Posts made by Trumpetsplus

@ACB said in Survey: How do YOU test a new trumpet?:

@Trumpetsplus this is a wonderful answer and a similar approach I have. Soft playing tells all in terms of efficiency of design for me at least.... ALWAYS music for me.
Aw. sweety!

If the gap is OK it just means the the receivers are different lengths. Nothing to get worked up about. Your current receiver is fine.

@Dr-Mark As I have written in My Friend the Trumpet, the first and only lesson required to play the trumpet is to breathe, hold lips together (as if saying M) and blow.

@Kehaulani said in How To Play Trumpet With Less Tension:

@Trumpetsplus said in How To Play Trumpet With Less Tension:

My heart sinks when I see students waving around the photos of successful trumpet player's faces and wanting to look like them.

In Philip Farkas' book, The Art of French Horn Playing, he's got a number of photos of top horn players' embouchures. The first thing one is hit with is that no two embouchures are exactly the same.

apropos of nothing here
One should never play a piece of music the same way once.

The reason that the world "embouchure" is banished from the lexicon in my teaching studio is that players will often think that xxx embouchure is something to strive for. No. One's embouchure is the result of doing things correctly for one's own body in the performance of trumpet.

Compare it to aiming for the sub 4 minute mile, or the sub 2 hour marathon. Both of these are results which will occur given the successful implementation of particular actions.

My heart sinks when I see students waving around the photos of successful trumpet player's faces and wanting to look like them. Visualizing their own embouchure! What a joke! The shape of the lines etc on a trumpet players face are merely the result of their having played the instrument in their own way for a long time.

Do we copy a weight lifter's physique? No, we go the the gym and work out (or other people do!).

Start with 5 notes, slowly. Poo attack slurring from 2nd line G up to 4th line D. Assess how the instrument and the sound feels. Then up to D and down again. Invert - G down to C and back.

That tells me pretty much all I need to know about a horn. If the basics are right most the other stuff will be as well. No horn is perfect. Live and work with the imperfections of your chosen one for the sake of its assets. Rather like choosing a life partner!

Yes when you have narrowed the choice down, check out some high notes I suppose, and rapid tonguing.

I might add:
When I play test a horn I often end up playing some piece of music (like a ballad) that I had no idea before I started I was going to play.

So now we can officially give you a hard time!

@Dr-Mark said in Tuning Tendencies:

@Richard-III said in Tuning Tendencies:

Totally agree with the behind the bell and the actual sound being different. I've recorded many a practice and performance and listened back. Some instruments have issues to work around and others are just about perfect, with no slide use. Listen to some old recordings before there were slides and recording technology to correct tuning and they managed to play in tune. So why not now?

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That's a great question but I'm not knowledged enough in antique trumpets to answer. I know little to nothing about old horns. However, there are people on this site that can field this question. We have serious brass technicians and trumpet builders that can answer your question. Possibly trumpetsplus or flugelgirl can help.

Well this is an enormous subject, however we know several things: Older instruments were built with the valve slides deliberately long (flat), recording fidelity was not to the same standard as today, and we are talking about supremely talented players that could probably have made even a pTrumpet sound great!

This abstract describes a change in intended slide lengths between the 1930s and the 1960s.

I will throw the cat amongst the pigeons. Ascending valve instruments were around years before instruments with adjustable slides. 100 years ago Merri Franquin's trumpet made by Thibouville Lamy solved the intonation dilemma by side stepping it. Instead of playing C# 1 2 and 3, you activate the ascending valve bringing the instrument up one whole step and play that pitch as a B natural.

The ascending valve trumpet has many other advantages such as:
High A played open and the slur from high G to A is a cinch because they are both on the same harmonic.

My go to horns are my ascending valve Bb (Bb/C) and my ascending valve C (C/D).

On the C/D trumpet the beginning of Mahler 5 ta ta ta taaa is now 2nd valve! Not 1, 2, and 3, (C trumpet) or 2 and 3 (Bb trumpet). And the top note becomes an open G!

Fun! Fun! Fun!

The principle is very simple: in order to achieve maximum resonance for any note, the instrument's acoustic length must equal half the wavelength of the note. If an instrument is being "blown into tune" the notes are being blown out of resonance, the trumpet is being played inefficiently.

Because 10% of 110 (=11) is bigger than 10% of 100 (=10), and sound frequencies change in a proportional way, not fixed, we need to make the instrument progressively longer when more valves are utilized. If the first valve is long enough to lower an open note by one step it is not long enough to lower a third valve note by one step. This is an immutable law of physics

It requires either divine intervention or some form of physical compensation to enable the trumpet to be consistently resonant on all valve combinations.

This is an excellent listing of the tendencies. But there are many differences to this list shared by many (but not all) trumpet designs. One difference I should mention is the very sharp 3rd overtone C (look at the number of top professional players using alternate fingering 2 and 3) on many C trumpets.

Also let's consider the bell effect (thank you Arthur Benade). Because the instrument has an open bell, sound waves do not see their zero pressure happening at exactly the same place. Specifically low notes think the instrument is longer and high notes think it is shorter. The lower the note the flatter it tends to be, the higher the note the sharper it tends to be (poor technique notwithstanding). Incidentally this is why the pedal C, first harmonic, is so unusable; it is almost a 10th lower than the first overtone "low C". It is why the didgeridoo overblows not at an octave but a 10th (or so).

The solution to this global untunefulness is balancing the amount and quality of feedback to the player with projection into the auditorium. I have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours working on this balance.

Phew! Got it! I can do trumpets, but some of this computer stuff is just Knutz. Thank you all for your help.

Here is what I posted

Should we get a legal opinion as to whether this site could be held liable for any deal from such a Trusted Seller going south?

File is still rejected 1600x2000 4.1MB

They are around 4MB

When I load images into my website builder (Everweb - it is fantastic!) that program automatically adjusts the file size to web resolution. However if I attempt to load images into my post here I get failure notices that the file size is too large. Is it possible to incorporate such an auto resizing thingy into this site?

I have expanded on this and posted a blog - http://www.jaegerbrass.com/Blo/Entries/2019/9/difference-between-cornet-and-trumpet.html

Here is the text What is the Difference between a cornet and a trumpet?

When I started playing the cornet in NZ in 1958, the brass band community was vehemently “anti professional”. If anyone was discovered to have been playing for money, in a dance band for instance, they would have their brass band association registration revoked, and would not be allowed to participate in such events as contests. Dance band at that time equalled trumpet, and playing the trumpet was regarded as heresy. Being terrified by these regulations, we young cornetists wondered what the difference actually was between cornets and trumpets. We were told that cornets are tapered and trumpets are cylindrical. This is the commonly accepted view, but, as I have observed, not correct.

Shorter?
The cornet looks to be shorter than the trumpet. It is not. Both instruments play the same pitch indicating that their lengths are the same. Yes the silhouette is shorter but the tubing lengths are identical. The cornet looks shorter because the tubing of a cornet is coiled into two complete turns whereas the trumpet has only one. We refer to this as the wrap. Anyone who has experimented with different shape main slides on their trumpet will have experienced the great effect that these different shapes can make. The cornet has two more half turns than the trumpet.

Conical vs Cylindrical?
Many think that the tubing of the cornet is conical whereas the trumpet is cylindrical. This is incorrect. Both instruments have roughly the same proportion of tapered to straight tubing as the accompanying graphic shows. Both the measured instruments have bores starting at around 0.335” at the mouthpiece entry, 0.459” though the valve section, and 4.8” at the bell.

The tapers of the lead pipes and bells of both these instruments are the same. I have been told that when French Besson were designing their trumpet they used the same bell mandrel to make the bell as they were using for their cornet. To this day Vincent Bach cornets are offered with #25, #31 or #37 bells which are some of the same bell shapes offered on their trumpets. When 19th century composers were calling for chromatic instruments, these parts went to the cornets because at that time trumpet players were insisting on keeping their valveless “Natural” trumpets. Maybe the straightening of the cornet by one turn to more closely approximate the silhouette of the natural trumpet helped in having these new chromatic trumpets accepted.

Valve Section Placement
The valve section of the cornet is two thirds down the length of the tubing whereas the trumpet valve section is halfway down its length (plus or minus a little bit). This positioning places the valve section (which is where the player holds the instrument) at the center of gravity so that the instrument balances in the hand.

Mouthpiece
The mouthpieces for both these instruments are quite different. The cornet, in its British Brass Band mode, requires a relatively deep V shaped cup, whereas the trumpet prefers a shallower bowl shaped cup.

Experiment
I built a cornet which has a receiver for a trumpet mouthpiece. It can be played with either a trumpet mouthpiece or a cornet mouthpiece (when used with an appropriate adapter). When I use a trumpet mouthpiece it sounds and feels like the cornet used in Jazz, and when I play it with a traditional cornet mouthpiece it responds suitably for British Brass Band. It is a cornet not a trumpet.

I also built a trumpet with an extra coil in its wrap but with the valves half way down its length, not two thirds down like a cornet. When played with a trumpet mouthpiece it is absolutely trumpet-like; when played with the same cornet piece as above it sounds mellow but does not feel like a cornet. It is a trumpet not a cornet.

Both of these instruments have the valve section at the balance point, the same distance from the player.

Conclusion
It appears that the essential differences between trumpet and cornet are:

Mouthpiece shape - bowl cup or V cup

Wrap - one complete turn or two.

Placement of the valves - half way along the tubing or two thirds.

The instrument with a cup mouthpiece, one complete turn, and valves half way along its length can play and feel like a trumpet.

The instrument with a V mouthpiece, two complete turns, and valves two thirds along its length can play and feel like a cornet.

Hopefully this information will help in unraveling the difference between these two instruments.

@Dr-GO said in What's Your View On the Use of Time and Space In Music:

Here is an example of use of rests (and notes) in Kenny Dorham's, writing genius in his composition "Short Story" at the swing section:

Its such a nice use of space in the first series (quarter and eight rest) introducing the first whole not phrase, than a subtle triplet quarter rest to set of the next whole note phrase then bam on beat 3 to bring home the last of the three whole note phrases. Here is how it sound in the song (first entry starts at 0:28):

I view this subject in completely the opposite way. Rests are there to make up the whole. Play the notes where they need to be. In the quoted example the 16ths and triplet quarters play right up to the next long note. Concentrate on getting the phrase of played notes; the rests take care of themselves. This is a big subject in my Trumpet Saturday gatherings. Brick buildings are made of brick, the mortar just fills in the gaps and keeps them aligned.