- - Please visit: Legacy Horn Experience - -
You love the horn. You want to ramp it up to a new level. Besides accuracy and general technique there are four key things that the great horn players all have that you need to focus in on developing to the maximum as you practice.
Strength and endurance. So how do we develop that? The resource I keep coming back to is Caruso and the whole concept of musical calisthenics. Back in 2008 I posted more on these classic exercises and how to use them on the horn, see this article for more.
A great tone. For sure! A great tone is a combination of a lot of different elements all hitting at the same time, but one I would point to specifically is pitch placement and pitch bending to find that great pitch placement. The Brass Gym has a great exercise for this among others, and also I have a longer article on the topic of pitch placement and bends over in Horn Articles Online. This article I don’t think gets read much these days, but actually it has some great content; it is a version of an article that was published in The Horn Call 33, no. 3 (May, 2003).
High notes and range in general. Yes again, that is an obvious key thing. Besides Caruso (strength is a part of being able to play high notes) in my personal practice lately I keep coming back to some of the concepts in The Balanced Embouchure. This article can serve as a brief intro to some of the basic concepts, and for sure there are things derived from this approach that will be of help to some players. In my own practice lately I have a version of a Caruso routine that I like (I try to hit it every day) and I sprinkle a bit of BE and Brass Gym in for variety and to work on the goal of an even better high range.
And for sure the low range is extremely important to develop as well — I have a book of low horn materials published at Horn Notes Edition)
Finally, a great sense of music and musical lines is a major key element. Part of how this is developed is from listening to and learning over time great music in general and great horn music specifically. CD sales are dropping like a rock but back a few years ago I posted a list of suggested, must own horn CDs (direct link here). There are for sure a group of works that horn players need to listen to repeatedly; this is part of how we learn how to sound like horn players (another list of essential solos to know is here). You have to have the concept of what you want to sound like firmly in your head or everything will just sound like Kopprasch. And don’t just work on orchestral excerpts, listen to the works they are from and really get to know them, it will pay off!
On all of these subjects above there are other related articles in Horn Matters. Almost too many articles, in a way…. The related articles feature generated at the end of each article is of some help, but it would be nice to have even more guidance. In relation to that, Bruce and I are working on some ideas to formalize some courses of study within the Horn Matters website. Be watching for more as our plans develop.
To close too I would add that if you look at the big picture of even great horn players very few are truly great in all four of the areas mentioned above. Everyone has individual strengths and weaknesses. But for sure all strong players work all of these areas up to a pretty high level, and you have to aim to be one of those.
