Valerie Valerie, Everyone knows that the best way to keep the chops in shape on ship board is to kissy kissy kissy. :) Milton
Milton Kicklighter 4th Horn Buffalo Philharmonic Retired ________________________________ From: valerie wells <[email protected]> To: horn list 2 memphis <[email protected]> Sent: Mon, June 27, 2011 4:41:47 PM Subject: Re: [Hornlist] Are there any good ways lip and fingers in shpe on a long boat trip. Steve's made an excellent suggestion with the plastic tubing idea. I seem to remember reading about a horn player who carried tubing & a mouthpiece in his car & he would practice lip slurs while he commuted to & from work. If I recall, he said it was enough to keep his chops in very good shape, so that he could focus on other technical aspects at home. That would work for me, because I believe I could do my BE exercises on a plastic tube. Okay, now it's time for clever person to invent a plastic travel horn w/ detachable bell to sell for less than $50. (I'm thinking of the lovely vuvuzuela's!) Anyone into plastics? There's definitely a need for such a product. Come on, we need this! As for fingering, there are French horn fingering aps for I-phones & Blackberries. Valerie Wells The Balanced Embouchure Method http://bebabe.wordpress.com/ http://www.beforhorn.blogspot.com/ Message: 9 Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2011 17:47:14 -0700 From: Steve Haflich <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Hornlist] To: The Horn List <[email protected]> Message-ID: <[email protected]> When I need to travel on a NHR trip. I sometimes take along a mouthpiece and some tubing. Your local aquarium supply (or even a plain pet shop) will carry flexible plastic tubing in several diameters. This stuff has negligible weight and rolls nicely into a suitcase. I, like you, find it better than practicing on a bare mouthpiece, but it doesn't really provide a good substitute for a horn, even a valveless horn, because of several deficiencies: - The tubing is too narrow, hence has very high resistance. - The cylindrical bore is grossly out of tune, especially on the low harmonics. The reasons this happens to a cylindrical bore have been discussed previously. The nice feature of this arrangement is that the cylindrical tubing doesn't couple very well to the atmosphere, and the plastic tubing absorbs a lot of energy, the the practice setup is nicely soft. I've played in hotel rooms without problem. Another nice feature is that the thumb over the end of the tube works a little (a _very_ little) like the right hand on a waldhorn. I've tried correcting the tuning problem by using two different sizes of tubing, the smaller nested into the larger. But this provides only a single step increase in bore, and I didn't find that it helped much. It did slightly reduce the excessive resistance, but not very much. But thinking about this abysmal practice instrument, I have a few ideas in case anyone else wants to experiment. First, try selecting larger diameter aquarium tubing rather than smaller. If you must, use a rather short segment of small tubing and nest that into a long segment of wider tubing. Narrow tubing makes the instrument too resistant to blowing. Second, choose an instrument length significantly longer that 12.5-foot F length. Since the lower partials are out of tune, constructing a lower instrument will make the harmonics you actually use closer to being in pitch. I haven't tried this, but perhaps 16-foot C would be good. But here is the real idea that I'd like to throw out in case some horn atelier has more energy to put into developing a product than I do: The quietness, lightness, and cheapness of aquarium tubing is attractive for making a practice instrument. But the conical bore make the instrument only marginally playable. I imagine most plastic tubing is extruded at constant width, but suppose some clever manufacturer could figure out how to _cast_ similar material into a conical shape similar to a horn bore, complete with bell. Might be very difficult to construct, but if it could be done, one would have a very quiet instrument that could be simply mashed into checked luggage and which would then return to approximate shape when the suitcase is opened. If this could be manufactures and sold for $100, I think there would be a market for travel practice instruments. -- _______________________________________________ post: [email protected] unsubscribe or set options at https://pegasus.memphis.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/options/horn/kicklighgter%40yahoo.com _______________________________________________ post: [email protected] unsubscribe or set options at https://pegasus.memphis.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/options/horn/archive%40jab.org
