Do you fight your horn to play slurs?
One topic I have mentioned a few times here in Horn Matters is that of easy music in relation to testing horns and mouthpieces. But it is a topic mostly buried in other, longer articles, deserving of a dedicated article.
The ability to play easy music easily and accurately is really critical for success on the horn. And the problem can be your equipment, not you.
Easy music?
It’s counterintuitive really. What we tend to do is play hard music when testing horns and mouthpieces. What we should do is play easy music.
Why? Because easy music must feel easy! If you are fighting your horn at all to play easy music in an easy register, something in your equipment setup is not optimal.
In recent testing of horns I’ve come back to this exercise below. It’s actually part of a trumpet part of a band warmup publication, random music found in some music I was given at some point. Below is about the first 1/3 of it, plenty of music for our purposes.
You can tell a lot, to be honest, with just the first two bars. I use this music often at home as part of my warmup.
Use it to test horns or mouthpieces or both
It’s a good idea to set some limits as to what you are testing any given time. Most typically, I use this exercise to test mouthpieces, as you will easily and quickly feel and hear real differences between them. Pay attention especially to the space between the notes.
In recent practice, instead of mouthpieces, I’ve been testing various historic-style single F horns and also double horns.
As to the single horns first, those first two bars are surprisingly difficult on many of my single horns (I’ve been actively testing 5-6 different horns lately). The slurs often have big “clicks” with the valve changes on my rotary valve horns.
The one single horn that does not have any click at all is the Vienna horn I have on a long term loan. It’s so smooth on this exercise — it’s almost freaky. No wonder there are so many enthusiasts of the Vienna horn out there (more on the Vienna horn in this article).
Turning to double horns, I’ve been working on a project (nearly done) where I’ve rebuilt a maybe late 1970s brass Mirafone Kruspe double horn with a smaller bore bell (from an older Mirafone single), to more closely match my real Kruspe double (more on Kruspe here).
I’ve been testing it against my Paxman 25A, my Patterson Geyer, and my Pan-American Schmidt. Four very different wraps. The result is that none are bad for sure, but the slurs on each one are different, with the clicks happening at different places and to different degrees. Which would be expected for horns with different wraps.
Overall, the Mirafone Kruspe I’ve been working on, it probably has the best slurs. The exercise has a very comfortable, easy feel on this horn. And the medium bell gets it into the soundscape we would expect of a Geyer, it does not at all have the sound profile of an 8D.
It gets me back to a topic from a few years ago, can the Kruspe style horn make a comeback? I still say maybe, if high quality instruments were made with a medium bell — although there seems to be no significant market, at present, for such a horn.
