[AlbertCory]

Just as an aside: a couple years ago I was hanging with a professional French Horn player at the dog park, and never having played one, I thought it would be amusing to try it. I had no aspirations of really being good. I was honest with him about my lack of ambition and he was fine with it.

So I got one for cheap, and took a couple lessons from him. Damn, that thing is hard!

[eredengrin]

Very interesting, professional performers in the classical music world are relatively hard to come by since it's so competitive. It certainly takes a lot of practice to make it start to sound somewhat good and the professionals are on a whole other level. The amount of competition to get a job in a professional orchestra makes a google interview look like a piece of cake. Although I would say you probably got a bit unlucky with instrument choice, out of all the brass instruments, french horn is generally regarded as being the hardest. Haven't ever tried myself but I don't doubt it.

[AlbertCory]

Yeah, for sure. Scott is on The List (my term), those guys who've passed the test and can fill in for your sick Horn player. So he's played with almost every orchestra in the Bay Area.

He played at LucasFilm for a couple weeks, to build their library of sounds. He said for that one week, he made more money than his son in high tech.