Best posts made by Jolter

@shifty said in WTB mouthpiece case:

Protec Trumpet/Small Brass Multiple (4-Piece) Leather Mouthpiece Pouch with Zipper Closure, Model L221

That's exactly the product I have now. I have loved it and used it for 11 years until it started to flake recently. I just found the receipt.

Clearly it's not leather, despite the product headline, and it didn't last the way I expected real leather to last. Of course, it's priced way below what a hand-made product would cost, but still at $31 from an otherwise reputable brand, I would expect them to use the advertised materials. I'm very disappointed.

Here is what it looks like today - let me know if you think that looks like leather! (The black top layer, which is flaking off, is some rubbery polymer, the light-grey middle layer is some foam, and the darker-grey bottom layer is clearly woven fabric.)

The product as named on the receipt is "Protec L-221 Leather Mouthpiece Pouch - fits four trumpet
mouthpieces, quality design and protection, includes belt
loops and exterior pockets.
Price: 24.90 EUR"

Unless Thomann were selling counterfeit PT products in 2010, I'm not going to trust that brand with my money again.

Thanks to everyone who recommended products so far, I'm considering "moving up" to a Great Leather 5-pack even though I've never needed more than 4 so far.

The Torpedo 4-pack looks nice but impractical - I wouldn't see which MP is in which compartment which is a non-starter for me.

The PT 4x or the Great Leather 5 pack both allow me to open the case, sitting on the floor or a table, and see them all.

One more idea would be to use this kind of language model as a classifier for the mods to use: is a particular post insulting, uses demeaning language, etc? Then alert the mods by pm.

Hey there!

I've heard people mention oiling the leadpipe for this particular reason, but I've never put much stock in it myself. Red rot is a form of corrosion. There are apparently still competing theories exactly how it happens, but everyone seems to agree it is caused by exposing the metal to a slightly acidic environment over a long period of time. Ergo, the best way to preserve brass should be to keep it clean and dry when in storage. If you have acidic saliva or sweat, you run greater risk of red rot, but it should be very possible to mitigate it by simply cleaning it more often than others.

If you're really worried about this antique, maybe do a leadpipe swab after each play session, followed by a wipe down with a soft cloth. No horn will rot if it's clean and dry.

I suppose the argument for oiling would be that the film of oil will stick to the inside surface and prevent acid (hydrophilic) solutions from sticking there. I don't know if there's anything to that theory, but my experience as a mechanic says that if you add oil to any place that's exposed to air, that surface will start collecting particles (dust). And once you have particles stuck on a surface, those particles will absorb humidity, which means you now have an oily, dirty and wet surface. I'd say that's a red rot waiting to happen right there.

An engineer would say: lubrication goes directly on bearing surfaces and nowhere else in the machine. Other surfaces should be clean and dry.

All this said, I don't swab my leadpipe. I do empty out all slides when I get home after a rehearsal or gig, and there's usually plenty in there once the cold night air has condensed the humidity out of the last breath I left in there. I clean as often as the next guy (every few months). I always rinse out my mouth or brush me teeth before playing. Never suffered red rot in one of my horns yet.

Certain models seem very prone to red rot. Kanstul "Besson Meha", older Benges, the Yamaha Miyashiro model, for instance. You might have to be extra careful around one of those.

@Kehaulani said in Mouthpiece recommendations for young beginners:

Well, here we go in circles. Isn't a Yamaha 11C4, Yamaha's take on the Schilke 11?

I think it is, yes. And not coincidentally, an 11C4 was included with my Yamaha beginner's horn in the 80s, so that's what I played all the way up to age 23. It's actually marked "11C4/7C".

I noted they now include their 11B4 with (at least some of) their student line. I suppose that should work well for youngsters, except if the student has thick enough lips to find the B cup too shallow. Both pretty middle-of-the-road pieces, on the smaller side. They ship a 16C4 with their pro line trumpets - IMO, they might as well not include one...

@j-jericho It does not provide any sources. In fact, the model does not “know” where any of the training data came from. All it knows is a bunch of numerical weights between nodes in a graph… Well, that’s what a neural network is if I oversimplify it a bit.

They fed it all of the text on the Internet up until 2021 so it has a fairly broad corpus as a basis. It can answer questions on many things that Wikipedia has no information on.

@ROWUK said in Old vintage maintenance.Conn:

I would never oil the inside. Remember: valve oil is NOT food safe and if you oil the bore, you WILL breathe in the vapor.

Regular maintenance should include bathing the horn in proportion to how often it is played.

Supposedly WD40 is food safe and designed to displace water (WD=Water Displacement). That may be an option, but just as I prefer bathing myself, my horn certainly deserves regular attention too!.

I am not convinced WD-40 is food-safe. It does not have the smell of a food-safe product.

In fact, I googled it and would advise against using it in a wind instrument based on this material safety data sheet:

IF SWALLOWED: Immediately call a POISON CENTER or physician. Do NOT induce vomiting.
IF INHALED: Remove person to fresh air and keep comfortable for breathing. Call a POISON CENTER or
physician if you feel unwell.

Apart from that nuance, I agree completely with your assessment.

"Common data formats in Germany".

This one, I actually kind of enjoy because they obviously love the source material and are playing with it in a pretty virtuoso way. I think the use of contrabassoon here is quite inspired.

But I played it to some people who absolutely hated it! So I think it still fits the theme of the thread.

@ssmith1226 said in Bots are getting scary:

@j-jericho said in Bots are getting scary:

@ssmith1226 Does ChatGPT provide references/footnotes with its summaries? When I want generic information, Wikipedia provides it, but usually when I do an internet search, I want to be able to screen the sources, as some have more veracity than others.

If you ask it, it will provide sources. The below is an example. Remember, Wikipedia is not necessarily accurate either.

Sources:

Harbo HF, Kyvik KO. Sarcoidosis: a complex genetic and environmental disease. Genes & Immunity. 2003;4(2):63-70.
Alho AM, van der Meide PH, Visser LH. Neurological manifestations of sarcoidosis. Sarcoidosis vasculitis and diffuse lung diseases. 2006;23(2):85-90.
Alsulami Z, Castro-Gago M, Calero-Linares C, et al. Clinical manifestations and therapeutic options in neurosarcoidosis: a comprehensive review. Journal of the neurological sciences. 2017;375:85-93.

You’d do well to check each of those citations before using them for anything important. ChatGPT is prone to hallucination when you prod it for specifics such as sources. See this short write up from a mathematician:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33841672

I was pretty surprised and happy, because I hadn't had much success with Google. But it turns out that every single one of those references and links are made up. The references don't exist and the links themselves appear to be cobbled together. The last link for example, takes you to a paper on "Grain mixes for subgrade layers" - the title in the url is irrelevant and only the number matters.
Googling for some of those authors throws up author pages with their publications, and it turns out they've never published papers with those titles!

@Comeback said in Reasons to NOT Collect Trumpets:

So, my reasons for not collecting trumpets:

Let me add another:

• Collections are risky - Collectable objects are attractive objects to steal. In case of a burglary or fire, you risk losing them.

Of course, this goes for any wordly possession, but I've heard this exact reason from an acquaintance who was thinning out his herd. If looking to invest money, invest in something that's not in your house. Imagine if your house were to burn down, you would lose you player instruments and your life savings! Whereas if you have your savings in alternative investments (stockmarket, gold...) if your house burns down you can still liquidate your investments.

@j-jericho said in How about a "Random Meaningless Image...let's see them string"?:

That seems indeed very random. Am I supposed to be seeing something?

No comment on that video.

Use this thread for covers that should never have been performed, or at least never caught on video.

@j-jericho said in Bots are getting scary:

From a layman's perspective, does not electronic communication rely on electric pulses perfectly following their paths with the precise voltage and duration? And considering the physical size of the hardware, is it possible that electronic pulses can, due to extreme miniaturization, sometimes follow a path not intended by its designers, creating unexpected errors which can be difficult to trace or replicate, yet nevertheless cause a program to function abnormally?

Yes, it is possible. It happens from time to time that a bit "flips" in a memory chip, causing a 1 to become a 0 or vice versa. It's usually attributed to cosmic radiation.

Another possibility is that a bit becomes flipped in transit, during a network transmission, by randomly interjected electrical fluctuations in wiring, or cosmic interference with the transmitting or receiving chip set.

The good part is, most of these occurrences will either:

1. (best case) cause an error or exception to be thrown in the running program, because the corrupted data is no longer to be interpreted, or if it was program code that got corrupted, the resulting instruction is invalid. Normal computers will fail in a "loud" way if this happens, and normal program error handling should ensure that nobody gets killed as a result. Program crash is a common symptom.
2. cause a computation to continue executing normally but with incorrect data. In a fault-tolerant system such as aeronautics, this can be discovered and corrected for, by doing the same calculations in redundant systems. Normal computers will not find or correct for this type of error.,

There are statistics from the big cloud computing players on how common bit flips are. IIRC, you won't see flips daily or weekly per computer, but you can have multiple memory bit flip incidents during the multi-year life of an average computer. Due to good modern programming practices, these very rarely become a problem to the user.

Error correction techniques are employed to try to detect or correct bit errors. In communications, bit errors are fairly common and the communications protocols will contain contingencies like check-sums and automatic re-transmission of failed packets.

Memory in consumer hardware doesn't have error correction codes (ECC) but more expensive server hardware generally does. Anecdotes abound but I've heard that servers with big memories will register a couple of correctable events a week, which the ECC memory handles automatically.

Rick is the best! If you haven't taken the opportunity to attend his trumpet making workshop, do it as soon as possible! I have a feeling these instructors (Rick Seraphinhoff and Bob Barkley) may may be approaching retirement age.

I attended in Rostock 2018 and it really is a memory I'll keep for life. The empowerment you feel once you realize that instrument making is actually approachable and something you can pick up, to some extent, in one intense week.

https://www.seraphinoff.com/about-the-international-trumpet-making-workshops

You get to do exactly this exercise in the workshop -- shaping a leadpipe, hammering it together, silver soldering, burnishing, polishing, etc. But of course, you also get to make a bell (hammering, anvils, noise, mandrel, more burnishing, more hammering, more noise...), you get to shrink and expand tubing, to solder using silver and tin, bend tubes in Cerrobend (not as cool as pitch but a bit easier to handle), make a scraped finish, fit it together, pick out a period mouthpiece and play a concert together. Best of all, you walk home with a well-playing replica of a 1635 natural trumpet that you engraved your own name into, that you can leave to your grandchildren.

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.

In case anyone is wondering, I was in touch with Kanstul's sales office a couple of weeks ago. If you follow them on Facebook, you'll see they are/were having a fire sale on mouthpieces, 70% off.

Anyway, the information I got was that there were only two employees left apart from Jack Kanstul. One sales guy shipping out stock and a lady doing the books. Last update was, they're selling of half-finished or near-finished horns, and some bass trombones. Don't know when the doors will finally close but it doesn't look like there is much stock left of anything.

@bigdub Looks to me like we're on complete agreement. In poor taste but skillfully performed.

Now here's something else in that vein... I really can't fault the skill of anyone involved but is this any way to treat Mozart?

In my opinion this is actually pretty good.

The Tofanelli version is cool, but I wouldn't listen to it several times. I think Uri Caine genuinely captures the spirit of the original even though the style is completely different. Mahler wasn't going for "cool".