Tag: horn playing
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Ear Training – Work Your Ears!
Ear training, as painful as it was during undergraduate theory, was one of my most useful classes, and is an essential skill for a musician on any instrument. For players of brass instruments (especially horn) it is especially important, since one fingering can play about a dozen notes! Knowing how to play the horn technically is…
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Preparing for All-State – Fundamentals
If you’re a high school horn player in Kentucky, by now you’ve probably seen the All-State audition music for this year. Although it’s certainly challenging, make sure you spend at least a third to half of your practice time on developing good fundamentals with basic exercises! There are a couple of good reasons for this:…
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How Long Should I Practice?
It’s likely one of the most common question asked by both students and their parents – how much time should they be practicing? While I was in high school, I read Phil Farkas’ Art of French Horn Playing, and in it, he advocates for around 3 hours of practice per day. As an undergraduate, I tried…
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Horn Playing From the Inside
Sarah Willis, the first female brass player in the Berlin Philharmonic, an incredible low horn player, and the host of several music- and horn-related TV and internet shows, has done an incredible experiment on what goes on inside the mouth while playing horn by playing a specially-made horn inside an MRI machine!
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Know your Right (Hand Position)
There are many reasons why I wish I could observe students’ practice habits at home, but one of the biggest reasons is probably one that they think little to nothing about – their right hand position. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen students playing (either in lessons, in rehearsals, or in performances)…
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The Importance of Articulation
For many horn players (me included) French horn tonguing was a mystery. One of my biggest personal struggles in learning to play the horn and one that I notice a lot in students and younger players is a lack of consistent and strong tonguing or articulation. Since the tongue stroke sets up essentially everything else (timing,…