How I teach Low Horn and the Shoemaker Legato Etude #15--Tips on how I learned to play low horn.

Hi, I just finished playing Shoemaker Legato Etude number 15. This one was a little bit different because I had to play forte like the whole time whereas number 14 was piano or soft. So this one actually I kind of enjoyed more playing loud. It's a little easier. So I hope you enjoyed that. But I wanted to say a couple words about my approach to low horn playing since I did a video last week on high horn playing. There's some main points that you should make sure you're doing if you're new to low horn playing or struggling with it. The first is make sure that you are getting your tongue down low enough in your mouth. You want the cavity of your of your mouth to be as open as possible. You want your throat to be open as well as though you're singing from your chest. Finally it does help to lower your jaw. Well it's actually essential that you lower your jaw as you go lower. It's like uh because you have to keep your lips together but you can still lower your jaw as you go lower. I mean there's something wrong. You can still lower your jaw when your lips are together. Otherwise they won't buzz. But anyway you lower your jaw as you go lower. Another point is make sure your right hand is pretty open in the bell. So again that goes with trying to keep things big. I try to imagine myself as like a big guy singing into my horn because I'm not a huge big guy and I my actual singing voice is quite high just like my talking voice. So in order for me to play low I try to imagine everything's low and my jaw is low. My bell is low. I just try to imagine kind of this I'm a big person. I don't know why that helps but it kind of does. Here are a couple of exercises that I do to work on my low horn playing with my students. It's basically the same thing as playing high it's just opposite. Instead of starting on the scale and going up and taking breaks I start on a scale and I go down. I usually work chromatically rather than with a major scale because of the angle of the mouthpiece slowly changes as you get lower. So here's a C scale going down chromatically. Wow I got some water in there. A lot of water. Now I'm using F horn right now to do that but a lot of times I will use B flat horn in my low register because it is a little easier to produce the note. I suggest you try to go for the F horn sound though as you play low and then if you can you know figure out a way to use the B flat fingerings to make it easier with that sound of F horn then you got something. The opposite of high horn playing is low horn playing right. So just like how we try to angle the mouthpiece away from our top lip when we play high we do the opposite when we play low. We angle it into our top lip which doesn't sound like like healthy but it actually it's not that much pressure that you're putting on your your top lip. So when I go to my really pedal notes I'm really angling into my top lip and I'm actually even bringing the bell forward. If you have a problem with scooping it's because you're not getting your tongue out of the way and low enough fast enough. If you do have a problem with scooping practice it multiple times tongue like this. I'm playing really loud and the reason why is that really helps open up your low horn playing too. It's not to say that you should always play loud it just really does help if you're just starting. Also try to always use a tuner when you're playing low horn. If you're out of tune to play low horn you're just going to screw up the section and screw up the sound. And also it means that you're doing something wrong probably with your mouth. You've got to use a tuner. If you can't really hear where you are use a keyboard. Play the note on the keyboard or use a drone. Finding those notes those audible memory is really important to playing low horn. It's important to learn how to do because half of the horn section really needs to play a lot of low horn notes. So that's basically half the jobs. It will be easier for you to get a job if you can do both high and low. A lot of people cannot play low horn so it's I found a little easier for me to get a job when I was auditioning but maybe you are a little easier at high horn. But if you think about it why should we ignore that? Why should we ignore the fact that half the jobs in a section are low and a lot of people can't do it. So take advantage of that. Learn how to play low horn and get yourself a job.