Understanding Volume Dynamics on a French Horn

Video Transcript

Hi! I'm Katie and I'm here on behalf of expertvillage.com, I'm going to show you how to play loud and soft on a French horn. Basically the volume of the notes that you play depends on how quickly the air is passing through the horn and also how much air. So a louder note is one that is pushing a large amount of air as quickly as possible through the horn. A softer note is one using less air and is passing more slowly. The concept is pretty simple but there are a couple of things that you want to remember first of all if you are playing softly you have to make sure that at least enough air is going through that you don't loose your buzz. You require some air pressure to keep the lips vibrating, they vibrate over that flow of air and if the flow of air stops, then its much more difficult to vibrate. So if you are playing soft your just want to keep the note going. You could see that its still very soft but it never peters out. So now one thing to remember when you are playing loudly is you don't want to over blow and that happens when a horn player want to play very loudly and they just push as much air as possible and what happens is that they loose control and it actually pops up to the next note or that it blows sharp. So you want to play loudly but you want to try to control the air and control the buzz that is the biggest thing. When you are playing loudly,don't let it effect your embouchure. So for example and that is how you play loudly and softly on a French horn.

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