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The question of water keys and horns

John Ericson
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Here is a question you know you have wondered at some point: why are some horns constructed without water keys?

It is a puzzle for a lot of people, as literally the cheapest versions of every other brass instrument have water keys. But here we are in horn. Some pretty expensive models, with screw bells and everything, don’t have water keys.

Why? Isn’t this the 21st century? What happened?

Having a water key is something that truth be known probably has sold a bunch of Holton horns over the years, when parents compared them to Conn models. No water key on the Conn! Must not be as good; horn with water key must be better!

But the question remains, why no water key? One possible angle is that horn buyers are complacent or resistant to change. Over years, we have just accepted that while other brass instruments have often multiple water keys, on horn we don’t have them. We make do without them. Tradition or something.

But the real answer probably lies with some of the people that assisted with certain horn designs when they were created. In short, the same people (or type of people) that were really reluctant to have a screw bell on a horn (“it will ruin it!”) are the same folks that did not want a water key either. Theory being it might ruin something, a note in the high range, something.

Also, those makers would be correct to say at this point that people are in fact buying every one of those horns without water keys that they make. Why change anything? Ignoring the fact that of course lots of buyers have water keys added after purchase to rectify the omission.

How do horn players actually feel? I did a quick Twitter survey, not scientific of course but still a cross section of our horn world. In short, 90% of horn players want water keys! My only surprise was that the result was not 100% in favor of water keys.

To close, horn makers, it is the 21st century, give us our water keys please. Looking at you Conn and Hoyer in particular … you are cheating horn players of something basic that you offer on every other type of brass instrument you sell.

Introducing the Horn Notes Podcast

John Ericson
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Those following Horn Matters for a few years know that there are a group of videos on YouTube related to posts in Horn Matters. The original idea was to develop a series of videos — the channel is HornmattersTV — but most of what has actually been posted there are episodes of the Horn Notes Video Podcast. Some have live video included, but mostly they are audio with still pictures related to the topic at hand. All 24 episodes may be found here:

The series has accumulated some views, but not quite what was hoped. Part of the problem was my low interest in video editing, so visually they are not as exciting as they should be. But also, they were not available to their natural market. Podcast fans are looking for actual podcasts that you can download from iTunes and listen to as audio, not videos.

Realizing that, I also saw that many of the video episodes would be suited to present again as straight podcasts. Those are now being converted to podcast episodes which you can download and listen to basically any way you wish to access podcasts. The main podcast page is located here:

As of now the first six of the podcast episodes are up and are also available on iTunes, etc. The rest of the existing video podcasts will roll out over the coming months at a rate of about four a month, with the plan being to add an occasional new podcast as well as part of the mix.

The initial result of the change is it appears there will be many more downloads overall. If that trend holds up be watching for more new episodes!

Check them out, they are generally under 15 minutes long and cover a wide variety of topics, perfect for listening to when running, driving, working, etc.

On the Dreaded C on the Third Space, the Best Note on your Horn?

John Ericson
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They have all been off the site for a while, but in the early years of Horn Matters there were a series of articles by a certain “Professor Corno” which addressed some issues of horn playing and teaching in humorous and pointed ways.** One article in particular was on the topic of the dreaded C on the third space.

The gist of the article was this: C on the third space, fingered T-0, should be a note you have absolute faith in that it will be in tune.

Certainly, you can find very reputable players that firmly believe that 3rd space C should be looked at as being the most in-tune note on the horn. Their idea would be in fact to tune the horn to that note; start the process of adjustment of all the other slides on your horn with the idea that note is correct, adjusting everything to agree with that note. Embrace it!

On the other hand, you can also certainly find very reputable players who note that the harmonic involved is naturally sharp. The idea being that C is the sixth partial of the overtone series when played on the Bb horn, and therefore tends to be slightly sharp. If the note truly is a sharp overtone for you depends on the horn you have (how the maker handled the tapers) and your mouthpiece. Theoretically the C might be slightly sharp, but in reality it might actually be completely in tune due to the skill of the maker.

From the above I think you can see I am in the camp of people who think that note should be thought of as your best note, one you are never afraid of. You really should not be afraid of any note, but if you are afraid of one, be sure it is not third space C! If you are in fear it will be sharp, give the system I describe a try, tune the horn to that note. You will likely need to do less adjusting around your horn if all the notes you normally finger T-0 are ones you don’t fear due to an imagined intonation tendency.

But what if you really can’t lower that note? Well, actually you can, even if your horn does not have a separate Bb horn tuning slide. See this article for more.

**At least that was the idea. The series was cut in 2014 as part of a content review, the Professor was ready to move on. But there were some good topics cut, which will be returned to in a few upcoming articles.

More on The Art of (Slow) Practice

John Ericson
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Back nearly ten years ago Bruce Hembd posted here a brief series (in two parts) on The Art of Practice:

I was reminded of them as I recently saw a link to an article with data from a recent study related to the topic of slow practice. Over at Bulletproof Musician the article is:

Feel free to read it all, but what particularly caught my eye was the premise of the article and also a study cited within the article.

As to the premise, doesn’t everyone practice things slowly and work them up to tempo over the course of practice? Our natural assumption (especially as teachers) is that all would practice like we do, but actually it is not, some of you (and your students) practice in a very inefficient manner. What you do is just sort of slam away at the music until it is better, more or less at full tempo.

There is a better way, demonstrated in a study using school children and beanbags. Basically, they were first all tested for throwing accuracy, and then split into two groups for practice. From the article,

Over the course of the next few weeks, the students received a weekly 15-minute practice session, where they practiced throwing beanbags at a square target taped on the wall, again from 5 meters away.
One group of students (the error-reduced or “imperfect practice” group) threw towards a large, easy target area in week one (2.4m x 2.4m), a medium-sized target in week two (1.1m x 1.1m), and a small target in week three (.45m x .45m).
Another group of students (the error-strewn or “perfect practice” group) went in the reverse order, throwing at the small difficult target in week one, the medium target in week two, and the large target in week three.
And then a week later, they were tested on their throwing accuracy and form once again, just like they were at the beginning of the study.

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The first group practiced in a manner analogous to practicing slowly and speeding up the tempo, and the second group practiced in a more random manner. The results?

In terms of accuracy, the error-reduced group (i.e. where they progressed from easy to more challenging standards over the course of training) made significant strides in accuracy from the beginning of training to the end. On the contrary, there wasn’t a significant improvement in performance for the error-strewn (i.e. perfect practice) group.

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So, there you have it in black and white: slow practice works! If you are not making use of this technique, you need to try it ASAP, and if you teach it might be worth being sure your students understand this essential principle of The Art of Practice.

From the Mailbag: Online Materials for High School hornists

John Ericson
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One question that periodically comes (in various forms) asks about online materials that would be of use to high school hornists.

Certainly, the number one “material” overall is Horn Matters itself. It is more comprehensive and up-to-date than any other horn publication you can name, covering for example all the topics in the Farkas book and more! (And, teachers, your students do actually recognize how dated the Farkas book is, it really is time to rely on more recent sources.)

Within Horn Matters there are a number of specific materials and areas to point student hornists toward.

One topic of much interest is the “where to study” horn question. This article gives a good rundown of the topic.

One type of material that is of interest are technical materials. You could certainly build a very effective warm-up from the technical studies in our downloads page. With an important tip for students being this: there is no one magic, secret warm-up that will get you there; no one “path” or approach to practice that will take your technique forward. There are many roads to be explored, and in particular it is to your advantage to “cross train” using several different styles of warm-up. If I had to pick one to purchase, I am still partial to The Brass Gym for horn.

Etudes are wonderful for working on technique. This article on materials I used as a student can get you going in the right direction, and if you really don’t have any materials, there are some good choices for practice in our free PDF download page, such as the Franz 29 etudes.

For those aspiring to a higher level of study, orchestral excerpts are important. This article gets at the question of which ones to study.

Transposition is often required! Check out our transposition chart.

And you will need an excerpt book! We have you covered with all the standard excerpts that are legal to put online for free with our Horn Matters PDF excerpt E-book.

You will also need to work on some solos. We have horn parts to many of the standards in our PDF page. As to which ones to study, the key thing would be, after noting it is not so much what you play as how you play it, college professors do ask certain solos for a reason, they are good choices. Our current list here at Arizona State for undergraduate admissions is:

Two contrasting movements from works that are comparable in difficulty to the following representative samples: Hindemith – Sonata; Mozart – Concerto No. 2, 3, or 4; F. Strauss – Nocturno; R. Strauss – Concerto No. 1

And of course, you need a good horn and mouthpiece; generic horns and mouthpieces produce a generic tone and limit your results. Much information may be found in Horn Matters, largely in the categories devoted to horns and to mouthpieces (see the “Browse by Topic” feature for even more categories).

If you want online resources outside of Horn Matters, one obvious resource is the website of the International Horn Society, specifically The HornZone. While not nearly as organized as Horn Matters (there are no categories of content, for example), there is some very interesting content worth spending some time with too. Not to mention there are a huge variety of things to be found on YouTube and Facebook with just a bit of searching.

Finally, do buy some music! Not everything you would want to study is free and in the public domain. Music publishers are there to serve you and are not really making that much money, support them as much as you can.

Brief Review: An Inexpensive Natural Horn

John Ericson
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With a small amount of funds available, I had an idea how to use them for something that would help the studio. What I learned from a source was that the body of the natural horn sold by Berkeley Wind Instrument, made in China, was nicely done, but that the crooks might not be so good. Which could be OK for my students at Arizona State, as I will explain shortly.

The horn arrived over the summer and I have had some time to work with it. The bell/body is really nicely done and the bell appropriate sized for natural horn (smaller throat than a modern bell). The inside of the bell is painted black (I joke with people for a darker tone) and nicely decorated.

The crooks that came with it look pretty but don’t play well. They have sort of an odd design with a tuning bit piece at the receiver. Ours came with 5 crooks; I would rate the G and A crooks as bad and everything lower the key of G is terrible.

However, we at ASU have the set of five crooks and a ½ step coupler associated with a vintage Hawkes piston horn (over 100 years old! More info here), and with those crooks the horn plays quite well! The receiver design used on the Berkeley horn is larger than that used on the Hawkes, so to use the crooks we have to wrap the end of the crook in paper or thin cardboard. When you get them on the horn though, the horn is vastly better and plays quite nicely. Besides fit, the other major issue with using the Hawkes crooks is that the horn is ½ step sharp! So for example Hawkes Eb crook plays in E on the Chinese horn body. It is not really a problem in the big picture, just a slight math problem, and we do have that ½ step coupler as well.

Special mention should be made of the case. The design is really nice, it has pockets to hold five crooks and the coupler, for our purposes at ASU it is a great case. However, within two weeks of arriving the hinges failed. They seem very small and are not attached to anything firm. I plan to rework the attachment point and probably also affix more robust hinges.

In short I give the horn body itself an A+ at the price, it works great! The case I would give a C to, the design is good but has an execution problem. As to the crooks, those are now all up on the wall in the horn studio. Shiny and decorative! But not very good crooks for actual horn playing.

This horn, because we have the Hawkes crooks, perfectly fills a niche for us. I am looking forward to some natural horn quartets this year, as now ASU owns two natural horns and I have two more we can use.

5 Keys to Horn Success

John Ericson
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It is human nature to be curious, what are the keys for success for famous people? The following are five keys to success I have observed or experienced toward playing the French horn on a high level.

Key to Success: Hearing and playing

This is a huge key to success. All great horn players certainly have great ears and high audiation skills. Audiation, according to the Wikipedia, is “a term [Edwin] Gordon coined in 1975 to refer to comprehension and internal realization of music, or the sensation of an individual hearing or feeling sound when it is not physically present.” But the concept is not a new one, as in this quote from Arnold Jacobs: “All brass players should develop the ability to hear music in their heads before playing. The lips act as vocal chords for brass instruments, but (through our thoughts) we have to furnish the message for them.” The bottom line: ideally you should be able to hear music in your head so clearly that it is exactly like listening to a recording – all the parts, on pitch. Building your audiation to this level will help your horn playing more than almost anything else you might try to do, as you know clearly what notes you are aiming for and associate the feeling of producing all aspects of that pitch with the sounds in your head.

Key to Success: Summer study

Another key thing for me certainly was summer studies. I feel sure I started college well behind the level of most of my peers, but each summer I made a full semester of progress. Serious horn lessons will help you make that progress, but even more effective for progress are the rich learning experiences of study at a summer festival.

Key to Success: Learning more than Kopprasch

In my notes for Horn Matters articles I have had this quote for some years, from a now deceased friend. In it she simply said “I remember trying to get ready for auditions and [insert famous teacher name] would just want me to play Kopprasch.” You do need to work out technique, but you also have to work on more than Kopprasch. Kopprasch alone really won’t get you there.

Key to Success: Learn to play low horn well

I had a decent low range by the middle of my grad studies, but when you get down to it the two years I was Fourth Horn in Evansville (as a Doctoral student) were a key to the rest of my performing career. I really worked out my break on the job. You need some serious time playing concerts on low horn to get past barriers in your technique; I feel sure it is a part of how I went on to win Third Horn in Nashville. This is why I also emphasize low study in my teaching. There is no one secret to playing low, but there is a process of working it out that involves not only low practice but actual performing. If you are looking for some specific tips and a practical resource for study, check out my “low horn boot camp,” now [2018] available in an expanded second edition.

Key to Success: Stop worrying about mouthpiece pressure

The final key on this brief list certainly might sound wrong, but I am really convinced with now over 25 years of teaching that people worry about this way too much. Just play horn, and make it sound good. There really is a “just right” to be found between too much and too little pressure, and the best players use more pressure than you think they do. More on the topic here.

More on “clicks” — and the best horns

John Ericson
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Last year a topic touched upon in an article was that of “clicks” and valve changes. In that time frame, I started taking some really extensive notes on the topic — and the notes, honestly, got out of control, so much so that there is no way to develop a full article. But it remains an important topic to consider as you think about what elements make for a great horn.

One thing I have observed is every horn with rotary valves seems to have clicks of some sort on at least a couple note connections, if you really search for them. The cause of the clicks is what I learned from a maker are acoustical “transients” that may occur at the beginning of a note. Makers work to manage these through brace placement, etc., but they are also impacted by mouthpiece choice too. These transients will occur at different places on horns of different designs.

Horn making, in short, really is a black art. Below are some bullet points on the topic from my notes, hopefully of help as you consider what exactly makes a great horn.

  • One horn I loved [Knopf wrap] except for the connection between F-G on the bottom space. Huge click there, if fingered on the F horn! But using Bb horn fingerings there was no click at all.
  • But that big click was not as noticeable with different mouthpieces.
  • Some clicks reflect slight synchronization issues of the fingers, usually thumb and third valve not moving at the same time. (As in going from 2 to T23, F# to G# for example)
  • Another horn felt hopelessly clicky on any mouthpiece I tried and I have a lot. But then I found one that made it play beautifully! Clicks? Almost totally gone. It was amazingly striking. Horn went from almost unusable to very usable.
  • Meanwhile, another horn I liked was terrible on that same mouthpiece, very clicky.
  • Had a very interesting time comparing Knopf and Geyer wrap models made by the same maker. They had used the same tapers and the same valve maker on both horns but the difference in sound and playing quality feel was fairly substantial. And entirely attributable to the overall wrap and brace placements, including the soldered longer joints in different spots
  • “Connections” seems to be the term that works best with my students. They can feel when they are better or worse, if there is something that breaks the connection they can feel it relatively. Notes that are connected well are the opposite of notes that have distinct clicks between them.
  • I see people audition on strange, poor choice mouthpieces all the time. Jupiter mouthpieces, Holton, Bach even. Their teachers have really let them down. I can always pull out a mouthpiece that feels vastly better for them to try.
  • Mouthpiece receiver fit can make a huge difference in terms of clicks too.
  • Looking at horns from this angle, the topic of note connections has changed some of my general thinking on horns for sure. Not only should the horn with better connections sound better but you should be more accurate on it as well.

BONUS: Editing this article I was intrigued by the note that led to the bullet “Another horn felt hopelessly clicky on any mouthpiece I tried and I have a lot. But then I found one that made it play beautifully! Clicks? Almost totally gone. It was amazingly striking. Horn went from almost unusable to very usable.” It was a mouthpiece I used in the past — for quite a few years, actually — but I knew when tried most recently with the new horn I felt that the intonation was really goofy, going very flat in the high range to be specific. But my enthusiasm in those notes intrigued me, so I got it out again. High range very flat — initially! But actually I got used to it in maybe ten minutes, intonation returned to normal and things feel like home. A week later it still feels nice, like the old friend it is, and I like the extra smoothness it gives. So I will keep experimenting, and the point to make to any reader that has made it this far into this topic is that some mouthpieces may feel goofy initially but might just be the solution if you give them a chance.

Brief review: Horn Technique by Jeffrey Agrell

John Ericson
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Those familiar with older horn publications will recall a classic 1962 book by Gunther Schuller titled Horn Technique. It is so compact that you can practically put it in your pocket, quirky in ways, but full of interesting information, and a good book to examine in comparison to the Farkas book.

Fast forward to today, we have another book of the same title, but different in practically every way. And those that have already seen Horn Technique by Jeffrey Agrell of the University of Iowa will also know that the idea of doing a brief review of such a massive volume is almost a humorous idea. But here goes!

The title Horn Technique is apt as the Agrell book, much more so than the Schuller, is fundamentally a book about actually building technique on the horn.

One thing I will say right away that I LOVE is the font size. As I get older I really appreciate books printed so that they are easily readable, as the temptation is for the publisher to cram more text on less pages. The result is, however, that this is almost certainly the longest horn publication since the 500+ page Dauprat  Méthode de Cor alto et Cor basse of 1824 (in three volumes — more info here). The table of contents alone is more than eight pages long, there are 48 chapters divided into ten parts, the entire publication is well over 450 pages!

Having helped build very large websites I realize fully that organization is always a challenge with large projects. In this case, the book is full of interesting content that flows logically, but, still, purchasers may find things a little intimidating. An index would have been helpful. I mention all this as organization might have benefited by following the lead of Dauprat, breaking the content down into perhaps two or three distinct volumes.

Setting all that aside, the big positive is this book really is fresh and new. One complaint I have had about many horn publications is that authors seem almost afraid to say something different than Farkas. Agrell on the other hand really goes for it, there is much here that will be very new to readers. Bravo!

Horn Technique by Jeffrey Agrell is an impressive publication, one with much to offer. Printed and bound well and cleanly edited, it is as advertised truly “a new approach to an old instrument.” Serious students of the horn should check out this book — a huge bargain selling for only $19.99 as a print version and $9.99 for Kindle.

Deeper insights 5: Quitting?

John Ericson
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As a final point in this series of deeper insights related to raising a handicapped child it would be this: giving up is not an option.

Saying that, I know there are really difficult situations worse than ours. Sometimes there are no good options for parents and I don’t mean to judge. In our case, we would like James to live more independently but we are a number of steps from there. If we were to try to place him in a group home right now his behavior issues would be off the charts, there would be no good outcome. He has to buy into the idea, and there are steps toward it that we have to achieve.

Focus on what you can do

We might wish we could be empty nesters now, I would love to be playing more concerts (I feel I am playing as well as I ever have!), but fact is we have to keep working with James with the goal of tracking toward a good outcome. We would prefer that day be sooner rather than later. But in the mean time I choose to focus on what I can do instead of what I can’t do. I have been able to work on this website, to write and publish some interesting publications, make CDs, etc.

Who knows how different things would have been if James were “normal?” Of course, he might have had the same autism issues even without the extra chromosome. So much is out of our hands, all we can do is just do our best and keep moving forward. Staying optimistic.

Cooking omelettes

In my twitter bio I have presently the following:

Horn professor @ASU | Performer & author, enthusiastic about all things #Frenchhorn | Makes a cheese omelette for his son every morning

The last item sounds like it might be a throwaway line, but actually it is not at all. I literally make him an omelette every morning and have for now a number of years. He needs that much stability of routine as he starts his day. The only times I don’t cook an omelette are days we are not at home, at a hotel with a breakfast room.

Which brings me to this summer, I have been working on writing projects large and small, taking James places, and have inserted extra hobby time in the schedule too. Hobby time? Quitting is not an option, but also you don’t have to be hard core every day working hard every moment. If I did not have hobby outlets and interests, and my faith as well, I hate to think of how life might be. I would guess I might have burned out by now. The future we don’t know, but I chose to be optimistic.

And have a real hobby too

In relation to that last thought about burning out, I have this final point. If your “hobby” is “self-improvement” you urgently need to find a real hobby.** If you don’t have any activity in your life that others would easily recognize as being a legitimate hobby, take stock and make sure to make your life more balanced and three dimensional.

** Self-improvement is not a hobby. However, a famous horn player actually stated that was their hobby in a Horn Call interview years ago. I hope they were joking, or, if not, I sincerely hope they have developed by now some real hobby.

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