Posts made by barliman2001

@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...

@Dr-GO Needs to be a slide instrument... but if you've once mastered the slide positions on a normal trombone, it's easy (relative distances as regards mouthpiece/bell rim remain roughly the same). It's tougher on the tenor trombone due to the vastly different mouthpiece size. But even that can be mastered with enough incentive: Some years ago I inherited a trombone from a dear departed friend... thirteen years after his passing, his daughter called me and told me they had opened up her father's music room for the first time, and found hand-written labels who was to inherit what... and his pride and joy went to me (B&H Sovereign big bell trombone)... and of course I was in honour bound to learn. First piece I played was Amazing Grace at his graveside... been using it for a number of gigs since.

@SSmith1226 I know...

@SSmith1226 I seem to remember that horn...

@administrator
Whoa!
You should try a different approach - mine.
Got my Courtois flugelhorn as a factory surplus - free.
Inherited

• my B&H Sovereign trombone
• my Selmer G picc

found my Garreis trombone in an ntique shop for a hundred quid
found my latest cornet (Besson Bb/A) in a pawn shop, for less than $100...

Got this nice and wonderfully decorated Conn International off e-bay at € 47...

and was given this nice Arnold & Sons pocket trumpet - the ideal hospital trumpet! free, in exchange for a review...

and finally exchanged a badly dented and patched UMI Benge 7 for this Olds Recording...

Cold is of no importance when transporting instruments - only when playing...
I remember one Christmas gig in Austria, with temperatures nicely below zero for several weeks... and then we were supposed to play a Christmas service in a church that rarely if ever is used (secondary Catholic church lent to Protestants on occasion). When we arrived through about one foot of snow, the caretaker informed us that he "had switched the heating on ten minutes ago".... in a frozen-through Baroque church!!

We were seven - two trumpets, one flugelhorn, one French horn, one baritone, one trombone and a 5/4 Kaiser tuba... when tuning at the beginning, everything was fine. But with having to wait in between pieces for the service to continue... intonation went haywire, and we ended up being more or less halt a tone apart...
horrible... and in the final piece, the rotary valves of the tuba and the french horn suddenly froze... luckily, we were seated near the door and were able to escape with our lives before the service ended...

@Dr-GO Red wine cork for rose brass, white wine cork for silver plated instruments... chips of plastic champagne corks for Chinese-made TSOs...

Thomann are offering different sizes of waterkey corks as well as different thicknesses of cork sheet to cut your corks out of.
https://www.thomann.co.uk/search_dir.html?__cTr=7bedffb2-1e7f-45de-be1e-2790c2f1c4c7&shp=eyJjb3VudHJ5IjoiZ2IiLCJjdXJyZW5jeSI6NCwibGFuZ3VhZ2UiOjJ9&reload=1&sw=cork&smcs=a935ee_13621

As your question is resolved, I will close this thread.