation of this position and what it feels like. Now, why are the tongue positions so different? Let’s go back to the position of the mouthpiece.
Due to the more acute angle of the clarinet mouthpiece, the tongue must be higher in the mouth than with the saxophone. For clarinet, if the tongue is positioned as in “dah” and not “dee”, the air loses focus. With the saxophone, if the tongue is positioned as in “dee” like the clarinet, then the sound will be pinched and constricted.
To close off this article, I would like to go through my own technique to forming a single-reed embouchure:
1. Take your entire lower lip and put it all the way into your mouth over your bottom teeth. Notice how there is too much lower lip in your mouth?
2. Slowly slide your lower lip out until only the pink part of your lower lip is covering your bottom teeth.
3. Keeping the pink part of your lower lip curled over your bottom teeth, move the corners of your mouth inward as if you were saying the word “vuum”.
Here, the top teeth will rest on the mouthpiece and the lips will support the reed/mouthpiece like a rubber band.
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