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In short, in this series we have seen that there is no shortage of advice with respect to the critical topic of accuracy. To close this overview I would offer these additional thoughts, from the preface of my (former) publication Ultimate Horn Technique. While it is a publication related to technique development, a big, underlying topic of this book is in fact accuracy.
We all hate missing notes. Conductors tend to think you are missing notes because you are not focused enough, as though it were only a mental thing and if you had your “inner game” down you would not be missing notes. That is a part of it, but besides the inner game from my perspective as a horn teacher I see three primary reasons why horn players miss notes.
1. You can’t hear what note you are aiming for. If you can’t hear inside your head what you are trying to play, you can’t reliably hit it. Magic will not happen.
2. You’re not buzzing the correct pitch. Try buzzing anything you miss right away on the mouthpiece alone. If you can hear the pitch but are missing it you are missing it either because you are not buzzing it accurately or on pitch (again, magic will not happen) or because…
3. You lack the underlying technique. There is a lot to train and practice. This includes the range of things from chop strength to finger coordination to tonguing to poor equipment and fingering choices, etc.
All of these can be worked on, especially with the help of a competent horn teacher. There really are many things to coordinate from ear to air to tonguing to the buzz to sound.
One tactic I would suggest for working on accuracy is thinking in terms of strikes. On a high level you would ultimately like to be able to play a whole audition with less than three strikes. At the very least though every excerpt needs to have less than three strikes or you will be out for sure; the committee will stop listening.
What is a strike? For our purposes a strike is a chipped note. Because while a committee can argue about what is the best tone and style they can’t argue about you missing or not missing notes. A “small chip” I would call a ½ strike and a full scale chip is a strike.
(Rhythm is another very black and white issue, it must be perfect—listeners may not give you any strikes for rhythm, one strike and you are out).
Part of why the three strikes thing is real is conditioning. Growing up in the United States especially, virtually every child has played at least a little baseball. The concept is firmly entrenched; three strikes and you are out! Beyond three misses it does not really matter because too many notes were missed.
Of all the possible horn playing topics there are, accuracy is really the big topic we can’t avoid. Beyond simple repetition, we all have to search carefully for tactics that we can practically apply to our own practice and performance without turning ourselves into head cases, such as buzzing passages to improve accuracy. For those interested in a more in-depth study of accuracy development I highly suggest investigating this publication:
When we return to the Hornmasters the topic is another essential one, transposition.
Continue in Hornmasters Series
