Home Practice

Practice

Practicing the French horn.

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...

Wellness, practice, and how to actually improve

This semester our guest for our horn day was Richard Seraphinoff. One focus was on injury and wellness, and that is a...

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...

Exercise PDF: Slurpies

Smoothing out the bumps. Practicing in extremes - going "outside of the lines" - can help to sharpen up a problem area so that it...

Exercise: Pitch Benders

Blurring the lines. As children we are told to "stay between the lines" - whether it is playing with crayons in coloring books or when...

Before Farkas: The Dufrasne (Mercier) Routine, Part II

As I noted in Part I, a new publication of the Dufrasne Routine was recently put out in The Complete Hornist series. In the acknowledgements editor...

On the Singer “Heavy Routine”

This week in the pedagogy class we focused on warm-up routines. One old standard discussed was the “Heavy Routine” found in Embouchure Building for...

Using a Stop Mute for Mouthpiece Practice

Ever since reading about using a brass stopping mute for mouthpiece practice on Julia Rose's site, I have wanted to try it out. I...

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...

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...