I'm so sad I couldn't catch this live, but darn, it works really well as an on-demand stream.

It's amazing the names that are suddenly available for this kind of light-hearted thing. All my heroes, on one stream!

Edit: I think Arturo is right, no-one apart from Sarah could have gotten all these faces up on one screen simultaneously.

@SSmith1226 I missed this topic, apparently, just caught it now. Very cool project! I bet the kids were really happy to have made a music video.

This reminded me of this take of the same song. This is now my head-canon version of the tune. Whenever I hear the original on the radio, I am disappointed that it's not The Smoking Section.

@Kehaulani Surely it adds labor, but it would be considerably quicker than doing extensive engraving, and some makers did that routinely in the old days. Maybe cosmetics was an important competitive edge to have?

Those pictures sort of remind me of reproduction natural trumpets. The old masters (16th and 17th century) often would scrape the brass of the bell and tubing. We got to do this in the International Trumpet Making Workshop using a "knife" with a triangular cross-section. I was pretty nervous about removing too much material!
You end up with a pretty gorgeous finish, click to enlarge the closeups here: http://trompetenmacher.de/en/historical/building-a-copy/

More info about the workshop in the video description:

@kehaulani I find I have to compromise on warmups. A method such as what you posted would take me … maybe 45 minutes to go through? It’s hard to estimate without counting out the bars but it’s a long commitment to be sure. After that, it’s doubtful if I’d have any juice left for the gig!

I try to do a structured diagnostic warmup before a long day of rehearsal or a gig, but still I find it hard to commit to more than 20 minutes at most.

The important thing to keep in mind is that GPT is basically an advanced autocomplete engine. It takes whatever string you input and essentially generates the most statistically likely continuation.

So given that Microsoft seem to have done a poor job of filtering the Bing chatbot’s outputs, you’ll get some funny results. With that in mind, it’s not at all surprising that if you start talking to it like a therapist, it will start coming up with dramatically depressive outputs. Likewise, if you accuse it of being wrong, it will do what people on the Internet do: defend itself rather than admit to a mistake.

That Sinatra clip was way too good. Sinatra at his worst was still better than many artists. Time for something truly atrocious.

I bet the mic was never supposed to be hot...

In case anyone is interested in getting a surface understanding of how these Large Language Models work, I found this article to be quite enlightening:

https://thegradient.pub/othello/

Disclaimer: I have some previous professional exposure to machine learning, so I understand some of the jargon here. Article might not be quite as accessible if you're not already into the statistics and math behind ML. Nonetheless, they make a very approachable thought experiment and manage to implement it in reality. The article shows us some properties of how these models are able to be so eerily good at very diverse topics, from constructing a correct computer program to playing a board game with (mostly) valid moves.

Our experiment provides evidence supporting that these language models are developing world models and relying on the world model to generate sequences.

@bigdub said in Blasphemous takes on classic tunes:

I once saw a bunch of brass players who decided to play while submerged in a city fountain. Only the bells were above the water.

I guess it wasn’t these guys. They do this fountain gig every year on the day they turn the water on for summer.

Speak about blasphemous takes on classic tunes, by the way!

@j-jericho said in Bots are getting scary:

https://futurism.com/newspaper-alarmed-chatgpt-references-article-never-published

Think of each GPT model as a low-resolution JPEG picture of the internet. Just like a jpeg, it’s a lossy encoding. It’s encoding “everything that was ever written on the Internet” into a finitely-sized neural network. It will tend to get broad strokes right but just like when you zoom too far into a very badly compressed photo that you saved off the Internet in 1997, you won’t be able to see what was originally there. If you try to “upscale” it (demand too much detail), the model will oblige but each detail risks being a fiction.

@bigdub That's on the bell tail. It's called a microtuner, or "opera glass" tuner. Turn the screw to tune up or down in small increments.

@ConnDirectorFan That's very cool, has anything more happened to this initiative?

Since there are a lot of duplicates photos, I assume some manual checking and removing of redundancies could be useful, as would categorizing/systemizing the scans further.

@ConnDirectorFan That's very interesting to hear, that JK are now providing their mouthpieces. So they got out of that business altogether, then.

I never saw their 7EW, but I bought a new 7DW when I visited Praha in 2004 or so. It had a wide rim, which was quite flat, a fairly sharp inner bite and a tiny tiny cup in a heavyweight blank. (Not quite megatone-weight but something like that.) I was coming from a Yamaha 11C4/7C and was hoping for just that little push in endurance/range. The honeymoon was nice. Unfortunately my intonation and tone suffered, and this was when I first discovered my lips are too big to be able to play extremely small sizes. I was young and stupid but a senior section member clued me into that my new mouthpiece was not helping my playing.

(The wide rim promoted some bad habits, too, like I used a lot of pressure those days...)

I passed the MP on to a donation drive, instruments for poor students. Hopefully one of them had thin lips...

I have experience of three Amati Kraslice instruments. A pocket trumpet (pretty sad but OK for the money), a stencil double french horn (pretty OK for a student model) and a forward-facing tenor horn (bassflugelhorn/basstrompete).

The tenor horn, pictured, was really quite good. I played it in small ensemble (and even in symphony once) for about five years before selling it on. I inquired about its age and got a response by email that it was “35-40 years old” (in 2016).

The sad part is, it has no serial!

Cerveny are currently producing a very similar tenor horn under its own mark (I believe it is CTR 592-3), which I have played side by side with this one. The new one is of course more airtight, more efficient, and slots more tightly, but the old one holds its own.

@josephtriscari62 Welcome to the forum!

@SSmith1226 I missed this topic, apparently, just caught it now. Very cool project! I bet the kids were really happy to have made a music video.

This reminded me of this take of the same song. This is now my head-canon version of the tune. Whenever I hear the original on the radio, I am disappointed that it's not The Smoking Section.

@tmd Thank you for the assist!

That is so interesting! Like getting a "message from beyond the veil". It's rare that a web forum gets to do an exit survey.

I have seen the same problems at TrumpetHerald, and have decided not to create an account there for the time being, and I think this forum is a bit friendlier and more useful. The only drawback I see to Trumpetboards is the low traffic/participation.

For now, I will just continue to participate, and maybe to a somewhat larger extent now that I'm trying to limit my time on Meta services.

(Administrator, if you do put up a Paypal link or something, I would be happy to contribute some small amount towards your costs.)

@dr-go said in Future survival of this forum:

From this count it appears 10 new users in the past month but no comments made that I can see.

Ah, I hadn't found that view. Thanks! 10 per month was more than I expected, based on the limited traffic I'm seeing.

Meanwhile, the trumpet groups on facebook seem to be amassing new low-effort posts every day. I guess it's down to the convenience of posting media (photos, videos being integrated to the site)? Combined with a critical mass of users?

I guess I'm equally to blame as everyone else, since I've been posting more in a national trumpet player group on FB than here. There are groups for nearly any hobby, including particular vintage brass instrument brands, jazz impro, whatever. While that all fits here, as well, I guess few people want the added friction of creating an extra account. Personally, I see it as an added value that my forums identity is kept separate from Facebook, but seems like everyone else sees it as a drawback.

I'd love to see Meta crash and burn sooner rather than later, but the question is if it can happen before someone else arrives to eat their lunch? And who would it be, if Reddit and regular web forums like this one are not enough?

What would everyone say about a brass-instrument themed Mastodon instance?

@dr-go said in Future survival of this forum:

What is interesting to me is we have more and more new users but very little input from them.

Do we? Color me surprised, as I'm seeing no new posts most days, or even weeks. Is there a way to see the user count?

Hi all,

I've really appreciated this forum since it was formed, out of the ashes of Trumpetmaster.com. I was very happy so many users were able to find their way here.

Obviously, there is very little activity here these days. I figured, for those few who persist in reading everything being posted here, we could take a minute to pitch ideas for what to do next.

First off, what's the competition, i.e. where is everyone now?

I've noticed there is a lot of traffic on some popular trumpet-related Facebook groups, like Positive Trumpeters Worldwide. Personally, I really dislike the Facebook product as well as its parent company Meta. They're really led the way of the notorious "enshitification of the Internet". Content is split across a multitude of groups, interlaced with ads and seemingly random "recommendations" that seem less and less relevant for each week that goes by.

What's worse, any content posted there is basically un-findable on search engines (being only accessible to members), and so the content will go the way of the dodo whenever people migrate off of that site. Web forums are at least persistent.

Moreover, Meta's latest initiative, "offering" a for-pay ad-free version of FB and Instagram feels to me like mostly an attempt to circumvent the GDPR. The EU has required that they offer a way to opt-out of the invasive tracking/advertising practices, yet now they offer it only if you're willing to pay ~10€. It will be months or years before we find out if that evasion tactic holds legal water. The fact of the matter is, few users will pay such a sum for a service whose user value has declined so much since its peak days.

I've seen a few trumpet-related Sub-Reddits, but they seem constantly inundated with sophomore highschool players with their juvenile attitudes. (r/trumpet has 40k members which is not bad, but probably most of those never participate.) Reddit has some of the same problems as Facebook, being another company driven by strange Silicon Valley economics, but at least their content is indexed on Google, accounts are free and they are not as notoriously invasive about ad tracking.

@administrator said in You may be jealous....:

Not so short anymore!

And not so trombone, either!

Anyway, that's a very rocking sound! Very cool, thanks for sharing.