Greetings, and apologies in advance. I have been searching, searching, and more searching of back threads for information on all aspects of Euphonium playing. There is an amazing amount of it here. I must say, however, as it concerns embouchure placement, I haven't so far seen any. As a long time (relatively) Horn player, we obsess about things embouchure. The mouthpiece MUST be placed 2/3 upper lip/1/3 lower lip or else! As I understand it, all other brass use the opposite or perhaps 50/50 and so you can have 'upstream players' and 'downstream players'. I personally CANNOT play Horn with the classic embouchure and I self adopted a 2/3 lower lip to 1/3 upper lip placement to fairly good effect. I covered a full 4 octaves and to get to pedals (and double pedals) shifted to a more conventional looking embouchure. This 'shift' is/was obviously a huge technical fault. I know of one other successful professional Hornist using this approach and attempted to correspond with him but he never responded to my initial e-mail. I don't know if he never got it (I had to use his academic affiliation as an intermediary) or he just wasn't interested because of workload or otherwise.
Water under the bridge. I spent some time last year with a rented Trombone and a 6.5AL mouthpiece and found myself immediately adopting my usual lower lip dominant embouchure. In the highest octave I was right at the top of the mouthpiece. When I look at players like Steven Mead and Dave Werden, it 'looks' from the outside like the top of the mouthpiece is right under the septum's of their noses. This might indicate an upper lip bias in their embouchure's? Norlan Bewley on his Low Brass site recognizes three placements and doesn't appear to judge any of them as better than any other. What about present company? Is there a consensus?
I have a chance, perhaps, with Euphonium to start with sound fundamentals. If I know what they are. When I started Horn, the Internet was just transitioning from a text based Lynx browser infrastructure to the kind of World Wide Web we have today. I couldn't then and still cannot now justify the cost of lessons beyond, perhaps, a few early introductions. I guess what I am trying to find out is: do Euphonium players judge results by what feels right or by understanding the rules that have been established for their instrument in teaching materials? I understand the concept of 'warm air' and I do notice that much more is written about the kind of airstream a player should use to get a characteristic tone, but little or nothing is written about how the lips should be working in the mouthpiece. Any thoughts gratefully appreciated.