- - Please visit: Legacy Horn Experience - -
In certain books on the horn you will find photos of a horn built on the same general system as this one below.
It is made to use a combination of crooks and couplers to be placed in every possible key, and is an ingenious system actually. This instrument I made using the same system with the help of natural horn maker Richard Seraphinoff when I was a Doctoral student.
The system uses three master crooks and four couplers. The crooks are in C alto, B-flat alto, and in G, and the couplers are set up as follows from smallest to largest
- Takes G down a whole step to F
- Takes G plus the first coupler down another whole step to E-flat
- Takes G down to E
- Takes G down to C
With various combinations of these couplers with the G crook you can get every key you need to get on the natural horn. D horn for example is the G crook plus the second and third couplers.
This example really plays quite well, I use it often. It was built using a bell and first branch from a Cousenon mellophone from around 1900, and the crook tapers and bore are typical of French natural horn of the period.
To the point of this article, so what key are you in when you set the horn up like the photo, with the B-flat crook and all the couplers stacked up? You are in no known key and the horn plays terribly. But it looks cool! That is why it is in the photos in the books like this. But it does not work that way in reality.
UPDATE: And of course check out my natural horn book, available in a second edition in affordable print and Kindle formats through Horn Notes Edition.
