After a catastrophic audition and years of frustration, I participated in a spiritual ceremony asking the "Kontomble" for help with my French horn high range. What happened next changed my playing, my career, and eventually my teaching.
TRUE STORY: I asked magical “elemental beings” for help with my high range.
Have you ever prayed for your high range?
In January 2015, despite having already recorded with the San Francisco Symphony on assistant principal horn, I was still struggling with my high range.
It was uncomfortable.
Playing high felt... dense and unreliable.
I had just come back from an audition for the Atlanta Symphony, where the Queen Mab third horn excerpt had catastrophically failed under pressure.
My sister, trained in African shamanism and a whole host of other modalities, saw how much it was bothering me.
And, like any good shaman sibling, she offered me a ritual.
“We can ask the Kontomble to help you,” she said.
“The kon-what-eh?” I said.
Asking the Kontomble for help
I am not going to get deeply into the shamanic tradition - it’s not the point.
The TL;DR is that we created a spiritual ceremony asking these beings for help with my high range.
Did I go into a seizure or hallucinogenic fever and wake up having discovered the secrets of high horn playing?
Far from it.
We did the ceremony and moved on with life.
But several months later, things did shift.
Discovering a new way to play
I discovered a new way of playing.
Call it a different embouchure if you want, although that oversimplifies things. Whatever it was, it seemed to work for me.
I finally found an easy high range.
The problem was that it was such a different way of playing that I could barely perform a C major scale to professional standards.
So I trained the new method in secret while continuing to play gigs on my old setting.
About a year later, while meditating during a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat, I decided I had to take the plunge.
I knew learning the new way would take some work.
I also knew I would want software to help me practice more efficiently and get results faster.
That led to the development of Modacity, the practice app I built and later sold.
What a journey.
Was it really the embouchure?
When all was said and done, and I had fully transitioned to the new way of playing, I was delighted.
It just worked.
But then I started teaching high range to other people.
I had to think seriously about einsetzen players and all sorts of other embouchure configurations.
And eventually, I realized something surprising:
I could now play high on any embouchure.
Even the one I had struggled with before.
So was it really the embouchure change?
Or was it the Kontomble?
You know I am partial to woo-woo spiritual stuff sometimes, and maybe the ceremony did help.
But there is a more direct way.
A more direct path to high range
Rather than praying to invisible elemental beings to help you with your high range, I highly suggest exploring my aptly named program, High Range Magic.
Yes, there are some metaphysical principles at work in my teaching.
But you do not need to have any particular dogma, belief system, or even a spiritual bone in your body to benefit from this kind of magic.
High Range Magic helps you understand the physical, musical, psychological, and perceptual factors that make high playing work.
And unlike my Kontomble ceremony, it comes with exercises, coaching, feedback, and a clear process.