Where are YOU on the Internet?

In 2006, You became the Time magazine person of the year. Your contributions to Wikipedia, YouTube and MySpace are changing the way we share, communicate, and view our world. Indeed, these sites entertain and educate us, and they have been made by ordinary people working together to document the things that interest them.

If you are reading this, it is likely that you are a horn player. If you are visiting this site for more than the first time, you might have noticed that I have been expanding it. There is now a section for french horn recordings, which, at the time of this writing, is totally empty. I wanted there to be some nice examples of the Tills, Tchaik-5's, lip trills and high C's, but alas, upon searching the Internet, I was unable to easily find any recordings of horn players playing their horns. I am therefore coming to the conclusion that you haven't been given the right tools and the right forum to do what so many other people have been doing like crazy over the past couple years - documenting and sharing the things that interest and excite them.

Granted, I am not looking for just any old recordings of people playing the horn. On the new videos section of this site you can already find YouTube videos. On MySpace you can also find illegally uploaded commercial recordings that have been ripped from someone's CD collection. These are not what I want to see. Aside from the obvious legal and copyright issues involved in copying commercial CDs to the Internet, we've always been able to get our hands on that stuff just by walking into the record store. What I want to know is, what are you doing with your horn? Here is a list of things that I am missing on the Internet:

• John just played a masters recital at the conservatory. The Mozart concerto went especially well and he wants others to hear it.
• Beth is preparing an audition tape with excerpts. She thinks her Beethoven 7 is coming along, but wants feedback.
• Andy is trying new mouthpieces but is having a hard time being objective about how each one sounds. He plays the same passage on each and shares the recording for others to help judge.
• Julie is a composer and wants her new Sonata for horn to be heard by a wider audience.
• Bob makes the weirdest sound on his horn that anybody has ever produced and wants to show off.
• Jack just played a high-G-above-high-C and wants to have it as proof.

These are just examples. Horn players record themselves like crazy. My colleagues and I were already making digital recordings of ourselves in the early '90s when I was in music school. These days making recordings and getting them into an mp3, ogg or wav file has never been easier. Hopefully, HornRoller.com will fill the void that I perceive, and you and your fellow hornists will find fun and interesting ways to use the recordings section of this site.