French Horn Fingering Chart

Two horns in one: the double horn

The instrument in almost every school band room is not one horn but two, built into a single frame: a horn in F and a horn in B♭, sharing the same three rotary valves and the same bell. With the left thumb resting off its lever, the air takes the long way round — through roughly twelve feet of F-side tubing — and the instrument behaves as a horn in F. Press the thumb trigger down and a second set of valve loops switches in, cutting the tubing to roughly nine feet: the same valves now work on the shorter, higher B♭ horn. Nothing about the fingers changes; the trigger simply changes which instrument the valves are fingering.

Why build two horns into one? Because a brass instrument's notes come from a ladder of harmonics, and the rungs of that ladder sit further apart on a long tube and closer together on a short one. Low down, the F side's wide-spaced harmonics are easy to find and its sound is full and round. High up, those same harmonics crowd so tightly together that neighbouring notes are hard to separate — and that is exactly where the B♭ side, with its shorter tube and more widely spaced high harmonics, makes the notes slot in securely. The double horn exists so the player never has to choose between a good low register and a reliable top one.

The thumb trigger, and the switch at A♭4

The rule taught in band methods, printed by both charts this page is checked against, and used throughout this site is simple: from F♯3 up to G4, play on the F side — thumb trigger untouched. From A♭4 up to C6, play on the B♭ side — thumb trigger held down for the whole note. The main fingering in the table above follows that rule for every note, and under each fingering the table also prints the same note fingered on the opposite side, because every note on a double horn genuinely can be played both ways. Yamaha's French horn manual states the same system in words: of a printed pair of fingerings the left-hand one is the main fingering, and a range of its double-horn chart is marked as usually played on the B♭ side.

Two habits make the switch feel natural. First, the trigger is part of the fingering, not an afterthought: decide the side before the note starts, and move the thumb exactly with the finger change, so A♭4 arrives already on the B♭ side. Second, expect the two sides to feel different under the fingers — the B♭ side responds a little quicker and brighter, the F side a little broader — and give each side its own slow practice rather than treating the alternate fingerings as emergency spares.

Concert pitch: a perfect fifth below

The French horn is a transposing instrument — a horn in F. Everything you play sounds a perfect fifth lower than written: written C4 sounds as concert F3, written G4 sounds as concert C4, and so on through the whole table. The "Sounds as" column does that arithmetic for every note, and each note page repeats its concert pitch, because the moment it matters is in rehearsal: when the conductor asks for a concert B♭, the horn player fingers written F. Older orchestral parts are sometimes written for horn in other keys, but the school and band parts you will meet are for horn in F, and this chart follows them.

The left hand fingers; the right hand tunes

The horn is the odd one out in the brass family: its valves are worked by the left hand — three fingers on the valve levers, thumb on the trigger — while the right hand does something no other brass player's hand does. It rests inside the bell, where its position quietly adjusts tuning and tone: a little deeper darkens and flattens, a little further out brightens and sharpens. That is why the diagrams on this site show the valves, the trigger lever (marked T) and a pill naming the side, and no right hand at all — there are no right-hand keys to press. Keep the right hand relaxed and consistent in the bell while you learn these fingerings; moving it around while you practise makes every note's tuning a moving target.

Reading this chart

The table is split into the chart's three registers, and the split is the story of the instrument: the low register is all F side, the middle register is where the switch happens (F♯4 and G4 are the last F-side standards; A♭4 is the first B♭-side one), and the high register is all B♭ side. In each diagram the filled valves are the ones you press, the lever marked T at the left is the thumb trigger (filled when the note is played on the B♭ side), and the pill under the valves names the side in words, so the side of every fingering is clear even in a black-and-white printout. If you arrived looking for a french horn finger chart for one note — "finger chart for A♭", say — find the note in the table and follow its link: every note has its own page with a bigger diagram, step-by-step instructions and the sound of the note. Combinations using valves 1 and 3 together tend to play sharp on all brass instruments; on the horn the correction comes from the lips and the right hand in the bell rather than from a slide, so check those notes (the 1+3 and 1+2+3 fingerings on either side) against a tuner as you learn them.

Single horns: F only, or B♭ only

Some beginners start on a single horn — an instrument built in one key only, with no trigger. This chart still works for you; you simply use one fingering of each pair. On a single F horn, use the main fingerings up to G4 and the "Other side" fingerings printed under them from A♭4 up: the F-side fingerings together form a complete chart for your instrument. On a single B♭ horn, do the reverse: the B♭-side fingerings are yours throughout — the "Other side" fingerings below A♭4, and the main fingerings above it. Single-horn players should know that the high register on an F-only horn, and the low register on a B♭-only horn, are genuinely harder to place than on a double horn; that is the trade the double horn was invented to remove, not a fault in your playing.

A sensible way to practise from this chart

Learn the F side first, as a ladder: start on open C4 and G4, then add one valve at a time — valve 2 alone, valve 1 alone, 1 and 2 together — feeling how each added valve steps the note down. Then practise the switch as a skill in its own right: G4 to A♭4 and back, slowly, thumb moving with the fingers, until the side change is silent and unhurried. Only then take the B♭ side up through its own ladder to C6. Ten slow minutes a day with a tuner teaches more than an hour of guessing, and the note pages here each carry one register-specific practice tip for exactly that work.

Sources — and how disagreements were settled

Every fingering on this page and on the 31 note pages was checked against two published charts before it was published, under the same two-source rule as the rest of this site. The two sources are the NoteAtlas French horn fingering chart and the First 5 Notes French horn fingering chart — both give the double horn, with both the F side and the B♭ side printed for every note. They agree on the side system itself (F side to G4, B♭ side from A♭4 up) and on 27 of the 31 notes on each side. Yamaha's French horn owner's manual states the same conventions in words — the left-hand fingering of a printed pair is the main one, and a range of the double-horn chart is usually played on the B♭ side — and was used as a text-level cross-check of the system. Yamaha's per-note valve states are printed as graphics in both the manual and its Musical Instrument Guide chart, in a form that cannot be checked note by note, so no individual fingering on this site rests on Yamaha, and Yamaha is not claimed as a per-note source for the horn.

Four notes divide the two charts on the B♭ side, and they are named rather than hidden. On A♭4 and A♭5 the main fingering shown is the NoteAtlas version (thumb trigger and valve 2); the First 5 Notes chart prints the trigger with valves 2 and 3. On A4 and A5 the main fingering shown is again the NoteAtlas version (thumb trigger, no valves); the First 5 Notes chart prints the trigger with valves 1 and 2. Both versions are playable — they reach the same sounding pitch from neighbouring harmonics — and the second version is recorded in words on each of those four note pages. One more adjudication is worth stating openly: the NoteAtlas chart also prints F-side fingerings for its four highest flat and sharp notes (A♭5, A5, B♭5 and B5) that cannot sound those notes on the F horn's harmonics at all; they are printing errors, they were rejected, and the F-side fingerings used here are the First 5 Notes versions, which both charts' B♭-side agreement confirms. Ten further fingerings appear in only one of the two charts (all of them First 5 Notes same-side extras, such as a valve-3 version of A4); under the two-source rule they are withheld rather than published. If you spot a fingering you believe is wrong, use the report link at the foot of any note page and it will be checked against the sources.

French horn fingering questions