Hand Stopping the Bell on a French Horn

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Katie and I'm here on behalf of expertvillage.com and I'm going to show you the correct way to hold your hand in the bell of a French horn. First of all the reason that horn players put there hands in the bell is that first it effects the sound of the horn, it gives the horn and part it characteristic mellow quality and second of all you could control intonation with your hand. So first I'm going to show you what your hand should look like the first thing I'm going to do is you want to put these four fingers together as tightly as possible. Make sure that there is hardly any space between them and then what you want to do is you want to scrunch your hand up like this. This is about the shape that you want, you are going to put your thumb just like so and hopefully you could see that is up against the other fingers just as tight as they are with each other. The shape here is almost like the Nike swoosh that is what you are going for so once you have the proper position of your hand you are going put inside of the bell. What is important here is that the back of your fingers is out against the far side of the wall of the bell. Like so. You don't want to end so fine that your hand is blocking off the air but as you could see you want it in pretty far you want to point when you could see my knuckles are just visible. If you keep your hand just like this, then you would be in a good position to change intonation and to ensure that you have the mellow tone that you want. "