It looks as if Blogger has made a liar of me.

Well, technically it wasn't my fault, just ironic that the post that implies you wont see the same thing twice ends up staying there. I hope you enjoyed that run on sentence. Anyway, I was standing out at the garden and looking straight up. It was enticing to realize that instead of standing on a flat surface, I am actually standing on a sphere at its apex, and the star directly above me may be the closest thing to me in that direction. I'm birdwalking here.

Today's Horn Lesson.
The French horn has a reputation for being a "difficult" instrument to play. This is also because of the harmonic series. Most brass instruments play in the first few octaves of the harmonic series, where the notes are farther apart and it takes a pretty big difference in the mouth and lips to get a different note.  The range of the French horn is higher in the harmonic series, where the notes are closer together. So very small differences in the mouth and lips can mean the wrong harmonic comes out.

There is one positive to this. Having the small distances between notes, coupled with the extra back pressure inherent in the physics of the horn, makes lip trilling more feasible. Wiki defines a trill as a "musical ornament consisting of a rapid alternation between two adjacent notes, usually a semitone or tone apart. A lip trill is accomplished by rapidly moving from one pitch to another without the use of finger movements, and using only the lips. Obviously, having very light pressure makes this even easier, giving the lips more space to move.
This is an example of lip trilling. Note : This still isn't me but I promise homemade material tomorrow.

Here the trill can be seen in its natural habitat (beasting face) at the 21 second mark. This solo is difficult.