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tone

Author: EaubeauHorn
Date: 2008-05-21 19:12

Hi folks,
I have some questions about tone.

Background: I can "sort of" tell people who have lousy tone on the (french) horn what to do to make it better. With a brass instrument, the is an "optimal combination" of chop tension and air support that will get the best tone. This is in addition to "soft surfaces" of the lips and cheeks as opposed to "hard surfaces" of same. With the lips, the soft surfaces are those that generally are wet under non-playing conditions. The hard surfaces would be the those that are generally dry. To get a good sound, the player has to find the combination of these, plus oral cavity shape, that works best. It can be a many-years-long process. My own horn tone is on the bright side because I am a very small person; I've never heard a very small player with a dark sound. I think the size of the body cavities has a lot to do with how dark a sound a brass player can produce, but harshness can be overcome by any body size using the above concepts. To me a "bright" tone is one that has more of the higher overtones present, and a "dark" sound is one that has more of the lower overtones present.

Back to oboe: I don't get what I think is a duck-like sound any more, but it is not dark like my teacher's sound, and she is starting to be more pointed in suggestions to do long tones to work on tone. Well...I can do the long tones, and I fiddle with my oral cavity shape just like I would for the horn, but my tone is not getting darker. I'm looking for specific physical suggestions from players who have the same intellectual bent I do...I need the kind of input that I demonstrated above, to give me some things in particular to focus on and give a try to. I'd say her tone has more "air" in it than mine, that mine is more "intense," but that's as far as I can characterize it in writing. If I were discussing horn tone, I'd say that the tone was too much buzz and not enough air, but on oboe I don't have a buzz and consequently don't know how to get more air in the sound.

Suggestions?

Thanks,
EBH

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