Update for everyone: I'll probably be out of hospital some time next week.

This question is one that hits me very directly as it is connected to my permanent condition as an Autistic... We in the Autistic Spectrum tend very much to overemphasize our shortcomings and belittle our capabilities - it's just one of the expressions of how our brain is functioning. I don't say that only we experience this; but most of us are more prone to thinking we are not good enough than Neurotypicals. I'm looking at my own example: I finished my Leaving certificate with best marks, being third in a class of 129; I completed undergraduate university in record time with an MA in history as third of a class of 355. I then completed my PhD in record time - less than a year - coming second in a class of 88. And yet I always sought after becoming better still because being second was already a cause for depression - I was simply unable to put my achievements in relation to what others managed to do. Even when I reached the absolute pinnacle of my chosen profession and was awarded a Professorship in Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, I was not content. I could not strive for more, but there was that nagging thought I was not good enough... it ended with a divorce and deep depression; several years of therapy which did not help me at all because the therapists did not recognize the root of the problem, i.e. my Autism (and please forget everything about Rain Man and similar movies: There are such people about, but they are at most one % of the Spectrum). Only when one clever psychiatrist, at the goading of my wife, took the trouble of testing me for Autism did I suddenly receive the master key to everything that had ever happened in my life, and to my own mind. Since then, I have found the key to compromise and happiness; and now, I am not driven any more to try and reach unattainable goals, but am content to be what I am, and - in music - to be a good player within my own comfort zone. I still try to do as well as I can; but I now accept my own limitations while still trying to improve. And I am happy that way.

Hope you could make some sense out of this.

Well, after mourning TM and my hard-earned status as fortissimo user, I'm here.

Whether you are celebrating Christmas, or Hanukkah, or Diwali, or the 12th Week of Halloween, or Birthday or Wedding Anniversary or Happy 9th Divorce, my Season's Greetings to you. May all of you enjoy the best of health, the best of food, the best of company, and the best of trumpets!

At this point, I think I just have to chip in with the story of how I got hooked into big bands... 1993... I was a fairly competent amateur player with lots of experience in brass bands and wind bands, some orchestral stuff and already a vast repertoire of church stuff. No jazz experience whatsoever. Then, one Saturday morning, I got a phone call... a very Bavarian, very bearded voice at the other end...
"I've heard you're a trumpet player." -
"Yes?" -
"We are a big band." -
"Yes?" -
" You have a red shirt?" -
"Yeees??" -
"Free this afternoon?" -
"Yyeees?" -
"Be at the Saint Florian Restaurant at three." CLICK.

Spoof or truth? Well, the place was not too far away, so I collected everything I thought I might need... rotary Bb, rotary C and picc, black jacket and bow tie... (my usual church gig outfit) and went there.

In my innocence, I thought it might be just a short gig, with probably a third or fourth trumpet awol, possibly an hour's sight-reading of easy stuff, cash in and get out... "otherwise you don't hire a guy you don't know anything about four hours before a gig"...

What I found...

an Austrian wedding, and the band scheduled to play for the afternoon coffee break, then provide dinner music and continue to play for the dancing until dawn... the guy who had gone awol was the 1st trumpet, and they expected me to fully replace him for a whopping 16 hours or so... with a repertoire I had never seen or played before... I had to come clean about my big band experience so far, so trumpet #3 stepped up and I filled his place and managed to muddle through somehow... interestingly enough, they did not throw me out afterwards with catcalls and rotten eggs, but invited me in as full replacement for the now promoted #3. I stayed with that outfit for a full eleven years, playing another 196 weddings with them, 40-50 balls, and smaller gigs, numerous... have never been without a big band ever since.

@BigDub In a local paper: "The inventor of Autocorrect just pissed away. He was an anthole. Restaurant in pieces."

@bigdub Sir Thomas Beecham is best remembered for this incident... He loved to mingle with the audience in Covent Garden during the interval. One day a guy rushed into him and without apology, asked him where the loo was. Sir Thomas told him to follow a certain passage, adding, "The first door is labelled "Ladies". Don't go in there. The second door is labelled "Gentlemen". Go in there nevertheless."

Two trumpet players in Rome, in the only caffè possible!
barliman2001, left, and ssmith1226, right.

A friend of mine, former musical show trumpet player Alexander Gerzenberg, now has decided to throw his vast expertise in all things trumpet in with the Breslmaier company, being part responsible for mouthpiece development. A few days back, he gave me one of his first efforts at hands-on creating screw rim mouthpieces for my birthday. It's quite a story, so I am sharing it with you.
One of the chief products of Breslmaier is creating screw-on rims for existing mouthpieces, and vice versa. Usually, the leftover bits are thrown away for recycling... now Alexander has made it his pastime to root through the throwaways looking for something nice. What he found was a Bach Mt. Vernon 1 1/2 stem and cup, and a Bach Mt. Vernon 1 1/4 rim, both discarded. He cut a thread on both, inserted a slightly tapered distance ring and thus created what might easily be described as a Bach Mt. Vernon 1 1/4 A mouthpiece...
I played it for a full day yesterday, on both my Courtois Balanced and Olds Recording, and it was fabulous... nice control, warm silky smooth sound with optional paint-stripping... definitely a keeper! Thank you, Alexander!

P.S.: Tried it on my Courtois Roger Delmotte D today, a very mouthpiece-sensitive horn, and it was grand on that as well...

Suddenly, after a longish wait, I found "Global Moderator" beside my name... well, quite a few people here know about me from TM, but for all those who don't or who did not really care at the time, here's all about me. I don't have a fancy website - more or less because I'm busy updating my wife's website. But here's everything of interest about me:
I'm a 53-year-old Bavarian (well, German national, but I prefer my local tribe) living in Austria, near Vienna. Married to an opera singer (www.reginaschoerg.com). By trade, I am a historian.
My musical past consisted of children's choir, then the local church choir and finally, after studying voice with several renowned teachers, soloist with the Passau Cathedral Choir and the Dublin Guinness Choir. From age four, I played piano - did not really like it, but was good at it.
Until I accidentally put my hand through a glass door and cut a nerve. Fortunately, the same year I had won my first trumpet in a raffle... went on to Kinneil Band in Scotland (current British National Champions!), then back to Germany. Seven years in Ireland, playing with a number of brass bands and the Greystones Symphony, eventually conducting this orchestra. Since then, Principal Trumpet of the one and only Vienna Klezmer Orchestra (www.klezmerorchester.at) and webmaster for Munich-based Markus Fluhr Big Band (www.bbmf.de).
So far, I have performed on trumpet in twelve different countries and a total of 97 orchestras or bands (usually as a sub). I have been known to pack the car at a moment's notice and drive several days just for one interesting gig...
My finest moment in history? When I walked into a Vienna coffee house and they had a clarinet converted into a table lamp!

Feel free to contact me - I'm sure to answer.

@flugler Nice offer; but I want that special cornet and none else...

Several reasons come to mind...

1. Many professionals have been contracted as Signature Artists - they get paid (sometimes huge sums) to play on a certain manufacturer's horns, and endorse them. Their personal horns are then crafted to whatever specification they prefer. So it may well be that some professionals are playing Committee clones - we just don't know.
2. Many professionals in the past were playing Committees - when they were still being manufactured and readily available Nowadays, full professionals - whose livelihood depends on being able to perform very full schedules - would probably shy away from using an instrument that could not, in case of accident, be readily replaced. There are myriad stories around of professionals' horns getting lost in transit or being mislaid on airports, or being severely damaged by luggage staff (remember Dave Carroll of Sons of Maxwell fame whose valuable guitar was damaged by United Airlines staff, inspiring him to write an appropriate song...
   and several sequels...

@Dale-Proctor Well done!

All went very well...
Except...
They had said, "it's a modern church, with a good heating system". Indeed. But no warning that for climate protection reasons, they only switch on the heating on Sundays.
Yesterday was a Wednesday. Horribly cold, but was happy to have brought my Brand Turbo mouthpiece (plastic mouthpiece which does not get cold)...
Picture wobbly because I shivered so much!

For those interested - I played that gig on my Gaudet/Courtois C, with a #1 Brand Turbo mouthpiece. My partner on 1st trumpet had a Selmer Radial C... very French trumpet section, blended well.

IMHO, most Martin Committees are way overpriced due to demand from players who want one even if their playing capabilities don't warrant such an investment...
I don't deny that there are wonderful instruments amongst those remaining with us; but it is a fact (as with all instruments) that there are some played-outs and duds amongst them and what's even more important, an instrument needs to be suited to a player's charactristics and typical repertoire. You would not play a Mozart Mass on a Committee, just the same as you would have your work cut out playing swing solos on a Selmer piccolo.
So, as with all instruments, only buy "into the dark" if you cannot really miss due to proven quality, known fittingness of instrument or good price.
I have several times bought "into the dark" because something seemed desirable at the time... with the result that afterwards, I either could not get to grips with the instrument, or it had some hidden defect, or it failed to fit a need I had. Result?
Neither of these instruments is with me now.
I'll explain:
As a relatively inexperienced players, I had a lot of recordings of music for the corno da caccia - and I had money to burn. So, when on a business trip to Leipzig, I casually wandered into Friedbert Syhre's workshdp because there was a beautiful silver-plated corno in the window, and bought it for cash (a whopping € 4,000). I practised on it once a week, perhaps, for about five years, never played a single gig with it, and then sold it to a guy who really could use it, for half the price.
A couple of years later, I found a Clemens Glier Kuhlohorn on e-bay; really wanted it as a rotary flugelhorn to complement my piston Courtois. Bid on it till the cows came home, got it, used it for about ten rehearsals and two gigs and then found that as a flugelhorn, it was unsatisfactory compared to my Courtois, and sold it on to a player in Vermont who can really use it in church music.

At one time, I was so completely kitted out that I virtually had a trumpet for every possible pitch (A, Bb, C, D, E - for Hummel Original [which I never played] - Eb, G). The only thing I lacked was a trumpet in F. So I, young fool that I was, ordered one from Vinceent Bach, silver plated. Took about six months to get to me; played beautifully; but then, again, I was lacking opportunities of using it. So after a year, I re-sold it at half price.
One more instance: I had a beautiful Besson Kanstul Bb/A picc that I really liked and which I sounded nice on. But I was dead set on having a Stomvi picc, due to the Maurice André connection, and sold the Besson Kanstul for a Stomvi Elite. Nice horn; but the valve block was built a bit lighter than the Besson, and it did not fit my hand so nicely which forced me to exert too much pressure on the valve block with the result that valve #1 regularly got stuck... something I had never experienced with the Besson I am using in this pic...

I'll continue with my success stories...
Found an oldish, almost worn-out Courtois Balanced Bb at Votruba's in Vienna for a price tag of € 300, had it refurbed for another € 150 and been playing it successfully in symphonic settings ever since all over Europe...
About a year later, in 2018, Votruba's called me to see a nice horn that just had come into their shop out of a trumpet player's estate... turned out to be a nicely preserved Olds Recording, for a mere € 450... has been my main big band axe ever since...

Hope you can make some sense out of my rambling!

@Dr-GO We don't have a dog house... luckily, there is a maxim in the family that stand-ins always come first. Last stand-in was my wife doing Olga Kokozova in The Count of Luxembourg at two hours' notice...

Just got a call from a choir conductor... he needs me as second trumpet in Mozart's Piccolomini Mass on Christmas Day...
modern, well-heated church, playing in the organ loft (civvies permitted)... so all the plans of spending Christmas Day with my mother-in-law went overboard - no turkey for me!

@Kehaulani-0 "It's not Unusual..."

I know exactly who Alison Balsom is... but the lady in question was in her fifties when she bought the cornet off me (around 1993), and dark and short-haired... if she is still alive, she must be in her late seventies or eighties by now. And the Munich brass band Alison Balsom played in was a very different entity from the band I joined on flugelhorn in 1992... in my time, it was more or less a scratch band put together from odds and ends of failed oompah bands, with an averge age of between 60 and 90, and fell apart around the 2000 mark more or less from old age of many players... the current Munich Brass Band is an excellent band mostly made up of younger, aspiring players with an entirely new organisational corset and the like.

Many, many years ago (must have been around 1995), the late Hermann Ganter of Munich made me a cornet and gve it to me, suitably engraved, as a birthday present.
Some years later, I was in financial straits and sold that cornet on to a fellow cornet player, an English (?) lady called Alison Something then playing in the Munich brass band.
Shortly afterwards, I had to relocate and lost all contact to the band, the lady and the cornet.
Now, I would dearly love to get that cornet back somehow, but the band disbanded and reformed and there are no records of contact details of the players...
Yellow brass lacquered shepherd's crook cornet, engraved with HERMANN GANTER and a German language birthday message mentioning my name. No serial number.
If you know anything about the whereabouts of that cornet, please contact me!