Posts made by Trumpetb

I think you misunderstand what I was trying to say.

I did not mean he was musically uneducated, reading scores and being musically educated are two different things as you said.

What I mean to say is he developed new styles and ways of playing unrelated to others. This is one of the signs of genius.

It has been said that because Bix was not formally or classically trained he developed a range of alternate fingerings that were unique to him.

In the excellent "Current Research on Jazz" "Bruce Boyd Raeburn" published these words about Bix "Bix is the only musician who created a separate and distinct jazz style"

And then went on to say "Bix pulled his style right out of the sky. He would sit in front of the Joe Oliver band, with Louis in it, enjoy it immensely yet not one phrase or lick did he ever get from them"

For these reasons and many others my opinion is that Bix while he was definitely influenced by others, broke new ground in his playing and his influence on Jazz was profound innovative and influential.

This is the link to the current research on jazz article
https://www.crj-online.org/v4/CRJ-BixNewOrleans.php

@J-Jericho Thanks for confirming that timbre changes are real and present. I had not heard them and had not expected that.

Perhaps different people simply do hear things quite differently, and there can be an acute sensitivity to timbre in some people.

I am put in mind of synesthesia and colour blindness.

Synesthetes see colours and shapes when they hear sounds and perhaps have difficulty understanding those who are not synesthetes.

I should thank the member who opened my eyes to this particular sensitivity to timbre.

I feel it will be valuable to hear other members experiences in this area as well to maybe establish a yardstick this would be valuable to understand on a deeper level what our audiences are actually hearing and experiencing.

@Dr-GO Thanks for the replies.

By the sound of it our experience is much the same, I too have the ability to alter the timbre by embouchure and chops changes.

I suspect that the people who have questioned my ability to hear timbre changes when using valves maybe have more acute heating than I have, but if my hearing is similar to most of the other players then I think I have nothing to worry about.

I dont wish to start a fight or an argument but I am slightly worried by things that have been said to me, so I am asking for an opinion from the gifted players in here.

I am not trying to be funny here it is an honest question after being told how trumpets really sound as they are played.

This is the problem I have.

It has been said that the number of bends or the amount of bend in the wrap alters the timbre of the instrument and this is used to explain why the cornet with an extra 180 degrees of bend in the wrap plus a shepherds crook has a very different timbre than a trumpet with fewer bends and no shepherds crook.

An opinion I have stated in here is that if the bends in the wrap cause a change to the timbre then we should hear different timbres in the trumpet when using different valve combinations because they add bends to the wrap.

The timbre change should be significant and very noticeable when adding three valves compared to playing open for example.

I should also be hearing a large timbre change when playing the exact same note with valves 1 and 2 compared to playing the alternate fingering of valve 3 alone. But I do not hear a timbre change.

I do hear a detectable but slight pitch difference between the two fingerings, but the timbre of the instrument sounds the same to me when the pitch changes.

So why does a trumpet with two valves pressed not sound darker and richer than a cornet played open when the trumpet with two valves pressed has more bends in the wrap than the cornet has when played open.

I have been told that these large timbre changes absolutely do happen when you use the valves and I have been told there is something wrong with my hearing if I cant hear these timbre changes.

When you guys use the valves do your trumpets sound at first like trumpets and then they sound like cornets and then sound like flugel horns.

I do not hear that at all my trumpet sounds like my trumpet as I ascend, I dont think I could play an instrument that sounds radically different in character every time I press a valve. The simplest melody would sound like a bunch of amateurs playing each note separately on a range of brass instruments. I dont want that.

Mariachi trumpet sounds bright but it sounds bright to me on all the notes played, Mariachi doesnt sound like a mariachi when played open and like a flugelhorn when played with all valves down.

All my instruments and I have several have the same timbre as I ascend. The timbre of course is different at the upper register than at the lower register but that is not what been expressed to me.

I do not want to play an instrument that changes its character radically when I press a valve or two. If I have a medical condition that stops me hearing my trumpets correctly, I need to know and get some help.

I feel ridiculous asking this, but I have been told there is something wrong with my hearing so I have to ask the question.

So what is going on enlighten me on this.

@Kehaulani and @a-j-trumpet

I have come to realise that you are both correct.

The boat has indeed sailed as you say Kehaulani.

And Bix was a champion without the benefit of modern tools like internet youtube netflix. He broke new ground in his day totally unaided as did Louis.

Thank you for your comments and for illuminating my understanding.

I am speaking of the playing back of recordings only.

If a note is played on let us say a trombone and the slide is lengthened the pitch falls but there is no tempo as such it is a single note.

If this pitch is played within a piece of music then there are notes preceding and notes following the note in question.

Now we have tempo and pitch together.

If we record this music consisting of pitch and tempo and we speed up the playback of the recording then the pitch rises, they are locked together by the recording medium.

If we slow the playback the pitch falls, again they are locked together.

We can of course in a live performance slow the tempo while keeping the pitches correct, but the thread was only concerned with playing back on a computer, a recording of a performance and the pitch changed while the tempo of the recording was unchanged.

With a cd or a tape recording or a pressed LP, if you alter the tempo you alter the pitch.

Computers can however take a recording with a tempo and pitches and slow the tempo while keeping the pitch constant, or change the pitch without altering the tempo.

I therefore have said pitch and tempo in the real world are locked together but in the computer world they are not locked together.

Or do you perhaps know of a way of changing the speed of a gramaphone or of a tape machine without altering the pitches. I have never seen that I would be very interested in learning of it.

I agree it was speculation, thats why I called it speculation.

Yes I did not place a conclusion at the end because it was speculation and as such should not have a conclusion.

Speculation is for example the light in the sky might be an airoplane, an added conclusion would be, the light in the sky might be an airoplane therefore the light is an airpolane.

Look I am not explaining what pitch is I am explaining that a computer program can control pitch independently of tempo,

Again you misunderstand what I write or misread it.

I explained that pitch and tempo in the real world are locked together I know you know this, but I expanded that with in the computer world pitch and tempo are separated and independently controlled.

If you have a degree in computer communications that does not necessarily include programming and media.

I have 30 years in IT. I have programmed in several languages I have worked in comms I have authored software in assembly language for a major computer manufacturer.

If you claim my post had nothing helpful in it, I would expect that you have asked that of the OP rather than simply express your own opinion.

As for my coming across as being knowledgeable in music I dont believe I am certainly not compared to the majority of members.

I have however learned a great deal and enjoyed some success so I have opinions and I will express them.

And I will say this, you appear to demand that writing in here must have a conclusion, not every piece of writing has a conclusion, stop demanding conclusions all the time.

If the posts to the threads in here are only allowed to have absolute answers in them and every post must have a conclusion then most of the questions will go unanswered and the site might die due to inactivity.

Allow people to speculate, allow people to have opinions, do not demand there must be a conclusion in every post.

Remember that if a thread remains unanswered within a certain time it will be locked and quite right too, but your demands may force the locking of threads due to there being no replies.

We dont want that do we.

There thats a conclusion

Feel free to complain about my wall of text

The original post you quoted saying it was packed with verbiage was this

"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."

This is packed with information relating to the problem and you call it verbiage and a metric ton of words.

May I suggest that you reconsider your comments I think you have missed most of what I was talking about.

I feel that there is a difference of understanding here, I am saying things that you dont understand, that does not mean that you have less understanding than I do, it just means we have a difference of understanding.

Maybe I am just not using the right words.

More than likely that is my fault.

As for your saying you are not objecting to any particular content in my posts, isnt that exactly what you are doing, objecting to my posts.

@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.

At the risk of using too many words for you, if you dont like my answers you have the choice to not read them.

Some people in here seem to value my words even if you do not.

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 didnt mean to suggest that you might have made any changes yourself that caused these problems. My contention is that if a software malfunctions it affects whatever the software has control over. Nobody intentionally runs a software bug they just occur and the operator suffers the effects.

This could be caused by a software bug.

That also means that if apple music were affected, then garageband would not be affected.

The way software works is when you use a software application, Word for example or Photoshop, you use a copy of the software that is loaded into memory from the software that has been installed.

You then run the copy that resides in memory. If the copy is a good one the software behaves as expected, if however there is a corruption when loading the copy into memory the software misbehaves and that is a bug or one type of bug.

This is why apple music might work fine for most of the time but on one occasion it might misbehave, it is the faulty copy that was loaded into memory that misbehaved and not the installed software. Other software like garageband is unaffected.

if you restart and run apple music again you get a new copy of apple music so it then works fine, no bug.

You might think you are always running the software you installed but you never do, software can only run from a copy of that software that sits in memory.

I think the point is being missed lets look at a real example.

Here is Grieg playing his own Bridal Procession in 1903

And here is a later recording of William Murdoch playing Griegs Bridal Procession in 1931 just 28 years later

https://www.google.com/search?q=recording+of+griegs+bridal+procession&rlz=1C1GCEA_enGB973GB973&oq=recording+of+griegs+bridal+procession&aqs=chrome..69i57j33i10i160j33i21.13740j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:f607949a,vid:cUYNgacgIQg

I could have chosen any one of many other recordings of this work and seen the same thing, all are played significantly slower than the Grieg himself played it.

The argument that Grieg played it at a faster tempo than he wanted to play it was because he was forced to play it that fast by the recording medium is simply untrue.

Murdoch used the same recording medium of 78 that Grieg did, the later 33 1/3 technology was not invented until 1948, some 17 years after the Murdoch recording.

Murdoch therefore suffered the exact same constraints as Grieg did and by rights should have been required to play much faster and at the pace Grieg was, but he didnt play it at the same pace as Grieg played it.

The argument that the composer played it faster because the recording medium forced him to is in my opinion simply an attempt to justify modern musicians wishes to play pieces at a slow tempo.

I would ask, are they right to do this.

I would also ask how can musicians say "play as written" if they play all works slower than they were written, but then claim the composers really meant them to be played that slowly and then make up indefensible arguments to support that claim.

There are many more examples of modern musicians simply playing slowly with no good reason for it, other than the musician thinks the music sounds better played slower than written, if you look for them but few are so clear and so striking as this one.

Ahhhh I understand apologies for my confusion

Love that answer.

Some composers undoubtedly would compromise I agree.

It depends on how much perhaps.

Is a 30% change in tempo an adjustment, I ask because Grieg did play 30% faster in tempo than many recent recordings.

We often speak of 1% 2% maybe 5% but 30% is a huge change.

Imagine an orchestra about to play the 1812 overture which takes 15 minutes normally, being told by the event organiser "Thats great but I need you to finish it in 10 minutes or less."

I can imagine the 1812 played in totality in 9 or10 minutes but that is neither an adjustment nor is it a palatable concept.

I think chaos is an apt description.

Pace is critically important if the pace is too fast emotion and meaning dies. Equally if the pace is too slow understanding and meaning dies.

And I dont think Samuel Barber would have agreed to knocking out his Adagio for Strings in 5 minutes instead of the 8 it usually takes.

The feeling and sense of a work is bound up in the pace and to knock out a contemplative work at 100 miles an hour does nobody any favours least of all the composer.

Likening this to Fine Art Picasso painted Guernica and the canvas is 11 feet 6 inches. If a gallery approached him and said " We love the work but we only have a 7 foot long space for it, can you shrink it down to fit our 7 feet long wall", Picasso I am sure would have replied " No, get a bigger wall"

You ask does it matter musically if the tempo is altered, great question. I think it does, if the composer wanted it substantially slower he would maybe have composed it that way, does it really matter if we slow it down slower and slower until an energetic work sounds lethargic and sluggish if we choose to.

The flight of the bumble bee was composed at 178 BPM and if audiences want it performed at 30 BPM should we perform it at that pace. I think not, it is a 178 BPM piece its majesty energy and power is a result of its pace so that is how we should play it.

I suggest that this question is already answered by the people who have ridiculed the modern Baroque orchestra musicians who played the work at the fast pace they believed it should be played at.

If the tempo of the work were unimportant then those who complained would not have made an issue of it.

I am however on your side to an extent in that I believe it is good to play around with tempo and reach for a new perspective but this ceases to have meaning if we are unaware of the tempo the work was originally composed at.

It is all relative after all.

But there is a limit if we slow the tempo enough we eventually reach Larghissimo at 24 BPM, and then music ceases to be notes separated by spaces and becomes spaces separated by notes, it then becomes meaningless and then we have destroyed the music.

So I guess it is important.

That is true that is a fair point.

I will challenge that however.

Here we have a composer who is at the height of his art, would he really have agreed to compromise the work he slaved over to perfect it and considers it representative of his craft and then rush through it to appease a recording studio and make it less than perfect.

The studio serves the artist not the other way round.

I dont consider myself anywhere like the capability of Grieg, but I refuse to compromise my standards and rush a piece just because the audience cannot spare enough time for me to play it properly.

Would Mozart have galloped through a performance of the magic flute just because it was inconvenient for the theatre to play it as it was composed.

I have also consistently seen older recordings or rather heard them and they are all played at a much faster tempo than recent recordings.

And as for recordings having equipment constraints a Baroque orchestra in the UK who have studied baroque compositions and playing and have made recordings in recent years, are not subject to such equipment constraints you speak of, and they play baroque and renaissance works very much faster than other contemporary orchestras play them.

It has been remarked that they play like they are on speed, I think they are unfairly ridiculed for the speed they play at, maybe they have actually got it right and it is the rest of us who are misguided.

I see specialist musicologists playing old compositions swiftly at a brisk tempo full of energy.

I believe if anyone truly understands Baroque works it is a specialist Baroque orchestra who have intensively studied them and concluded that they need to be played briskly and not at the conventional pace we usually hear them at.

It is easy I know to dismiss these early recordings as musicians and artists being forced by the recording equipment to play 20% or 30% faster than they should be played, but there is a mounting wealth of evidence that this is not the right conclusion.

And I think we have to face the question honestly, - would an artist singer or composer who is recognised as being right at the top in the world, like for example Pavarotti was, be persuaded to make low quality recordings just so they can fit them on a limited length of recording media.

When I am asked to lower my standards I simply say

NO!

I would expect the best to do no less.

I agree completely.

There are however additional considerations, tempo in the past was much faster than in modern day, we can see this on the few original recordings that survive from the late 19th century and early 20th century.

For example recordings made of Grieg playing grieg are played at a much faster tempo with more varied timing and dynamics than is present on modern recordings of grieg.

I dont think anyone would argue that Grieg did not know how to play grieg.

This is a very common and noticeable characteristic of original recordings made 100 years or more ago versus modern performances made just a few years ago, the modern performances are played very much slower.

Also the timing in original recordings is far more varied and variable than in modern recordings and performances.

Modern recordings tend to be far less varied and less nuanced - almost clinical in their precision compared to older recordings of the same works.

The older performances I have listened to carry far more energy in my opinion than their modern performances, and there are accusations in the general community that orchestral works are boring for younger audiences.

Are we in seeking perfection and seeking more emotional performances simply causing a rejection of orchestral works that the original performances did not suffer over 100 years ago.

I personally find the older recordings to be more energetic and more interesting than modern performances.

Audiences love faster I am concerned that if this trend continues we risk alienating them when we play works slower than the composer intended.

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.

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.

@barliman2001 I love Olds and I know many others do love them, Red Nichols played an Olds Super I believe for much of his career.

I read some time ago that Uan Rasey who I respect immensely was offered a Recording by the factory but refused it and asked for an LA Ambassador, but he was refused that possibly because it was the lowest priced instrument in the range, he eventually ended up with a compromise instrument they made up especially for him.

I believe the issue was that he didnt like the offset valve block on the Recording preferring a normal straight valve block and I suspect he simply found no issues with the quality of the Ambassador valve block.

I seem to recall it being stated that they built a Recording with an Ambassador valve block just for him. I cant swear to that but I like the story.

It has been claimed that the original Ambassador and the Mendez were on a par but the Mendez had more expensive parts plus triggers, they were both built around the same time under Foster Reynolds.

The LA Ambassador is a player.

It has been said that the philosophy at Olds was no compromises were allowed and all instruments were to be built to the same high standards.

Certainly that appears true of the LA period instruments.

@thm588

Understood, that is unfortunate and a bit of a blow.

Olds are great instruments, both of mine are excellent, once you have this resolved it should be a good player.

As I understand it the LA Specials are well respected instruments.

Good luck with your search for a third valve, it will be worth it I am sure.