Any French Horn Players Here?

Last year, before Christmas, my band director gave me a French horn and I began learning it. Its been a few months now since I have really sat down with it, and I have made a fair amount of progress.

However, now comes the time that I must improve my pitch, and drastically extend my range upward.

As of right now, I can play a low low C to a high F (top line of staff), but C-F are kind of struggled and hard to get out, and it also hurts to play them for very long. So, how can I remedy this, any specific techniques, or just a lot of practice?

Also, anyway I can help my pitch, as far as hitting the exact right note any time?

...No horn players?

Ah well. :ninja:

Hello nintenboy05,

Just started really doing some stuff on Youngcomposers, and saw your thread, I don't know if you're still at the french horn, but keep at it, It's a great instrument. I've been playing it for 10 years, and I'm now a sophomore in college majoring in Horn.

The biggest thing with horn is a lot of practice... If you're serious about improving your pitch accuracy, There's an invaluable book called "the art of french horn playing" by Phillip Farkas. It includes an excercise in accuracy, simply hitting random notes with 3 beats rest at 60 bpm between notes. You could simulate that by randomly picking notes, or if you really like horn buy the book and use the excercise under accuracy, chapter 19.

As far as range, the excercise I used was as follows

Play a scale from an octave below your highest comfortable note to your highest comfortable note - Mezzo Forte, half notes, then hold the highest comfortable note for 2 whole notes at around 60 bpm if you can.

Then rest for 1-2 minutes and take the scale down a half step and do the same thing

Then rest again for 1-2 minutes and take the scale down one more half step and repeat.

That in addition to whatever normal practice should help range, as your comfortable range goes up, start your scale higher.

Hope you're still looking on this forum and are still pursuing horn!