Legato Tonguing on a French Horn

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Katie and I'm here on behalf of expertvillage.com and I'm going to show you how to do legato tonguing on the French horn. Here you see a series of legato marks and they are these long lines above the note and those lines remind you that the note makes it long as possible almost but not quite connected. Now although legato means is that the time for these notes are going to be very smooth; okay very long and very smooth. But unlike in slurs there is going to be a slight break in between notes. They are not going to be completely connected with air so one thing to think about that might help you where imagining where is about tonguing is to think about a paintbrush and how a painter may go one way and then goes the other. It is just a slight motion of picking up the brush and starting in another direction. Okay nice and smooth like that. If I where to play a legato scale it would sound like this. You could hear that the notes are all very long, they are almost connected but there is slight separation. You can hear how long they are you. You can compare that to maybe normal articulation which would sound like this. Legato connects notes a little bit more but you still use your tongue to stop the last note and to start the next one and that is how legato tonguing is done. "