Hello Steve, even you said the right things here, you missed something. Why the alterated fingerings for the high notes & the better result ? Because the students were playing higher harmonics on longer horns. The longer the horn the higher you might climb, very old rule & fact. The high c3 is played as 23 on the single F Pumpenhorn, which means they play it at a step high as e3 on a D-flat horn.
The psycho thing is really something to conquer. The trick works. The more they think about the high notes, the worse. Same with the loud notes. I preach always: "INACTIVELY Playing" = let the air out instead of pushing. Well, admitted, there are very few occasions, where you really have to push air out with JUST ONE STROKE (Blow), but not with lips formed in a way you were blowing at candles or the hot soup. These rare strokes are lightning fast explosions. Nothing for beginners or intermediate students. It is amazing, how students today look for the extremes of playing when still struggling with the basic. It is also amazing & selecting for the future, how long some students work on a single piece - often six months, when they are missing some basic study - working "note by note" - "hammering it into their brain" -, while others do it within two three weeks, but return to it after a year to polish the piece. Greetings from Munich Hans ========================================================== -Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 11:41 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Hornlist] Re: high notes Naturally there are a whole lot of reasons high notes might be a problem for somebody, but if the basic set up is ok, based on what I've seen from a lot of students, trouble often comes from doing more than necessary rather than not doing enough. If there's enough pressure and the lips are tense enough, it just makes sense they're not going to want to vibrate. I would often in lessons have students echo back notes for me. I'd play random notes with disjunct intervals and unusual fingerings so they'd get lost as to how high they were playing. After a few minutes they'd be playing A, B, C no problem. I'd say things like "here's a medium high note" then play high C fingered 1+3. These were kids who had trouble playing F but they would easily play C with a good sound. Then when I revealed what they were really playing, it would be hard again! There's a clue that it could be more mental than physical. A suggestion along those lines from Dave Krebiehl was to try to "miss the note". Have the sound of the high note you're going to play clearly in mind then, instead of elaborately preparing and screwing up your chops, you take a breath and play with no preparation and mentally try to miss. It's amazing how clearly and easily the right note comes out! Paradoxically, it's almost impossible to miss. This can lead to a real epiphany about the type of effort needed for playing high notes. Anyway, just some silly mental tricks about being relaxed enough to let the high notes out instead of trying to force them out. Sometimes you just have to short circuit some of the crap your brain keeps trying to tell you! A similar thing works with playing loud. Let more sound out instead of pushing more sound out. Long tones are a great way to experiment with that! - Steve Mumford _______________________________________________ post: [EMAIL PROTECTED] set your options at http://music.memphis.edu/mailman/options/horn/hans.pizka%40t-online.de _______________________________________________ post: [EMAIL PROTECTED] set your options at http://music.memphis.edu/mailman/options/horn/archive%40jab.org
