Around one and a half weeks ago, I started encountering problems with my ability to play horn. I thought it was just one of my "bad days" and I gave myself a day of rest, expecting to recover. After that rest day, I tried to play again, but to my surprise that I had not recovered at all. In fact, over the past one and a half week, I've lost a lot of my ability to play. Before I started encountering this problem, I could play a high A or B above the staff, had good tone, and had good endurance. Now, I can't hit a F# on top of the staff, my tone is extremely thin, and my endurance lasts for about 8 minutes before I cannot play at all. I've been trying almost everything that I know, doing long tones, lip slurs, etudes, rest days, mouthpiece buzzing, etc, but I cannot recover, and I just keep getting worse. No matter how hard I try to improve, nothing has been happening for the past week and a half. I've asked my band director for help, but he just told me to do the things that I was doing. Despite all of my attempts to get better, I simply can't. Currently, I play worse than what I sounded like when I first started playing the horn. Can anyone help me out? I have a concert in a week, and as the first horn in my lower band, I have several solos, none of which I can play. I would really appreciate it if someone could help tell me what's going wrong and what I can do to fix my problem and get better. Please help!

A similar question has been asked before. You can check out that post here: http://www.8notes.com/f/51_346384.asp

Have you learned anything from your practice log?

A time scale of 1.5 weeks may be a bit short to expect great gains. If you noticed the problem and then started beating your chops with a lot more practice to fix it, you'll go nowhere fast. With any muscle, yes, you have to work hard to improve, but if you continually fatigue that muscle day in and day out, it has no time to recover. This issue is compounded by the fact that it's very easy to use bad form (poor air support, too much lip pressure, etc.) and further harm your chops.

I recommend you readjust your expectations of yourself while your lips are recovering to their former strength. So, you can play up to an F for only 8 minutes? Use those 8 minutes on range-building exercises, then stop straining your lips when you can't play high any more. Stay a little lower--playing what's still comfortable--for the rest of your session to work on endurance and technical aspects. When you strain to hit notes, you're more likely to break form and harm your lips, preventing them from properly recovering later.

This problem is extremely hard to diagnose over the internet because we cannot witness the problem with our own eyes and ears. I suggest you start taking private lessons and ask your horn teacher to help you with this. The internet can only offer so many general remedies, but a real horn player sitting next to you will have a better idea about what's going on.