How to Use Mouthpiece Pressure on a French Horn

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Katie and I'm here on behalf of expertvillage.com, to show you how to use correct mouthpiece pressure when playing the horn. Now when you are playing a brass instrument, you need some kind of pressure. You need to have some tension between the mouthpiece and your vibrating lips; however a temptation among younger players is press as hard as possible to try to get those high notes when they are not coming out. So what happens is that they end up pulling the horn very hard to their face like so. If you are playing too hard, your are going to notice maybe two things. First of all you would very quickly develop a ring around your mouth that is a indentation from the mouthpiece. Now if you have been playing for a extended period of time, that ring is going to show up no matter what. But if you have been playing for very short period and you are pressing very hard and you notice that you have very red ring you are probably pressing too hard. Also although your lips are going to hurt the more you play or ache a little bit. Your teeth should never hurt. If you are pressing too hard against the mouthpiece, then your teeth would most likely hurt and that is a good indication. So what you want is just a relaxed tension but not too much. The reason if you think about it is simple the lips are muscles and just like any muscle if you are constrict it can't do its job. You could imagine it would be very hard to lift something with your biceps if someone is holding your bicep as tight as possible. It is the same thing with your mouth. You want to give it room to do its job. That is how you apply the correct amount of pressure to a mouth piece. "