Posts made by barliman2001

@administrator A bit over-restored, to my taste. By all means take out the dings and make it play-ready; but re-plating removes all the character of its age from the horn - especially as many horns of that period originally came in a matte finish.

@Kehaulani-0 Exactly. And as Bitburg is a small town attached to a biiig brewery, the brewery picks up most of the cost...

It's that time of year again... Welsh scratch brass band Coronation Brass are recruiting for players to join them for their annual participation at the European Folklore Festival in Bitburg, Germany.
11th to 15th July, 2025
I'll include the official invitation letter.

It's always a really fun event as TBers Steve Smith and Ivan Hunter can bear witness to... five gigs in four days, with no rehearsal (everything sight-read in front of appreciative audiences), with the chance to sit in with other bands of very different descriptions.

Details in the official letter and either from me or from Nick Jones (contacts in the letter).

"Coronation Brass
Coronationbrass@hotmail.com
Y Gaer
Llanfair Caereinion
WELSHPOOL
SY21 0DG
+44 7811 946826
February 2025
Invitation – European Folklore Festival, Bitburg.
11th – 15th July 2025.
Dear All
I hope this finds you well – this is a formal invitation to you to participate in Coronation Brass’s annual trip to the
Festival in Bitburg this July.
We had a fabulous trip last year, and it was fantastic to have a virtually full band for once! All our concerts were a
roaring success as always.
I’m hoping we can get a fairly full band together again this year, and as always if you know of any players who
you think would fit in with us, please feel free to pass this letter on. We always seem to struggle for cornets for
some reason, so get your thinking caps on!
As in the last couple of years, I won’t be arranging transport – the easiest way to reach Bitburg is to fly to
Luxembourg, and there is a bus transit from the airport to the town. If you’re driving, let me know if you’ve got any
spare seats and anyone struggling with transport please drop me a line, and I’ll see what I can do.
Accommodation and meals are provided – The price is the same as last year - £220 for four nights.
The full schedule has not been completed yet, but it is likely that our first performance will be on Saturday
afternoon. This means that you can either arrange to arrive on Friday afternoon, or Saturday morning. The final
concert will be on Monday evening.
For those of you who haven't been before, we play a programme of what can best be described as cheese, sorry,
brass band classics, in a central square in the small city of Bitburg. It's part of the European Folklore Festival
which has, in previous years, seen musicians and dancers from across the world perform to large audiences. We
will play two or three concerts each day and there's plenty of opportunity to enjoy the festival and all the brewery
town has to offer.
I don’t need definite numbers at the moment, but if you would like to join us, please let me know as soon as you
can. Also, if you know you definitely can’t make it, then please get in touch so I can approach another player.
Feel free to contact me for further information
I hope to see you in July!
Nick Jones
Coronation Brass"

And if you don't have a cornet, but would like to join - there are always a few spare cornets around to borrow. Just tell us in advance, and bring a suitable mouthpiece.

@J-Jericho Usually, only the later UMI models show up - and they are, basically, crap...

As some of you may know, I have a Buescher Aristocrat 264 Bb trumpet. I loved playing it, usually in big band and accompanied by my Buescher Aristocrat 265 Bb cornet... now, I am at a point where the 264 does not fit my playing charateristics so well any more, and it is getting relegated in favour of my Olds Recording and my Courtois Balanced (of which I have two...). So the Buescher 264 now leads a very retired life at the back of my trumpet cabinet... and needs to get out more. So I am thinking of selling, but not at any price.
It is yellow brass, with the original lacquer at somewhere like 90%, everything original and lovely short-stroke valves with as-new compression. Now what kind of price would one be able to ask for it?

Hi there,

as many of you will know, I started off playing in concert pitch (in Lutheran trombone choir), and then had things like Ab conversion instruments to cope with normal Bb parts, and then painfully re-learnt my fingering for Bb.
I never managed to learn transposing, and usually cope with bringing the correct pitch instrument with me. Now in May, I am supposed to play Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 5 which oscillates between five different trumpet pitches... I simply can't bring five instruments for one gig.
Does anyone have a Bb or C transposed 2nd trumpet part they could share with me?
Would be very much appreciated.

This is more or less very cold coffee. The Vuvuzela became popular during the 2010 soccer world championships in South Africa and took over stadiums during the 2014 champoinships in Germany. For that reason, most vuvuzelas on the market today are in the German national colours, black, red and gold (as can be seen in both videos).

@callmekolak SOLD - sorry. Should have locked the thread.

@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!

I can confirm that that iceberg is huge, and in pristine condition. Steve Smith has been hoarding treasures for years... now it is for you all to say "Open Sesame" and get at the treasure...