What is the best home depot alphorn? While beginners used to practice with garden hoses, you can now find various experiments on YouTube with sanitary pipes and cardboard tubes, with wooden slats, flower pots and hoses of all kinds. I have tried out a few things myself. The watering can alphorn convinced me the most. Yes, the watering can is superior to the vulgar garden hose! Here’s a quick taste:
Depending on the tuning, the instrument consists of sections of tubing totaling just over three meters in length. As is well known, an alphorn in F has a total length (including the spout) of 3.67 meters; an F-horn is 3.48 meters—fine-tuning is done with garden shears. I use air conditioning drain hose in various diameters—a little over 1 m at 25 mm, about 2 m at 19 mm, and small pieces at 16 mm and 13 mm to accommodate the mouthpiece. The pieces, connected and secured with electrical tape, form something resembling a conical shape.
A solid-plastic watering can serves as the cup. Thin-walled, cheap watering cans produce noticeably less resonance, and the horn sounds awful when used with metal watering cans. Small watering cans don’t have enough volume [sic]. I use a 10-liter model from Stöckli. The red version from this traditional Swiss company seems particularly well-suited for an alphorn (there’s also a green version and a black model made from recycled plastic). Even with such a high-end watering can, the total cost of the alphorn comes to less than 50 CHF / EUR. If you’re also looking for the most affordable alphorn mouthpiece possible, you can use the garden hose mouthpiece by Roland Schwab or a cheap model from Thomann.
The intonation of my watering-can alphorn is absolutely spot-on in the range from the 4th to the 16th natural note. This means that most solos or first and second parts can be played without any problems. The instrument is unusable only in the very low range, from the fundamental down to and including bass G.
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