Pip Eastop - Hornplayer » hornplaying

Essentials for the touring musician

Pippington — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 06:55:30 +0000

Please allow me to share with you my years and years of experience.
When going on tour you need only remember four (three) things:

Passport
Credit card
Toothbrush *
Instrument

* The toothbrush is optional as it’s perfectly acceptable to clean your teeth with a credit card.

How to plaice your embouchure…

Pippington — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 06:46:55 +0000

We can all learn from the humble plaice…

Harry Johnstone

Pippington — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 22:49:22 +0000

Here is my hornplaying friend and colleague, Harry Johnstone, of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

I caught this shot of Harry during a moment of quiet contemplation during the recording sessions for Mozart’s Divertimento, K 334
The recording was for Linn Records. The divertimento features two horns in D and a string quartet with double bass instead of ‘cello.
The elegant instrument Harry is holding was made by Engelbert Schmid – a beautiful horn and exactly the same as the one I was using.

Congratulations to all involved for some extremely fine playing and some very intense work!

The other players were:

Alexander Janiczek – director/violin
Nikita Naumov – double bass
Ruth Crouch – violin
Jane Atkins – viola

Where is your diaphragm?

Pippington — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:22:35 +0000

I know where mine is – and it’s nowhere near my belly. It goes above my stomach and my liver (they both tuck up under it, where it looks dark in the 2nd drawing) and my heart sits right on top of it, almost in the middle (the dotted line is the heart’s outline).

Surprised?

I’m going to be giving some tips here soon about some good ways to use the diaphragm – to actually get a hold of it and do something precise with it, specifically for playing brass instruments.

I hope you like my drawings!

Impropera (improvised opera!) in Dorset

Pippington — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 10:54:52 +0000

I’ll be playing with Impropera at the Serenata Music Festival in Dorset.
I’ve been working with Impropera for a year or two now. The singers are extraordinarily talented performers and the shows are hilarious and bizarre. It’s a wonderful sendup of opera and a great night out for anyone who likes to laugh until it hurts. The music and the opera plots are completely made up on the spot as it is performed, as is all the music. It’s a tough job for the “orchestra” which can be as small as a duo. When it’s just me and piano I have to do a lot of switching between horn and trumpet to keep as many colours on the go as possible.
Perhaps you would like to come along to a show sometime? Check out the Impropera website, or the Impropera Facebook page.

Here are a few photos I took during an Impropera rehearsal:

My wonderful Dad – instrument technician

Pippington — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 09:05:58 +0000

In response to my previous post here, about Gale Lawson, my Mum sent me a photo of my Dad doing similar things in his similar workshop.

So, here he is – my wonderful Dad, Peter Eastop – back in 1998, healing a bassoon in his workshop. Soon after this his Parkinson’s got so bad that he couldn’t work any more and he had to shut down the workshop. Tragic.

The evolution of the bicycle

Pippington — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 23:27:25 +0000

Gale Lawson – instrument technician

Pippington — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:40:37 +0000

Here is Gale Lawson, a wizard with horns (and also a halo, if you look carefully). The valves of my Phatterboy Eb Flugelhorn had been sticking and no amount of cleaning or drowning in valve oil seemed to free them up. Also, the main tuning slide and the first valve slide were too free-moving. The combination of valves that didn’t come back up again and tuning slides which kept falling out was driving me ABSOLUTELY NUTS so I took the thing to Gale to be healed.

Gale was very keen to show me his new machine for deep-frying instruments:

It’s not really a deep-fryer. It’s an ultra-sonic cleaning machine. It contains 90 gallons of a liquid with magical properties. You submerge anything from a trumpet to a whopping great tuba into it, making sure that the instrument is completely filled with the liquid, and then press the ON button for a minute or two. The machine hums, the magical molecules in the wizard’s liquid jiggle at an ultrasonic frequency and clouds of colourful dirt emerge …even from a relatively new instrument like my Phatterboy. Gale is very proud of his new machine, particularly of the fact that nobody else in the UK has one.

My Dad used to do what Gale does. He had a lovely workshop full of wonderful specialised tools and machines. When I was growing up I spent many happy hours watching my Dad working on all manner of wind instruments. He was considered a bassoon specialist but was equally at home with brass instruments. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t inherit any of my Dad’s patience, dexterity or methodical nature. Some people are destined to make or repair instruments, others to damage and destroy them – I fall into the latter category. Until his Parkinson’s Disease stopped him from working my Dad used to do all the repairs to my instruments, including a lot of customisation. He was a genius. He once made a complete set of detatchable levers for my Alexander so that I could play it the other way around – with the bell over to my left.

Gale Lawson is also a genius, and I very much like watching him work. His workshop looks and smells like my Dad’s used to, so I think when I am there I get somehow transported back to some very happy times.

Cycling to work

Pippington — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 09:14:44 +0000

I’m always delighted to find yet another studio in London that I didn’t previously know about. There seem to be hundreds, tucked away in all sorts of hidden corners and I’m lucky enough to live within cycling distance of a good many of them. I went to Sphere Studio for the first time yesterday. It’s near the huge and beautiful Battersea Park and it took me under half an hour to get there – cycling some of the way through the park. It was a perfect day for cycling; warm, dry and not windy, so I arrived feeling refreshed and in a pretty good mood. To find the place, I simply put the postcode in my phone’s satnav, set it to walking mode, and followed the curt voice instructions emanating from my shirt pocket. She gets pretty cross when I deliberately take a different route but she does a pretty good job of disguising the anger in her voice as she re-routes me.

When cycling to and from work, unlike all the other cycling hornplayers I know, I don’t carry my horn on my back. To me that’s both uncomfortable and dangerous. I have quite a strong rear carrier rack on my bicycle and I attach the case to the to side of it using small elastic hooks which absorb shocks from potholes and bumps. Should I ever fall off, or get knocked off my bicycle I don’t think I want to land on my back across a horn case as this would probably damage both me and the instrument. Also the horn has far less distance to fall from the side of a rear carrier than it does from up on my back. Once it’s strapped on the the rear of the bicycle I don’t notice it’s there.

Having arrived at Sphere Studio, I found a small orchestra split up into three isolated rooms; a big one for the strings and two tiny rooms for the brass and the woodwinds. I was in a tiny room the other hornplayer Laurence Davies, trumpet players Simon Gardner and Derek Watkins, trombonists Mark Nightingale and Gordon Campbell. It’s always a delight to be playing with such brilliant musicians – even in a sweaty cramped space.

We recorded a few tracks for a new album by Mel C. It was interesting stuff – songs by Joni Mitchell, Stephen Sondheim and others – a new direction for this particular singer, I think. It all sounded great and I’m looking forward to hearing the album.

Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Iván Fischer

Pippington — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 18:25:39 +0000

This photo was taken after our final rehearsal in New York when Iván Fischer arranged for his two orchestras to meet each other. Members of the Budapest Festival Orchestra who had been attending our rehearsal came up onto the stage to mingle, shake hands and pose with us for photographs taken from the back of the hall.

And here’s one of those photographs taken from the back of the hall. The OAE players all have instruments out, and all the others are members of the B.F.O.

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