Home Practice

Practice

Practicing the French horn.

Copyright week, part I: Never take Xerox music into a lesson

“Creative Enterprise” is a major buzz phrase in the musical world today, and relates generally to the idea that you want to actually make...

Warming-up before Farkas: Basic Technical Studies by Harold Meek

Recently I had a realization that so far as I can tell I don’t recall seeing a warm-up routine described in any horn publication...

Rethinking Your Warm-Up for Better Results

At an extreme, warm-up routines come in two flavors: etched in granite, or free-form. This past weekend at Arizona State we hosted Prof. Jeffrey Agrell...

Warm-Up with Drone > Tuner

Which is better, warming up with drone pitches from a pitch generator or watching a tuner? If you have the time and location to...

Testing the Soft Playing

Briefly following up on my recent article on testing a new or used French horn, a topic that has come up several times since...

On the dangers of practicing too much

Sometimes too much is - well duh! - too much Looking back at my student years, I think that I might have been an over-practicer. I was...

A key to horn success: “Hook up” your Low Range

Every year after ensemble placement auditions at ASU thoughts will come to mind. I was really happy overall with the quality and results of...

Technique builder: Take the Clarke 120 Challenge

Back last year I posted a technique packet PDF, and among the exercises it contains a version of the Clarke second study, a Classic...

Ouch! My Finger Hurts (and I Don’t Know Why!?)

About five days ago the index finger on my left hand became extremely irritated. Over the course of a few days this irritation swelled to...

From the Mailbag: Practice Space

Another recent question that came in had to do with the acoustics of the ideal practice space. More specifically, what acoustics I would prefer...