Category: Horn

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Increasing Productivity in Practice

For most students, practice recommendations are often given in minutes, since that is by far the easiest way to quantify practice (especially if you are teaching a large ensemble!), but one thing that is often overlooked by beginning and intermediate students is their practice productivity – making the minutes count, instead of counting the minutes!…
App Review: Tunable

The second app in my series of musical app reviews is Tunable, by Affinity Blue. This is a much more well-rounded app than ClearTune, featuring a tuner, metronome, and a recorder. Tunable is available on both , , and even the (for Amazon Fire tablets) for $2.99. Like before, my screenshots and my thoughts come…
App Review: ClearTune

Tuners are an incredibly important tool for all musicians, and it’s important that students have quick and easy access to a good tuner. Since there are so many tuner and metronome apps on the market (and I’m sick of students saying “I don’t know which one to get!”) I’m going to start reviewing them, to help…
Google & Bing make finding a metronome even easier!

It seems that once a week or so I have a student claiming that they couldn’t use a metronome for some reason – if you have a similar problem, there are two options that anyone with a web browser and an internet connection can use – completely free! If you go to Google, and just…
Horn-Timpani Interaction: Confirmed

The Acoustical Society of America recently helped out horn players the world over by publishing an article in 2014 in their Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) titled: The effect of nearby timpani strokes on horn playing. This study, performed by Jer-Ming Chen, John Smith, and Joe Wolfe from the School of Physics, The University of New South Wales…
Why You Should Use a Practice Log

Practice Log – The Introduction My first exposure to the concept of a practice log was in Phil Farkas’ Art of Horn Playing. In that book he shows a sample practice log featuring things like different warm-up exercises (lip trills, transposition, scales), etudes, and pieces of music – along with the length of time that…
App Review: Official Quality Tones App

Accuracy is probably the number one concern for most beginning to intermediate horn players. Until your ear, embouchure, and air become well developed, hitting the correct note – especially the first note – can seem like a crap shoot. That is precisely what the developer of the Quality Tones app wants to improve. What Are…
Can A Model Performance Improve Your Practice?

One questions that comes up a fair amount in lessons – especially lessons with younger students faced with new or difficult repertoire – is “can you play this so I can hear how it goes”? Most of the time, my answer is something along the lines of “yes, but everything you need to know is…
Transpostion – The Skill That Keeps on Paying

Like I mentioned over on my transposition page, lots of students are very resistant to the idea (and challenge) of learning to transpose. It’s not a particularly easy skill to learn – the basic idea is quite simple (see one note, play another note) but some keys are more difficult than others, and doing it…
Give Your Horn a Gift – Clean It!

If you have some extra time this holiday season (and let’s face it, who doesn’t?) try to find some time to give yourself the gift of a clean french horn! The Christmas break is a great time to do this since usually the few days after Christmas are pretty slow gig-wise (and, often, practice-wise), and…