Goodbye adjustable finger ring
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I recently bought a 1976 Bach Mercedes trumpet, and love everything about it except for the awkward 3rd slide ring. To keep the all brass (no nickel) vibe of the horn, I started searching for an all-brass fixed ring, and found out that was a real project. I finally found an old slide from a Sears Silvertone with a brass ring on it and bought it. A trip to Southeastern Musical Services and about a week later I had the horn back, the fixed ring is in the same spot as my Stradivarius, and my finger is happy again…lol.
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I have had a few horns with those adjustable rings. I think they existed so that somebody could have one of those things that holds marching band music.....I forget what it's called. But yeah, they are annoying.
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These adjustable rings came into favour on instruments that students would use.
They were generally missing on professional standard horns.
The reason for their existence was that as the student grows into adulthood the smaller child sized hands grow in size and the fingers reach further. A fixed ring can then be awkward for the student.
Students need the ring position to be conveniently adjustable and the adjustable ring allows this.
The adjustment to the ring position can be made easily so that the ring is always a comfortable distance from the valve block for the player no matter how large their hands and how long their fingers.
When they finish growing a fixed ring becomes convenient.
The Lyre holder is a different thing altogether.
Typically I see Lyre holders fitted as standard on cornets and not fitted at all on trumpets. The marching instrument was typically a cornet in Europe.
Trumpet players of course also marched with trumpets and to facilitate fitting a Lyre to a trumpet a Lyre with a clamp was developed. The Lyre then could be fitted onto any convenient tube.
I have always found that the clamp on the adjustable finger ring would loosen at inconvenient times so the fixed ring makes a lot of sense for a serious player.
On the other hand many players dont like or use the ring to adjust intonation.
Looking at images of players like Miles Davis I see that on some images he reversed the position of the ring so that the ring was positioned way beyond reach of his fingers. This got rid of it entirely during that session.
Some players inverted the third slide when the legs on the third slide were the of equal length so that the ring hung beneath the slide. An example of an instrument that allows this is the Olds Ambassador which has legs of equal length and an adjustable ring. This instrument allows three options for getting rid of the ring entirely.
1 is to keep the adjustable ring but reverse it so the ring is extended completely beyond the slide
2 is to remove it and leave it in the case.
3 is to invert the third slide so the ring is under the slide.Some instruments of course were narrow wrap instruments which were built with ring hanging down.
The narrow wrap Selmer with underslung ring that Sachmo played which I believe was one of the Selmer Paris Grand Prix models was an example of this as is the Conn 58B.
This is what I have seen.