Review: Hornlessons.org

A reader recently sent me a link to Hornlessons.org, a website that offers video instruction in the horn by Andrew M. McAfee, horn instructor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and former Principal Horn of the North Carolina Symphony (1992-2007). The website features 12 videos on horn technique, three of which may be viewed for free, and the site also states that he is “currently working on publishing his book” which will have the title “Horn Embouchure Technique.”

With the video series he is trying to appeal to horn students and players of all levels and also band directors. The introductory comments below, directed toward university level players, sets the tone for the site pretty well.

You decided to go into music and you want to be a professional horn player. You are now eagerly seeking out the best information to give you the edge and get you ahead. You will soon figure out on the audition circuit that you may never know why you didn’t advance or get chosen for the job. There are many reasons that have to do with how you played the excerpts and those can be fixed fairly quickly. One thing that underlies basic sound production and how solid the lower range is or how the upper range floats out on Shostakovich 5, is the embouchure.

If you are pressing in too much to the top lip, you are going to have a big break in the tone around the F and G below middle C. Learning to play with the bottom lip firm and the mouthpiece angled down so the top lip can buzz freely is essential to having an open low range. Otherwise, you will have a hard and forced sound.

There are some instant embouchure fixes to some common problems if your embouchure is already 2/3rd upper 1/3 lower, your chin is flexed and your mouthpiece is set below the bottom lip pink muscle line.

If not, you are going to have to think hard whether you have the conviction to make it through a major embouchure change and still stay in the game, competition wise.

Oh, and call your horn instructor that ’set you up’ and give them this website so they can better prepare their next student (s) for a career in horn performance.

The videos, accessed from this page, expand on this basic content, which gets right at both the strengths and weaknesses of this video series. A couple things I like are first that he has done something different to produce this series and that he lays down clearly his approach. That he tells the viewer clearly what he thinks is both a plus and a weakness. The clarity is a big plus in a way, but it is a somewhat individualistic approach that seems to be aimed at players physically set up like him.

His first point of the first free video is a perfect example. It is on the topic of the mouthpiece being “set below the bottom lip pink muscle line” of the lower lip mentioned in the quotation above. He is a strong believer in this principle. When you watch the video you can see clearly that McAfee has thin lips. For someone with thin lips the setup he describes will work great. I on the other hand have somewhat heavy lips and in particular a fairly heavy lower lip. I absolutely cannot play horn with the placement he describes; for me the mouthpiece must be set into the lower lip on the red only. My lips are much too fleshy to use the approach he advocates. My personal approach and his approach are both valid and really the choice depends on how the playing is going and on individual physiology.

On the other hand, I like elements of these nicely produced videos a lot. His approach to tonguing in the third video involves (although he never uses this wording) tonguing between the lips at all times. He gets well away from the Farkas description of tonguing with the tongue down and forward and this can open things up for some players for sure as, again, physiologies vary and Farkas very well may have had a different mouth physiology than that of McAfee. But with that said I see one possible negative of his tonguing method as presented, it is a very step-by-step approach that in reality needs to happen all at once in one motion or it can lead directly to a stutter attack condition which must be avoided.

I do find what is presented on the site to be interesting overall. I did not study with any of the same teachers that Mr. McAfee studied with so it is a window onto a different horn pedagogy suited well to players with similar physical characteristics to the author.