Instrument's Resistance

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Respect the tube! William VerMeulen 1

A modern (valved) horn does not have constant resistance. Short fingerings have little resistance and a “free-blowing” feeling. Long fingerings have more resistance and a more constrained feeling 2.

You have to learn to deal with resistance that changes as you change fingerings. Developing this skill to will help you to:

  • produce more even sound
  • improve your piano playing
  • gain confidence and improve accuracy

Find horn’s resistance

Play a C'' on open B-flat horn. Then change to the same note on the F-side. Playing both notes will produce similar sound. However, try blowing the air through your horn, while imagining that you play those two notes. If you just blow the air through the instrument, you will notice that the sound coming out of the bell changes.

Your job is to adjust the air stream in such a way that the sound coming out of the bell is more or less the same. In other words, you have to adjust the air you send into the horn (between the two notes) in order to get the same sound coming out.

Equalizing the air coming out needs to find the fingering’s resistance. On the note that has little resistance you might want to experiment with one of the following:

  • “expand” your air stream; make it broader, as if expanding the walls of the instrument
  • blow “deeper” into the instrument
  • increase the volume of air you are sending through the instrument

Resistance will be the point where:

  • you can blow in a relaxed way;
  • you fill the whole volume of tubing for that particular fingering with air
  • the air flows in an orderly fashion (see Laminar vs turbulent flow)
  • if you would blow any harder you would have to push against something and the blowing would become more strenuous
  • the air sound coming out of the bell is of dark, rich, full, “carrying”

Now, if you maintain the same intensity of the air stream and change to the F-side (higher resistance), you will notice that you are pushing against something. The feeling is more strenuous. You are overblowing. To find back to resistance:

  • pull back a bit
  • try to reproduce the same relaxed feeling and “sound” quality as you had on a shorter fingering with less resistance

Using resistance sensitivity

See “Shock-absorber technique”

  1. This is one of VerMeulen’s Six Quick Fixes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTkFCEm0IBA ↩︎

  2. How different the resistance between fingerings will feel depends on a particular brand of horn you play (some popular models have big difference). ↩︎

By Julius Pranevičius