Horn Matters | A French Horn and Brass Site and Resource | John Ericson and Bruce Hembd

Last weekend I played a recital using four different horns (more here, all not my normal horn) and on three different mouthpieces (all not my normal mouthpiece, but mostly with my rim). It was very fun, bucket list type stuff, but there is a consequence to it (and the struggle to play in tune on those four different horns), as subsequently as the week began I could not play in tune on any modern horn!

I have had this experience several times before, developing the topic in fact into a full scale article that was published in The Horn Call 33, no. 3 (May, 2003). The title of that article was “Placing Pitch ‘in the Pocket'”

Pocket?

Before getting to how to apply this to your warmup, the following is how I began the 2003 article.

Proper pitch placement is certainly an issue of concern for horn players. Many less experienced players play high on the pitch, and as a result need to pull their main tuning slides out a great deal. Most fine players, however, don’t need to pull their horns down nearly so far. In reflection I realize that over the course of my own studies my pitch certainly dropped; I needed to pull my horn out less as I advanced in my playing abilities. This was not something that I intentionally set out to do and no teacher told me that I needed to pull out less, but I did over the years learn how to place the pitch better. To play well with the best possible tone you need to place pitch correctly. Two keys to learning how to describe and achieve proper pitch placement recently fell into place for me while working on a recital.

The first key was realized when performing a sonata (Danzi, E-flat) on the natural horn, my first performance with fortepiano at A=435. I came to realize that when I practiced on the natural horn without the fortepiano reinforcing the low pitch I had a very, very difficult time keeping the pitch down. My ears wanted to hear pitch at A=440 and were, despite the horn being tuned correctly for A=435, guiding my embouchure back up to A=440. As a result, I was playing very high on the pitch on the natural horn and this transferred over to the valved horn as well; I was not keeping the pitch down where it needed to be. Thus, I had to consciously re-learn how to place the pitch again, something that had previously happened for me in a very natural way during my studies.

The second key involved a realization about practicing with a practice mute frequently. We have small children and these past few years, during which I have been teaching full time, I have frequently had to practice in the evenings with a practice mute. I finally realized that I was playing very high on the pitch on the mute and I also discovered that my personal sense of pitch placement is very much tied up with tonal color. The feedback of tone I was used to relying upon was basically lost on the practice mute. (I now practice inside our walk-in closet when the kids are asleep, to avoid using the mute).

On any horn, you have some freedom to bend the pitch, some horns more, some horns less. There is a range of motion over which you can bend the pitch sharp or flat without it breaking or jumping to another note. The upper limit is somewhat firm; on the downward side you can normally bend the pitch somewhat further, especially in the lower range. Within the range that you can bend each pitch there is a central portion of the range of motion that is more stable, that is to say, there is a boundary at which you cannot bend the pitch easily down or up but you can pass this point if you force the pitch hard. The location you want to place the pitch in is at the lower end of this central, more stable area of the pitch for any given note on the horn. This location can be found either by “feel” or by listening to the tone. There is a “sweet spot” where the tone is the most resonant and beautiful that is a stable location you can place any note in. It feels to me the most like a “pocket.”

The type of exercises I use to find and define this pocket are pitch-bending exercises. These can take many forms; I currently frequently use “The first beautiful tones on the horn” exercise found in Frøydis Ree Wekre, Thoughts on Playing the Horn Well (2nd ed., 1994), which works the downward bend well, and I then follow this with several pitches played in the manner of the exercise on page 16 [“Sustained tones with pitch variation”] of William C. Robinson, An Illustrated Advanced Method for French Horn Playing (Wind Music, 1971), which calls for upward and downward bends of a held long tone. There are many possibilities for what to play. I am not really looking at playing in tune the upper or lower neighbor notes in these bending exercises. The point is that you bend the note beyond the pocket in both directions and end up in the pocket. Don’t use a tuner; rely on feel and tone alone. Pitches must be bent with a muscular movement of the embouchure, not by air support variation or by mouthpiece pressure. I now practice these bending exercises at the beginning of my practice sessions to reinforce the memory of where the pocket is, after an initial buzzing routine which I will describe shortly.

Application: develop a modified warmup to aid pitch placement.

At that time a central thing I did (only partially described in the article) was develop a personal warm-up routine that was geared specifically toward setting my pitch placement, a topic I am sure some readers will benefit from thinking over and one I personally returned to this week.

Essentially the routine is in four parts. The first step is to warmup briefly on virtually any easy exercise. The point being that your pitch will likely actually be off as you start, and don’t even worry about it. Don’t try to tune, just get gently warmed up. This step will take maybe 3-4 minutes maximum.

Step two involves playing exercises that include a pitch bend. I describe a couple of these in the original article, and at this point today would normally use a shortened version of the beginning of the “Shawarma” exercise in the Brass Gym for horn, which was not in print back in 2003 to be mentioned in that article. The idea at this point in the warmup is to end each of the bending exercises with your best, most resonant sound, again with no reference to a tuner. Focus on how it sounds (don’t use a practice mute!) and feels.

Now that you have optimal sound production established, get out a tuner and see where that best resonant sound actually is. Likely it will be lower than “normal” by a bit. Keep that feel of where the pitch is and tune your main slide so you are in tune at that pitch level.

The final step then is to continue tuning up with basically any routine you would use, maintaining that feeling of centering on your most resonant, beautiful tone. I like using a few more Brass Gym for horn exercises such as “beautiful sounds” with the CD to reinforce pitch level, and I have a few other exercises I like to do with a drone. Feel free to use a tuner to hold pitch, and you may find that some exercises you might use are rather more difficult to hold to pitch than you might expect.

Part of what you want to do here is retrain your ear as well, that you really have the feel for the correct pitch level, not some sharp pitch level that seems right/normal to you (due to repetition or lack of a frame of pitch reference) but is not.

Within a few days of starting a routine of this general type you should feel that your pitch is getting more centered and will be more reliably placed. Good luck!