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Continuing with this series on the letter F and accuracy on the horn, the second elephant in the room is first note accuracy.
I don’t want with this statement to give readers a complex, but, unfortunately, perhaps the most critical type of accuracy is first note accuracy. This type of note can potentially be missed for quite a variety of reasons, but very often it has to do with the mechanics of your attack.
A warmup routine for first note accuracy
At this point it is worth digressing to a story. Close to 20 years ago now we had a new president at ASU and he wanted to bring in experts, school wide. In music a decision was made to have Gunther Schuller in. So, while he had not played horn since 1962 (!!), he gave I believe three horn master classes as part of his residency.
I have long found his book Horn Technique an interesting book, very unlike the Farkas book in a good way, very worth checking out to this day. The Farkas book, of course, has a long, “captain warmup” type warmup routine. Schuller, on the other hand, on page 35, presented exactly and only this routine:
When he was here I asked him was this really his warmup? And his answer was yes it was! When he was playing Principal Horn in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra that was exactly the routine. I forget if he said 20 or 30 minutes of this exercise, but just this exercise. The text of his book (quoted here) would indicate or at least imply that he did a shorter version before later services of the day and a longer one before the first.
Stepping back then, you can actually see the genius of this routine. If you were playing Principal Horn at the Met, what do you not want to do? Miss first notes! The Schuller exercise/routine reinforces an exact set of motions used to consistently start notes, in one motion.
Another thing I always mention to students in our pedagogy class is to actually try the routine as presented. Because it is so different than how basically anyone warms up and it really does work, you will feel warmed up at the end. Thus, it is an excellent routine to work on first note accuracy.
Just say “no” to hesitation attacks, and a tale of two trumpet auditions
Here is something I seem to have not written about very directly in Horn Matters, a huge playing issue that I would call a hesitation attack. Schuller was very concerned with this topic, and on page 25 of Horn Technique gives this illustration, which also exactly illustrates the way to approach his warmup exercise.
Which brings me to a story. I used to hear ASU trumpet auditions with our prior trumpet professor (we do them separately now). One very memorable day not one but two MM trumpet auditions, back to back, the applicants both had a serious hesitation attack issue. What it looks and sounds like is that instead of breathing, setting, and playing in one continuous motion the process gets stuck at a point where, seemingly, the players are intentionally bottling up air behind their tongue.
How anyone thinks this is a good way to play a brass instrument I just don’t understand. It is not. What you need to do is breathe, set, and play in one continuous motion with no hint of a hitch of any type.
A related point — attack the note, do not think of it as a release (more here). This is the right mindset. To “release” a note is to invite hesitation attack issues.
The brass guru Carmine Caruso was also not a fan of this type of attack, thinking specifically of the rules presented at the beginning of his text, for the “six notes” exercise — more on Caruso studies generally may be found here. Another author that addressed the topic was Christopher Leuba in The Rules of the Game. He calls it a stutter or a stall; a few of his thoughts on the topic may be found here.
First note accuracy is fundamental
We play first notes all the time! They need to be consistent, something that you may also find is helped by careful work on the fundamentals of horn playing, our next topic.
This is an installment of a series on accuracy, drawn from notes developed for a book on the same topic. The series starts here.
Continue in the Accuracy series
