Video: Adjusting French Horn Intonation with the Hand-in-Bell Technique

Change pitch with your hand in the bell when playing French horn; learn how with tips from our expert French horn player in this free orchestra video music lesson on French horns.

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evuser19599 Jan 06, 2009

Hey Katie, Great sound on the horn and thanks for making these helpful videos on horn playing. I was wondering if you could be so kind and share with me the type of mouthpiece that you are playing on. I'm searching for a good one. Thanks, Rusty P. Bruce

evuser19599 Jan 06, 2009

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 their hands in the bell is that first it effects the sound of the horn, it gives the horn in part it characteristic mellow quality and second of all you can 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 can 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 it inside of the bell. What is important here is that the back of your fingers is up 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 can see you want it in pretty far. You want to point where you can see my knuckles are just visible. If you keep your hands 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.

Adjusting French Horn Intonation with the Hand-in-Bell Technique

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