Best posts made by Trumpetb

Thanks for the warm welcome trumpetplus

I had no intention of causing trouble I just saw something that clashes with my experience

As for experiments there can be experimentation without formal experiments.

The experimentation I speak of is many side by side comparisons of instruments of varied and various types and of varied construction with valve blocks in a variety of positions.

Never have I found that the instrument varies in tone richness as various valve combinations are used, as it should do if the amount of bend in the tube determines the richness of tone. I think that theory is clearly incorrect.

I have seen tones varying in instruments that have valve blocks in different locations in the tubing, sometimes in support of the theory but at other times in complete opposition to the theory and that is not how a good theory should behave. It should be consistent reliable and predictable.

If there is a theory then that theory must be supported consistently by experience and be repeatable and perform the same way every time, any failure of the theory either makes the theory incorrect or calls for further investigation at the least.

If the facts dont support the theory then either the theory is not correct or there must be another explanation.

I stand by my words, I presume your contention is my opposition to the statement that a valve block position closer to the bell yields darker tones than a valve block positioned further away from the bell, and my opposition to increased bends in the tube yielding darker tones.

I have given my reason for rejecting the theory for both, I have seen instruments with valve block closer to the bell with brighter tones than instruments with valve block further away.

In my experience from observations with instruments of all types and a lot of different designs, not as much experience as some have and certainly not as much as a good tech might have but enough experience that I should be able to see clearly whether or not the theory holds true and gives predictable results, and in my view it doesnt.

I have seen however countless examples of correlations between
heavy instrument and dark tones
mouthpiece changes and predictable tone changes
bell shape and predictable tone changes
rim shape and predictable tone changes
oral cavity changes and predictable tone changes
embouchure changes and predictable tone changes

the theories all hold up well in these other areas we can make predictable changes and these changes result in the expected brighter or darker tones.

What I will say is this, under certain circumstances of design and size of bell flare in a cornet for example the valve block must by design be closer to the bell, but if the bell flare is such that the horn plays darkly, the darkness may be interpreted as being a characteristic of the valve block position, whereas it is in truth a characteristic of the bell flare.

Could this go some way to explain why valve block position appears to affect darkness in cornets compared to darkness in trumpets.

We can compare like for like in trumpets as I have done but cornet to trumpet is not a like for like comparison. Is there a way of comparing 2 cornets with different valve block positions that might show the effect of moving the valve block.

And critically how much does that contribute to the tone.

Apologies for the length of this post

I dont see what the fuss is.

I made a waterkey cork out of a used wine bottle cork. It worked fine and lasted years.

Most people have corks they throw out in the trash wine bars cant get rid of enough of em.

Many wine corks have a very suitable portion at the end made up of very fine grain cork and its this portion that we can attack with a craft knife.

You can make 4 water key corks out of one wine bottle cork.

If you cant find the right cork first time there will probably be around 1000 others in their wine cork bin you can select from in most wine bars.

Trim it slightly oversize and friction will keep it in place.

5 minutes work zero cost.

The only problem is making it out the door without sampling their wine.

This is odd that the question is even asked.

Music from the earliest time was heavily improvised it had to be, there was no means or method to write anything down.

Before the time of formal notation which appeared as Neumes in or around the 9th century there was only recalled melodies and learned plainchant and gregorian chant, passed on by word of mouth.

This followed on from Pope Gregory the 1st and his standardisation of chant in the 7th century.

Musicians were expected to improvise and use their experience to do so in groups all improvising simultaneously.

Rules were invented to make it more structured but it often created dissonances and errors which had to be corrected on the fly.

Musician would treat music as a suggestion and use embellishments freely.

Much later when formal scores appeared in or around the 15th century composed music written in a score was treated as a suggested framework upon which to improvise and diminutions and other embellishments were expected to be performed by the musician.

Musica Ficta was expected to be applied by musicians in addition.

Musica Ficta is the changing of the written notes adding sharps or flats, or the addition of many extra notes or the shifting of the melody up or down an octave, according to the skill and talent or desire of the musician and changing the score as it was played to solve issues of discordant note pairs that often appeared.

Later composers complained that the number of added notes in musicians diminutions were so many that the music became chaotic and they began to demand that the music be played as written.

Maestro composers even suggested that while improvising in ensembles, different instrumentalists should play solos individually and each take a turn.

This sounds very much like a modern Jazz ensemble with free interpretation, octave shifts runs and trills and free improvisation upon a theme or melody.

All this was well before Bachs day.

I regard Jazz now merely as a modern version of 15th century musicianship that had many techniques that had become lost over time and have now been rediscovered in the new age.

I recommend the site "Early Music Sources" to understand just how highly developed and technically brilliant the early musicians were.

Dont get me wrong we are very advanced now and Jazz is wonderful, but we must recognise just how wonderful early musicians were and what we owe to them.

@Jolter

Absolutely correct Jolter Monster Oil is marked aspiration hazard.

The problem is health and safety has decreed that all products must be marked aspiration hazard even if there is no evidence that there is a hazard.

This is a legal issue to guard against litigation.

For example disinfectant that kills 100% of germs has to be labelled kills 99% of germs.

No manufacturer is allowed to claim that a disinfectant kills 100% of germs. However a disinfectant that does not kill 100% of germs is useless. They all kill 100% but they are required to say they dont.

Industry is often forced to make ridiculous claims of risk where risk is simply not there, to satisfy ill conceived legislation and by doing so remove threats that simply dont exist.

Tea cozys for example those are the fabric insulators placed over and around tea pots and coffee pots

In 2001, a government report in the UK found that tea cozies were responsible for about 40 emergency hospital treatments each year. The report also found that accidents involving tea cozies had doubled in recent years.

I cannot find any numbers of aspiration hazard from light oils. I can only find 46 cases of inhilation of oil following major oil spills.

A conclusion we can draw is tea cozys carry a similar risk to aspiration or inhilation risk following all global oil spills.

The risk is so slight as to carry no records of any suffering of this risk.

Water carries an aspiration hazard. There are many cases of drowning each year. Water however has not come under scrutiny by the legislators yet.

235,000 people drown every year. This suggests a trumpet player is 235,000 times more likely to die from using water as they are from using valve oil.

Additionally RV's carry a warning to avoid leaving the drivers seat while driving the vehicle. This was following Grazinski V Winnebago when Grazinski left the driving seat to make a cup of coffee while driving at speed and the cruise control was on.

His argument was that it was not stated in the owners manual that drivers should not leave the wheel while driving at speed on the highway.

So yes there is a warning on all oils that an aspiration hazard exists. And it is there not because there is a hazard but because it is required by law for all oils to carry this warning.

It was in 2020 and 2021 that oil manufacturers were forced to place aspiration hazard warnings on their products. You may recall that many products changed their labeling at that time.

Before that time many products did not carry that warning. Does that mean they carried no hazard before 2020 or 2021. The warning was and is a legal requirement and is not due to any quantified risk. It is just the class of products that now require the warning.

For this reason we cannot assume there is a real aspiration hazard simply because it is marked as such.

As I said earlier I have not performed any testing on Monster oil caution is always recommended.

Apart from this very minor disagreement I heartily approve of and agree with your posts on this topic.

I would add that I have never suffered any ill effects of using copious amounts of oils on trumpet including within the lead pipe.

I have never seen any evidence in cases of musicians using valve oil.

I have seen cases of children drinking paraffin based valve oil and then suffering difficulties.

I would also agree that WD40 is in no way safe.

In fact WD means water displacement. This product displaces water and removes it from any surface it falls upon.

Water makes up 75% of the lungs, to place a water displacing product into the lungs is likely to lead to a swift death. I agree with you on this product and would go much further.

WD40 should not be allowed anywhere near the body in my opinion. It believe it is far more dangerous than any traditional valve oil.

Believing WD40 to be food safe is in my opinion similar to believing that my left foot is a pecan pie. But thats just me.

Its not a pecan pie.

The problems with ChatGPT have not even begun to surface.

Already it is being used to create literature.

The literature ChatGPT creates is mind numbing in its mediocrity.

I am put in mind of speech writers that teach students to use various tricks of speech that appear to be dynamic and yet they amount to a series of fireworks that carry the audience with them and yet they say nothing of substance.

These are the tricks that messers Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbles used with great effect to win over a population and take them into a place nobody should inhabit.

ChatGPT is a tool that is correct but it is a tool that sounds a death Nell to creativity.

It should be used as the tool it is and overseen and controlled by people who have knowledge experience and the capability of logical thinking.

I see the death of individualism in ChatGPT and the echoes of George Orwells 1984 in its potential.

Similar to 1984 newspeak I see a contraction of grammar and vocabulary in ChatGPT and the common belief of how wonderful ChatGPT is fills me with dread.

The modern idiom of AI pervades society such that only applications for work phrased in elementary forms are acceptable, only certain candidates are allowed to be employed, only certain phrases are allowed to be uttered, only certain thoughts are allowed to be held, only certain statements are allowed to be made.

Dumbing down of society is now at an end and the more pervasive and more serious dumbing up of society is being forced upon us.

I see factories selling via the internet, AI taking over all thinking, I see whole sectors of society being reduced to poverty.

The only work that people will be offered is hand work making things like garments and fishing rods or working the land.

We have taken a rural society with everyone living in poverty and through an industrial revolution made everyones lives better, living in riches.

And now through AI and computers we are set to take everyones jobs away from them by ending the reason to employ people.

What will the result be.

It holds nothing more than a return to a rural life with everyone living once more in poverty.

@Dr-GO yes indeed white for silver and red for brass I am glad to see you are on board with this.

On the topic of cost of the bottle, if you buy a 12 dollar cork you get a free bottle of wine with it and that cant be bad.

On the other hand a performer of your quality and reputation may prefer to select a cognac bottle to source an appropriate cork

As a middle of the road player myself I favour a robust cabernet sauvignon or a good shiraz for legit, a good sauternes for jazz, but I would heartedly recommend a dom perignon for a performance of the nutcracker.

@administrator I totally agree.

It is interesting to note that this was as true as much in the baroque and renaissance times as it is now.

The improvs quite often became chaotic and discordant to the displeasure of musicologists of the time.

I guess things eventually come full circle so easily.

Some Jazz improvs are spectacularly beautiful as are many orchestral works. But then some leave me cold in both genres.

When I am reaching for something new I often crash and burn, it comes I think with the territory.

First of all there is no doubt that the members in here are all of a very high quality and any difference is not going to be due to any lack or otherwise of skills.

My own experience is that all instruments are different and that goes for differences between trumpets and trumpets between cornets and cornets and between cornets and trumpets.

They do play differently there is no doubt but it is subtle and can easily trip me up.

When I grab a cornet or a trumpet and begin to blow the instrument can easily say to me, whoa buddy just who do you think you are then it opposes me and squeeks at me. But if I blow sympathetically the instrument rewards me and plays beautifully. It can sometimes take a lot of work,

The venerable long cornet Conn 80a, sold 24,000 units over a 50 year period, you dont sell that many units if the instruments fundamentally are out of tune or stuffy. I would look elsewhere for the explanation of why.

I would suggest that maybe it is the approach of the player, the differences in air support, the embouchure, the blow, the tonal concept, the articulation, and a heap of other things that we bring to our performance that is where the main differences between the cornet and the trumpet lie.

What works on a trumpet does not always work on a cornet and vice versa.

This is not cheap advice

This is expensive advice paid for in full from a lifetime of study of growth and of effort

The words reek of quality and importance.

Thank you for sharing those very wise words

Trying to get the root cause of this problem will be almost impossible given that
1 different valves have different clearances in the valve block
2 the valves wear through their life and the clearance changes
3 the valve surfaces lose their surface pits which normally hold oil in a stable film as they wear and become polished
4 different players use different oils with different viscosities
5 different players use varying types of oils with different additives
6 different players use varying amounts of oil some very low and some very large
7 different platers use different pressures and volumes of air as they play
8 different instruments have different resistances
8 the position of the nodes and antinodes changes as different pitches are played and this affects the pressure at the valve and this can lead to increased oil migration up or down the valve
10 changes in the pressure exerted by the player as the dynamics change during play changes the way the oil on the valves migrates during play
11 the temperature and air pressure change each day and this changes the behavior of the oil
12 the amount of condensation in the instrument varies according to the temperature of the instrument
13 the ability and efficiency of the player dramatically changes the internal pressures and volume of air

So many variables affect how the oil sits in the instrument and how it behaves that each variable would have to be tested independently for a meaningful result to be obtained.

They all compound together and we would have to test all combinations of variables.

To be very simplistic, the number of tests that would have to conducted to test all combinations and reach a conclusion could be as many as 12x11x10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3.

That adds up to 239,500,800 tests.

On the other hand we could simply chuck another felt in for a dollar, save a crapload of time, make some great music instead, and stop worrying about it.

Trumpet players when they reach a good level are without exception fighters.

It is the way we are.

We constantly fight with ourselves to progress and we mold ourselves to become the best we can be.

It is evident to me that you are a fighter Vulgano Brother and this tells me you will recover.

And you will be an inspiration to others.

There is not a day goes by that I am not told how much I inspire others and I see that in you.

Few musicians recognise quite how good they are and how much they are respected in society for the joy they bring to others.

It is a privilege to know you, make a speedy recovery.

Here are three players cutting a rug, Al Hirt on trumpet Pete Candoli on trumpet and Red Nichols on cornet.

I am not sure the instruments that Pete and AL played on in this clip but I believe Red played on his regular 1937 Olds Super L.A. cornet.

I dont see how trumpet players would have a problem with a cornet they have the same range and both have the same 3 valves that work in the same way.

Why should they be different as long as the mouthpiece for each is selected with care.

And on the topic of the thread, I believe there is no reason to believe the committee cornet to be in any way inferior to the committee trumpet

It depends on what you mean by improvising

Is improvising just making stuff up with no original song tune or melody to improvise upon, and never having heard what you are improvising on or is it improvising on a pre-existing melody or tune that you have heard at least once.

Last night I was expected to improvise on the fly with no preparation at all and nothing to improvise from. They would not take a no.

It was improv on vocal hip hop rap beats alone that they made up then and there on the spot that I had never heard before.

It was similar to an experience I had of being expected to improv with a group of amateur drummers who were just making up beats as they went according to how they feel. I had no idea what was coming out next as the rhythm changed from moment to moment.

Improvising where there is no melody no song no tune no track not even an instrument, just vocal hip hop rap beats that they make up as they go is somewhat challenging, you dont even know what to expect - tu tuka tu tuka chu chu tukka tukka and it changes from moment to moment this is not my preferred improv.

Mind reading is not one of my well developed skills.

But I did it anyway under protest, I laid down some improvised licks while they laid down some beats.

How does what I have learned apply to improvising of this kind, I dont think it does at all.

I think it was Miles or was it Dizzy who said "You cant improvise on nothing"

They thought it went well, - I however never left my unhappiness zone.

Or maybe I am just too demanding, or I am not experienced enough in improv.

Absolutely fabulous and a good collection

I too firmly believe that holding a broad collection of mouthpieces is the way to go.

I cant understand the philosophy that some players appear to hold, of owning just one mouthpiece and then if they want to try something new they spend weeks or months asking for advice and debating which mouthpiece they might buy in order to try out a different mouthpiece.

That seems such a waste of time and effort spent in choosing when they could be playing.

It only takes 10 seconds to grab and try one out if you already have it with you.

I also have a couple of mouthpiece cornet/trumpet converters and having these has allowed me to try all my cornet mouthpieces in my trumpets as well as all my trumpet mouthpieces.

This approach has allowed me to settle on a wick 4 cornet mouthpiece on trumpet with the converter as my go to daily player combination.

This combination does everything I need and I would never have been able to discover it without having a cornet mp collection and a trumpet mp collection and a converter.

Not only this but you helped a musician friend by providing a collection for him. What could be better than this

Way to go Dale

Pitch is represented by timing, in other words, middle c is 256 hz or 256 cycles per second a above middle c is 440 cycles per second.

If you slow the cycles per second of a note played at a at 440 cycles per second down to 256 cycles per second it will sound exactly like a c.

A correct pitch then produced by a computer is dependent upon the speed that the computer operates at.

If the computer runs slow the pitches will all be flat.

I have done some work many years ago in the area of computer basic operations and the speed of internal clock operations in computers.

What I would say is, the speed of the computer governs the pitches the computer plays in exactly the same way that slowing down a vinyl record lowers the pitch or a train hooter sounding as it moves away lowers the pitch.

Computers are run at whatever speed the system board clock cycle allows them to run at and this may vary and can affect the speeds that software programs run at and the pitches they produce.

Computers cannot be relied upon to govern speeds correctly they run faster or slower depending upon hardware and software resource usage.

The only computer systems that can be relied upon for correct and consistent speed of operation are real time systems that control traffic lights aerospace and flight systems. We dont have access to those real time systems they are very expensive.

The only caveat to this is if the computer is configured with a separate clock system external to the system board such as a timing chip on a separate device, or an external clock maintained and accessible over an external interface such as an internet timer clock.

Even if there is a clock governing the absolute time for pitches, if the computer suffers timing issues the pitches the computer generates must suffer.

One such internet timer clock is the world clock but that is not generally useful for timing a computer internally down to microseconds, and it is not useful to try to do this.

I am not at all surprised that inconsistent pitches in music played by computer systems has been seen, what I am surprised at is that these effects are noticed so little,

For example a music score played over an internet connection depends upon the packets delivered over an internet contended link. If the packets are delivered too slow the pitches may be affected, or pauses appear.

This means musical phrases are sliced up into parts and then reassembled in the computer, and if there is lots of traffic over the internet then slowdowns brownouts and dropouts are inevitable.

A router might receive 350,000 packets per second so pitches at 256 or 440 cycles per second are sliced up into fragments of cycles and each one must be assembled in the correct order or the pitch is corrupted in some way.

We cannot expect music to keep correct time there are too many variables, we cannot expect computers to even play a cd or a dvd or internet music correctly, it is simply not the way computers are designed to operate.

Typically modern computers have enough resources available to not run out while we listen to music so we dont see these effects but there is still a risk of that happening.

I cannot explain the symptoms described there are too many factors at play, it may be due to a temporary loss of of resources preventing correct timing of a short duration that then cleared itself when whatever consumed the resources stopped acting, then the software could operate correctly once more.

It could be that the software running had a corruption and that surfaced as a slowdown.

Resource loss is the usual culprit for slowdown and stagnation it being fairly common for a bad program to consume 100% of the computers resources and nothing is then left for music programs to use.

Expect to see this problem re surface occasionally.

My background credentials are in computer technical support, systems building, and systems troubleshooting on all platforms from intel to motorola to sun unix plus tcpip comms and ethernet.

Word

from rowuk

@Kehaulani

you do indeed count six,

He often had up to eight in the five pennies, it being more a play on his name Nichols, there being five pennies in a nickel.

The members of the Five Pennies were often major players who went on to be major band leaders themselves

Players such as Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden, Glen Miller, Jimmy Dorsey, Pee Wee Russell, Miff Mole, Joe Venuti, and Eddie Lang.

The original Five Pennies were said to be Jimmy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Artie Schutt, and Dave Tough along with Red himself.

My first exposure to Red was watching the movie "The Five Pennies" which was a great movie but sadly with little reality or truth in it.

I am pretty sure that his Five Pennies had several incarnations and formed and reformed over the years as he searched for lasting success which eluded him until he gave up music and then much later resumed his career and reformed the Pennies.

As I understand it he died unexpectedly in 1965 of a heart attack in a hotel room while on the road, and his band played the gig the next day with his cornet sitting on a chair unplayed.

I would liken mouthpiece, instrument, and player, to car and driver.

A new or inexperienced driver does not have the skills or experience to benefit from driving different cars. They desire a change to drive faster or better but they cannot fully extract higher performance from the cars they drive.

A seasoned driver with huge experience understands the car and their abilities far better and they know how to extract good performance from the car and they can successfully change vehicles and extract high performance from each one they change to.

In other words the seasoned professional can acclimate quickly to a new car, when the inexperienced driver cannot.

I cannot speak for other players but my personal experience is I can now acclimate quickly to a new mouthpiece or new instrument, where before when I was far less experienced, it took me a long time to acclimate following a change.

I also believe that failed mouthpiece safaris may be at least partly due to the player embarking upon the safari at a point in their playing when they are less able to benefit from the changes in the safari.

I have myself never gone on a safari, I have known there is a problem, and known what mouthpiece size and shape is likely to help resolve the problem and then made a change to see if I am right. Usually I have been right.

Having a collection helps me in doing this.

Knowing your playing, knowing your equipment and knowing what effect the change will make goes a long way to making the right choice when changing and having a collection enables test changes to happen easily instead of having to wait to acquire a test mouthpiece you do not possess.

It was obvious to me just as soon as the wick 4 that I use now was in the breech, that it was the right choice partly because I knew before trying it that it was more than likely going to resolve my issue at the time and why it would resolve it.

No acclimation was needed. It has been good from the first note and has since performed faultlessly for several months and for hundreds of performances in all styles from salsa to blues to jazz to legit to baroque and to opera.

Know yourself, know your equipment, know what difference a change will make then there is a good chance the change will take you at least part of the way on your journey.

Like a journey from arizona to washington, knowing where you are, knowing where you need to be, and having a good map, helps to get where you need to be and helps stop you getting lost on the way.

May I speculate

The apple store has an app that allows the listener to freely change the pitch and the tempo of a tune in the media library separately.

In other words you can take a tune in the library and alter a tempo slider that alters the tempo but keeps the pitch the same.

Or

You can shift a pitch slider and the tempo stays the same but the pitch changes.

In the real world with real instruments and real recordings this is not possible, shift a recordings tempo and the pitch changes. The pitch and the tempo are locked together.

Not so in the computer world.

Pitch and tempo are simply elements of the digital audio world. This is the reason that autotuners can function and alter the pitch of an out of tune singer while keeping the tempo fixed, or alter the pitch of an out of tune instrument and keep the tempo fixed.

Obviously you were not purposefully adjusting the pitch or the tempo but that doesnt mean that changes that affect the pitch were not able to happen.

Computer software is clearly in complete control of pitch and tempo and the two can act independently.

If a computer program malfunctions then everything it has control over can go out of synch and I suspect this might be what happened.

A restart fixed the issue, and that is typical of a computer glitch when things go out of synch, a restart refreshes everything and brings everything back into synchronisation.

Could this be at the root of this strange behaviour.

If the shank fits your cornets then it is more than likely a cornet mouthpiece.

There are several considerations with cornet mouthpieces.

There are several different tapers on cornets. The Bach taper is pretty standard today but was not standard back in the day.

Bach cornet pieces have more c shaped bowls very much like their trumpet mouthpiece bowl shapes

I have a Bach cornet mouthpiece and the rim measures 16.35 mm whereas the cup depth measures 10.89 mm.
I would class this as a shallow mouthpiece.

For example I have a Wick cornet mouthpiece that measures 17mm rim width and 18.37mm cup depth. I would call this a deep mouthpiece.

A rule of thumb is that modern pieces have bowls shallower than the rim width and the ancient pieces have bowls deeper than the rim width.

This is not a rigid rule many manufacturers make pieces that break this rule of thumb.

The Wick often follows ancient cornet mouthpiece shapes with very deep cup almost vee shaped whereas some Wicks have shallower cups than their rim.

I have an original cornet mouthpiece from the 19th century and that cup shape is very similar to the Wick cup shape measuring 15.9mm rim width and 17.46 cup depth.

This confirms the Denis Wick documentation that claims the Wick cornet mouthpieces originally followed early cornet mouthpiece designs.

It sounds very much like your mouthpiece is an older design than is the current trend. I cannot say for sure without seeing it.

I have a Yamaha 16E cornet mouthpiece and a Yamaha 11E4 cornet mouthpiece both of these represent well modern cornet mouthpieces and they fall fairly close to the modern Bach cornet mouthpiece design. both use the Bach taper.

One characteristic of ancient mouthpiece designs is the shape of the shoulder at the base of the cup where it enters the backbore.

If it is rounded the mouthpiece is probably a later design, if the shoulder is sharp then it is a more ancient design and could be expected to have a deep cup shape. This does not always hold true.

In short I would assume your piece to be simply a much older design of mouthpiece than we are used to seeing today.