Tag: horn practice

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The Theory Behind Stopping The Horn

In honor of releasing his newest CD, “No Limits”, Frank Lloyd has put together three different videos describing his playing and I thought his video about hand-stopping was quite interesting. Hand-stopping – How AND Why In the video, he describes a bit about the specific technique of hand-stopping, but he goes into quite a lot…
Why You Should Make Purposeful Mistakes In Practice

One of my biggest breakthroughs in my horn playing came around a decade ago when I was studying with a great horn player and teacher that I’ll simply call Mr. P. Mr. P helped me fix (or start to fix, at least) the numerous problems that I had in my playing with a variety of approaches.…
Tradition vs Progress in Horn Pedagogy and Playing

A new post over at HornMatters.com by John Ericson about the future of French horn playing raise some very interesting points about the negative side of “traditional pedagogy”, and raises quite a few good points for teachers (and students) who want to continue to move forward. Tradition Vs. Progress The basic premise of Mr. Ericson’s…
Minimum Viable Warm-up – Never Feel Unprepared for Playing!

Most brass players know the importance of a good warm-up. This is probably the single most important session of playing that you do each day since it gives you a chance to focus on the basics of playing. If you’re curious about some of the exercises that I use with my students, I have some…
In a Practice Slump? This 5-minute Video Can Help

If you’re like most people, at times you’ve struggled with making progress in the practice room. Sometimes it seems that you can slave away for hours, days, or weeks and make little to no progress (or even regress!). When you feel like your in a practice slump like this, I find that the most effective…
App Review: TonalEnergy

While it’s been awhile since I’ve done a tuner/metronome app review, I’ve been wanting to do a write-up of TonalEnergy for a while. It is an incredibly popular app for all levels of musicians, and it may be most commonly known as the app that has a smiley face when you play a note in…
Make Practice More Enjoyable in One Simple Step

If you’re like most music students, the activity of practice doesn’t thrill you. While it’s great fun to get better on your instrument and be able to perform more challenging repertoire at a higher level, the actual day-in-and-day-out practice regime isn’t exactly exciting or glamorous. One Solution From The World Of Fitness A relatively recent…
Fix Your Focus, Improve Your Playing

Focus, especially when playing a piece with many challenging sections, can often make the difference between a successful performance and a not-quite-successful performance. However according to a recent study on golf, where you should focus matters just as much as if you focus. The Golf Study According to this blog post on the Bulletproof Musician, a study…
New Metronome Practice Idea: No Instrument Necessary!

“Have you practiced this with a metronome?” Just about every music student has heard this from their teacher at least once. There’s a very good reason for this – being able to maintain a steady tempo is very important. If you can’t stay in time, you won’t play well with others! Protip: If your teacher…
Quick Feedback From Teachers May Slow Progress

As a horn teacher, I often say to my students that my ultimate goal is to put myself out of a job. That is, I want them to have a strong knowledge of their own strengths and weaknesses so they are able to practice and improve without my constant nagging…err..feedback. My Method… One of my favorite ways to try…