Play the French Horn: Lesson 3-- Your First Notes

Welcome back to Create Your Best Sound. Congratulations for making it through video one on buzzing and video two for proper posture and hand position. If you haven't watched those two videos yet, please go back and do so. It's important that you're getting all of the information you need in order to be ready to make a sound on your instrument. So please go back and watch those two. Then you'll be ready for this video that you're about to see right now. If you've already watched those two videos, then congratulations. You're ready to start making sounds on your instrument. It's gonna be a lot of fun. The first thing that we wanna do is remember that nice embouchure, that brass playing face that we made from the start with your firm corners, your flat chin, right? And the ability for your lips to still be able to move around a little bit, okay, with this ridiculous talking face, okay? Then we're going to remember our excellent posture with our feet flat on the floor, bringing the horn to us because we are the boss, right? Bring the horn up to you. And with your cup shape, right hand position, with the back of your fingers making contact with the bell. The place where our fingers go, we call those the valves or the keys, right? We're not going to worry even a little bit about those for the very first time making a sound on our instrument. So when you're playing for this video, we're not going to push down any of the keys, okay? Your fingers are free. What I'd like you to do is set your instrument, get it ready. I'm going to count to four, but instead of saying the number four, I'm going to take a deep breath in at that time, which I want you to do too. After that deep breath in on number four, then we'll play any sound that comes out of your instrument. For this very first time, any sound is the right sound. Doesn't matter what it is. Remember to keep everything firm here. Place your mouthpiece. Remember when you breathe, your upper lip stays attached to the mouthpiece so that you can make sure your face stays in the right place. I like to wet my mouthpiece a little bit before I start, just with my tongue. And we're ready to go. Ready? One, two, three. I hope that was fun. We're going to try it one more time. This time, if you didn't do this the first time, make sure you're using your tongue when you start the note. Remember tuh, tuh from the first video. We'll still just play one note, but make sure you're starting it with your tongue. Let's try again. One, two, three. Now, you'll notice when I'm playing, just everything we've been talking about so far, my corners stay firm, my chin stays flat, my cheeks are in, no monkey cheeks. Everything is solid and ready to go. Now, whatever note came out these first two times you tried playing your instrument is the right note. Okay, you made a sound. That's great, congratulations. Now, I'm going to play a couple of notes that are usually in a good beginner range for a first-time student. And I want you to see if you can match them. The first note is the note that we call E on our instrument. On the treble clef staff, the E that I'm going to play is the E that lives on the very bottom line of the staff. It sounds like this. Okay, I'll play it again and see if you can match my sound. I'll count us off, just like I was doing before. Set your face. One, two, three. E. Did your note sound like mine? If it did, that's great. If it didn't, did it sound higher than mine or did it sound lower than mine? If you know that information, then you know exactly what change to make. On a brass instrument, we change notes, not necessarily by moving the valves. That does help us sometimes, but not all the time. The main way we change notes is by making our aperture, that hole between our lips, bigger or smaller, and by making our air go faster or slower. To go higher, if this is my aperture, okay, this is the hole between my lips, to go higher, to make higher sounds, my aperture will get smaller and my air will get faster. So if your note sounded lower than mine, you need to make it higher by doing those two things. As you might imagine, to make a note lower, we do just the opposite. We make our aperture bigger and we make the air go slower. So if your note was too high, you need to make it lower by doing those two things. Let's try it again. One more time on this E. One, two, three. How'd it go that time? You can keep going back in this video so you can hear that pitch and try to match it. If that pitch is not going so well for you, we're gonna try two other ones. One that's a little higher and one that's a little lower. Again, not using any valves at all. We'll start with the higher one first. The next note we're going to play is the note that we call G. So we're gonna start with the G. On the treble clef staff, G is the note that lives on the second line. So it's just a little bit higher than E. Again, we're not using any valves at all. So in order to make that G sound different than the E did, we have to make our aperture smaller and we have to blow our air a little bit faster. It's gonna sound like this. Oh. Try it with me now. I'll count us off. One, two, three. How'd it go? Let's try it one more time. One, two, three. Okay, now we're going to try the note that's a bit lower than both G and E. We're going to play our C. This is our middle C on the instrument, which means that on the treble clef staff, it is below the staff with a line through it in the center. That's our middle C. It sounds like this. To make that note, I had to make my aperture a little bit bigger and my air went a little bit slower. Let's try together. One, two, three. One more time. One, two, three. So of those three notes, C, E, and G, pick which one of those was coming out the best for you. So maybe it was C. If C was your best note, then that means to get the E to come out, that is just one notch higher than C. So you just need to bring that note up one notch higher. Here's what I mean by that. I can turn a C into an E by making my aperture smaller and blowing faster while I'm playing. It'll sound like this. Oh. Did you hear how the note changed? I didn't use my tongue in between the notes. I did what we call slurring, which is when you go from one note to the next only using your air and not using your tongue. So you can slur and change one note into the next note just by changing your aperture and by blowing either faster or slower, whichever way you need to do it. And then to get to G, you would just even go one notch higher. Oh. Right, I turned my C into an E and then I turned my E into a G. If G is your best note and you need to practice getting down to those lower notes, do exactly from the opposite direction. Start on your G and see if you can turn it into an E by opening that hole between your lips a little bit more, still keeping these firm always, and slowing down the air a little bit. And then of course, you can turn the E into a C by doing exactly the same thing. So you can play all three notes. If you weren't able to get all three of those notes today, that is totally okay. I definitely could not do that the very first time I picked up my instrument, but I want you to choose which note or notes are working for you. Practice making those sounds and then see if you can change those sounds into different sounds by slurring to the different notes. One more thing I want you to practice before you put your horn away today is practice tonguing all on the same note. So just like we practice tonguing, getting ready for the mouthpiece, I'm going to choose E and I'm going to tongue three Es. You don't have to choose E. You can choose whichever note was coming out best for you, but I'm gonna choose E and I'm gonna tongue it three times. It's gonna sound like this. Oh, oh, oh. You see how I did it all in one breath. I just took the first breath to start and I kept the air flowing as I went into the instrument. So you pick whichever note you liked the best and let's practice tonguing three of those same note together. One, two, three, how'd it go? Let's try one more time. I'll pick a different note this time. I'm going to pick C this time. One, two, three, okay. So you can practice playing these different notes, tonguing and slurring. Once you've got that down, you're going to be ready for songs in no time. Thank you so much for joining me for these videos. It's been my pleasure to share this information with you. If you do not have a teacher and you would like for someone to check you out and make sure that you are set up properly, that you've been able to follow these instructions properly, you can sign up to take a lesson with me over Skype. There's a link in the description to my website and the sign up page for Skype lessons. It would be my honor to check in with you and make sure you've got everything set up properly so you have a great foundation to get going on your instrument. I wish you so much success in your horn playing endeavors and I hope that everything works out great for you. I hope you really enjoy playing music on this beautiful, beautiful instrument.