Category: Horn

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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…
MuseScore + IMSLP = OpenScore

A new project and Kickstarter recently announced by Edward Guo, founder of IMSLP and Thomas Bonte, CEO and co-founder of MuseScore, aims to take music into the digital age with the OpenScore project. The OpenScore Project The goal of the OpenScore Kickstarter project – launched on May 29 – is to transfer public domain classical…
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…
Not Even Horn Mouthpieces Are Safe From Internet Scams

If you’ve done much buying or selling online, then you probably don’t have to be told that there are hundreds of potential scams that you have to watch out for. It turns out that (unsurprisingly) even smaller websites dedicated to selling horn-related material are a target for some scam attempts. Despite my pretty obvious interest-bordering-on-obsession with…
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 One Note Count/Make Every Note Count

A few days ago Seth Godin posted this video of his TED Talk on his blog. It does such a great job of explaining a lot of about music, music teaching, and life in 3:35, that you should really just watch it: With all the flash you can find in music today, it’s worth remembering…
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…