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And More of It Tomorrow
Apr. 11th, 2019 09:08 pmHad my best-yet session on the horn today. What made it the best? Just the fact that, for maybe 5 minutes out of the 20, I made it sound more like a trumpet than like a goose in gastric distress. (And you've seen what they do to the parks and beaches, right?)
Something that may have helped is that, near the end of my previous session, I decided to switch mouthpieces. Instead of the wider 1-1/2C, which I'd special-ordered and had been using since day one of this iteration, I went back to the 7C which came with the horn and is, by far, the most commonly used by beginners.
My reason for opting for something else was that the 1-1/2C might've been closer to the mouthpiece on the French horn which had been my last instrument. But I guess that doesn't matter to my 74-year-old embouchure.
For most of my session, I use several YouTube videos presented by professional horn players and teachers. Something which, needless to say, wasn't even thought of the first time I was doing this.
After that, I use one of the books that I picked--sight unseen--from Amazon. I picked it because it had the word "Etudes" in its title which, you've gotta admit, sounds very musicological. Even if you can't tell a book by its cover, you can be pretty sure it's the real deal if it's called, "Something-Something-Etudes."
Anyway, I've just been playing the first few bars of the first study in it and, like I said, have recently succeeded in making sounds more likely to draw the cops than the SPCA. Which has gotta be SOME kind of progress, I guess.
But the fact is that it also brought me out of a pretty bad place, where I'd been earlier in the day.
And made me look forward to doing more of the same tomorrow...
LPK
Dreamwidth
4.11.2019
Something that may have helped is that, near the end of my previous session, I decided to switch mouthpieces. Instead of the wider 1-1/2C, which I'd special-ordered and had been using since day one of this iteration, I went back to the 7C which came with the horn and is, by far, the most commonly used by beginners.
My reason for opting for something else was that the 1-1/2C might've been closer to the mouthpiece on the French horn which had been my last instrument. But I guess that doesn't matter to my 74-year-old embouchure.
For most of my session, I use several YouTube videos presented by professional horn players and teachers. Something which, needless to say, wasn't even thought of the first time I was doing this.
After that, I use one of the books that I picked--sight unseen--from Amazon. I picked it because it had the word "Etudes" in its title which, you've gotta admit, sounds very musicological. Even if you can't tell a book by its cover, you can be pretty sure it's the real deal if it's called, "Something-Something-Etudes."
Anyway, I've just been playing the first few bars of the first study in it and, like I said, have recently succeeded in making sounds more likely to draw the cops than the SPCA. Which has gotta be SOME kind of progress, I guess.
But the fact is that it also brought me out of a pretty bad place, where I'd been earlier in the day.
And made me look forward to doing more of the same tomorrow...
LPK
Dreamwidth
4.11.2019
