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.
My mute bag is a ratty old backpack, so I stuff all sorts of things in it:
I find the music nearly never calls for anything else. Derby hat can be emulated by playing into the music stand, and no conductor has ever complained to the section over it.
I would like to replace the bucket with something else that's easier to put on quickly. But I'm not sure I can justify the expense, plus right now we have matching red&white buckets across the section.
The Bubble mute is really better in aluminum, I think. Copper is so heavy it falls out easily. I got it as a gift 18 years ago and somehow still didn't wear it out.
The mini straight is used as a straight, it sounds nearly identical to my larger DW straight. It sits further up the bell but seems to do the same thing. It's also small enough to use on plunger solos, for variety.
It's always fun to see international attention pointed at these instruments. The Euphony "ess-kornett" is particularly well regarded. It is better in tune than the predecessor A&O ones, yet retains the correct tone.
What other things are musicians getting up to, now that there are no gigs anymore?
I love this kind of initiative which shows how creativity can be stimulated by restrictions. Suddenly, they have time to pursue video production because regular rehearsals and concerts are prohibited!
(I guess it goes without saying that Sweden only banned crowds over 50 people, so far. It still seems a little risky to seat more than one player per car but at least they're not breaking any laws.)
A musician friend of mine is giving 30-minute concerts on Facebook once a week. She live streams, and people can send in donations via the local equivalent of Paypal. I guess it is paying off decently enough because she's now going on five weeks. She's also given (paid) "balcony gigs" at a home for the elderly. That is, the patients are on their balconies, and she played outside.
@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...
@trumpetb said in Weirdest thing happened:
@Jolter You chose a topic that nobody knows the answer to, so by your argument, nobody should answer the OP, but the OP wants an answer.
Here I disagree. If I had asked the same question, I would have felt better if I had received no answer, than if I had gotten a seemingly endless stream of verbiage that culminated in an “I don’t know” at the end.
At the risk of using too many words for you, if you dont like my answers you have the choice to not read them.
I do, and in practice that is most often the choice I’m making, to simply scroll by.
Some people in here seem to value my words even if you do not.
I can’t speak for others here, but neither can you, I think.
I happen to believe that members should be able to contribute freely so I would never suggest that you stop writing even though you appear to be suggesting that I stop writing.
If members dont like my words they should tell me they dont like them, they should not tell me to stop writing.
Thats my opinion.
I’m not telling you to stop writing. (Of course, I don’t have any such authority.)
I’m asking you to please ask yourself a particular question (see above) before posting. It is my strongly held opinion that everyone should ask themselves that question before posting here. Your posting is the only where I have felt compelled to mention it, since to most people it seems to be an obvious thing to do.
I will not object to, or disagree with, any particular content in your posts to this thread, since in my opinion there is no content to them.
@longtones said in How many is too many?:
I've been searching for an Ahlberg and Ohlsson swedish kornett for years. They always seem to disappear before I can secure one. I have a little brass quartet here in The States that plays out of the Svenska Messingskwartetten book that was recorded by members of the Swedish Radio Orchestra back in 1999. I'm also a huge fan of the Medevi Brunnsorkester and the whole Swedish brass tradition. You must have a blast playing!
My question is this: Where did you get your reproduction? Are they still being made? Would you happen to have any leads on a used A&O Bb or Eb that one could purchase?
Forgive me if this is too bold. It's just been difficult finding info on this from over here in the US.
Thanks so much for the help.
I'll move the conversation over to this subforum so we don't clutter up the Lounge thread with serious topics. 
Here's an imgur album of my cornet. It's not an A&O but a contemporary copy made by Schuster & Co in Markneukirchen some time in the first half of the 20th century. They were one of several factories in Central Europe who provided lower-cost (and often higher-quality) instruments for Swedish ensembles.
The restoration work was done by a local craftsman and cost about as much as having a modern reproduction made.
I will type up a somewhat longer post about this cornet, but I am a bit short on time today.
@ssmith1226 said in Funny story that's sort of trumpet related...:
Of course it was during intermission in the mens room. Our performance, by the way, was a duet version of “Handel’s Water Music”.
A friend of mine at University got invited as a student representative at the Nobel Prize dinner. Yes, they do that, dozens of students attend every year. There's a lottery for it. Anyway, he ended up at the urinal next to His Majesty the King of Sweden. He mentioned being slightly intimidated but declined to comment on what piece was performed or any other details.
Discretion, always discretion, he told me.
@fels said in Pic mouthpieces:
I am borrowing a Getzen Eterna Pic to try my hand (embouchure) at playing pic in our quintet. Did not come with a mouthpiece. Owner uses one of his trumpet mouthpieces. I just tried my Schilke 14A4a and 13A4a and they seemed ok. Any suggestions for alternatives? I am not willing buy a pic mouthpiece for the trial - though am interested in opinions should i choose to buy my own pic.
So how did the trial go?
My one experience with a Getzen piccolo, my instinct was to run far away, fast. In other words, I found it quite hard to play and would not have taken it if they paid me. But I think they made different models and some might not have been terrible. I'm playing a Yamaha YTR-6810 now, which is in the same genre and price range as the Getzen, only built so it's in tune and sounds good.
As for mouthpieces, the Schilke and Yamaha "picc mouthpieces" have the X backbore. So, the 11A4X and 14A4X (both brands) are good candidates, depending on your diameter preference.
@trumpetb said in Weirdest thing happened:
May I speculate
[...]
Could this be at the root of this strange behaviour.
Dude. If you don't know, have you considered that you do not have to be the person who tries to help?
I get severely turned off by these huge walls of text you keep posting in nearly every thread. Each containing about 0.1 ounces of actual content, wrapped in a metric ton of words.
When you feel the urge to post something helpful, just, please ... take a little break, take a walk, consider the question "am I adding something of value to the thread, or am I just stroking my ego by trying to seem knowledgeable?"
Sometimes you do provide insightful commentary, so I'd like to keep interacting with you, but the amounts of verbiage you spew at every occasion really tries a reader's patience. The "ignore" button tempts me every time I see one of your walls of text.
@longtones I'm afraid you won't have all that much luck on eBay. It seems like few of these instruments made it across the pond, and eBay is a very marginal marketplace in Scandinavia. (Well, I buy stuff on there all the time, but I wouldn't even think about posting something for sale there. International is just too much hassle, excepting private forums and facebook groups.)
So, if you want to find an antique Swedish kornett, you'll have to branch out to local/regional marketplaces. I'll list a few sites and auction houses below.
Let's start with an effortpost on orientation in the classic Swedish ensembles. From the most common to the least, they were:
Note: The counts are excluding the percussionist, so a sextet was usually a 7-piece band, etc. But drums were mostly optional, and most period sextet or quartet arrangements do just fine as "chamber music" without drums.
I'm excluding here all larger ensembles, since they differ little from continental bands and don't need much explanation.
Chromatic brass instruments had significant differences in the early 19th century across different marketplaces. Stölzel valves were huge in France for cornets/cornopéans, and Berlin valves were popular in Central Europe and Germany. Gradually these were supplanted by technically superior Perinét valves and rotary valves, respectively. In northern Germany (from Berlin and up, what was called Prussia), a type of cornet had developed by the mid-1800s.
It had the following distinguishing features:
The sound is very bugle-like, and if played idiomatically it produces a quiet and mellow sound, compared to modern trumpets, cornets and flugelhorns. It can play loud if pushed, but at great expense of embouchure stamina... It also has some quirks of intonation (like all flugelhorns, but more so). This makes it suited for an ensemble of other period instruments, which are likewise more bugle-shaped than modern tubas, horns etc.
The first Swedish manufacturer of these kornett-family instruments was I.V. Wahl of Landskrona, who was a wunderkind and built his first woodwinds professionally at age 16. He learned brass instrument making in Prussia in 1824, and brought this design with him. His were the first brass instruments in Sweden to be playable and affordable enough to find a wider use in bands. The wind octet took shape soon after, employing Wahl's new kornets in Eb and Bb, as well as alto horns, tuba and some woodwinds.
Wahl gradually took on employees and apprentices, and in 1850, two of his apprentices graduated and began a walk north to Stockholm, where they set up shop under their own names: Ahlberg & Ohlson.
They promptly revised Wahl's designs and improved them, and eventually outcompeted their old master. After a couple of decades, A&O were the dominant player in brass instruments in Scandinavia. Their instruments were part of the standardized Swedish military band as well as the opera and symphony orchestras of the capital:
For the navy bands, they made special orders of piccolo kornett in Ab (!). The navy did not like to employ woodwinds on board their ships, and the piccolo kornett took the role of flutes and high clarinet parts in arrangements. As far as I am aware, there are two playable examples in Sweden. One is in a museum and is sometimes lent out for performance, and the other is with a private collector and performer.
A special quirk of Ahlberg & Ohlson is the cylindrical rotor. Unlike continental manufacturers, who started making their rotors slightly conical, A&O never took to this novelty and persisted in making them cylindrical until they closed shop in 1959. This design makes restoring leaky valves an expensive prospect, since the rotors have to be re-plated and honed. With conical valves, making them tight again is a 5-minute job on the lathe.
Studying the history of A&O specifically, it is remarkable how little they revised their most popular instruments between 1850 and 1959. The kornetts were more or less the exact same for the whole era, though some details did change: Bell garlands were gradually disposed of across the whole range of products as bell making technology improved. Valve slide tubing has slightly more "square" bends in the first few decades and became rounder at some point before 1880 or so. But basically, you could interchange parts between the first and the last soprano they built, across a time span of 109 years!
Looking at tubas/bombardons, the catalogs stated "these instruments can be provided with rotors on request, but these will have a less favorable blow". Whatever that means. The fact of the matter is, the old Berliner Pumpen will almost always be worn out and need significant repair. When found in a playable state, these tubas have a very direct and unique sound, and not much volume. A modern tuba will require very sensitive playing not to overpower period horns and kornetts.
A&O tuba:
Moritz tuba:
They also made more "generic" brasses like slide trombones, french horns, and trumpets in various keys, which were mostly copies of French or German instruments and are not very remarkable today. I do hear good things about their orchestral trumpet in low F, where a surviving instrument is reportedly used at the Gothenburg Opera for suitable rep, such as Wagner. Probably, these were built as custom orders. I have never seen one on the open market.
Options beyond A&O
Bands who could not afford to buy A&O would send A&O originals abroad to have copies made in Graslitz, Markneukirchen or other places. Some of these copies are arguably improvements on A&O's design, like what Schuster & Co produced, while some of them are more faithful copies. Most of the makes are anonymous and practically impossible to identify, but Schuster & Co were persistent about stamping their trademark Saxon crown on the bell of each instrument. One, two or three crowns, depending on the quality tier of the model. Mine is an example of the "simplest" model, having little nickel silver trim.
End of an era
From what I gather, the death knell to A&O's business was the reorganization of Sweden's military bands that occurred in 1957. Out went the low Eb trumpets that had provided the fanfare parts and the kornetts in Bb and Eb which had done melody duty, and in went the modern piston Bb trumpets for both jobs. The rotary valve trombones were finally replaced with slide trombones, and Eb horns with french horns in F. Modern euphoniums and baritones took over tenor part duty from tenor horns and valve trombones, and tubas were from then on played in EEb or BBb.
A&O did already provide most of these modern instruments, but were for some reason not able to adapt their business to the new market. Both founders were already long dead, and as I've noted, the firm had long suffered from a lack of foresight in instrument design. As far as I can tell, they had not employed a proper instrument designer for decades, instead making do with copying others' designs.
Further reading
While I'm reluctant to advertise for the great big tech company of the West, there is a facebook group named "Ahlberg & Ohlsson" which is quite good for answering questions about these instruments and their performance, as well as hosting a repository of catalogues.
Next up, I plan to post something about repertoire ... Yes, I use mine for period rep, nothing else. (See above re: blending with trumpets...)
Let me wrap up with some pictures:
A period band from an industry town seems well-rounded but does not conform exactly to an octet. This would be very common, you make do with the players and instruments you can get. Gustavsbergs Blåsorkester in the 1920's. All of these brasses look like A&O.
Top row: Kornett in Bb, alto horn, tenor valve trombone, bass tuba, tenor tuba, kornett in Bb (I think)
Bottom row: Drum, drum, kornett in Eb, three clarinets, another tenor trombone, another clarinet.
Probably the best and most well-established Swedish wind octet to perform today, Oktetten Ehnstedts Eftr.. These guys have albums on Spotify, don't miss them!
You've already seen/heard this group; likewise the most famous Swedish brass sextet on period instruments with period rep. The group plays all summer at Medevi Brunn, and in 2021 they recorded many entire concerts for Youtube. (The players rotate week by week but are all music educators, professionals, or specialized amateurs.)