9-foot B-flat valved brass: flugabones/valve trombones/baritones/euphoniums

[The Big Ben]

About 40 years ago, I read an interview of the photographer Ansel Adams. He said that one of his biggest sources of support in his profession was the amateur who just has to buy a Nikon or a Hasselblad. Because of the unrealistic demand for these high-end cameras, the manufacturers can take advantage of a production level that allows them to lower their costs, and lower the user price. Adams said these amateurs helped subsidize his professional equipment.

Adams was what we would call in the tuba world a "Hasselblad Artist". The factory gave them to him. He also was on a first name basis with Victor Hasselblad.

[acemorgan]

Adams was what we would call in the tuba world a "Hasselblad Artist". The factory gave them to him.

I'm glad you posted that, because it reinforces my point. If there had not been demand for high-end cameras beyond the needs of the professionals, it wouldn't have been in the company's interests to supply them to a prominent advocate like Adams.

[BopEuph]

Ah sorry, not my horn, that's a picture from Ferguson Music. The only weird horn I own anymore is my Eb bass thing. Marching trombone, bass trumpet, contrabass trumpet, contrabass trombone, 4 valve Conn Giant Eb- all gone. You can play the Eb thing though.

Oh shoot, Bloke has a similar horn, and without looking at the user, I assumed it was his horn.

[bloke]

I also own a ballad horn in C made manufactured in Czechoslovakia. These are often mistaken for (6+ feet) E-flat mellophones. It's in wonderful condition and the tuning is good - with the typical fifth partial pitches needing to be played with 1-2 and 2-3. It has crooks to insert for B-flat and A, but those keys/lengths are not very rewarding, playing wise. The pistons are unplated nickel silver, and not a bit worn. It plays very nicely in C, and I use an extremely small mouthpiece - made on a trombone blank - to play it. (I use the same mouthpiece with my 9 ft B-flat King flugabone to achieve an authentic bass trumpet sound, rather than some nondescript sort of valve trombone sound.) That mouthpiece seems to work out better than any alto horn type mouthpieces with the ballad horn.
I don't pull it out very often, but when I do I find myself messing around with Mozart horn concerti at pitch.

[Finetales]

I have a Wessex Dolce. In his online review of it, Algirdas Matonis expressed his opinion that the Dolce would meet the needs of 90 percent of euphonium players. I read a lot of online harrumphing about that assertion.

The Dolce and Festivo are absolutely good enough for professional use. I would be happy to use one if I couldn't afford a fancy euph (or if cheap old Bessons didn't exist). No it doesn't sound as rich as a 2950, but it plays just fine.

[bloke]

When different stores sell the same products made in the same factory - at markedly higher/lower pricing - it's probably a good idea to explore those offered for less. I've seen enough of the higher-priced and the lower-priced to form an opinion/belief that the quality of components and care of assembly are the same.

I could sell a whole bunch more Chinese instruments, if I sold those which are lower-priced than JP. Cost-wise, I've already openly admitted that I've tried "going around" JP to buy euphoniums (and other instruments) straight from the factory.
I discovered that the euphoniums were exclusively sold to JP (though some of the other things are not).
When I bought some of the other things that JP sells (avoiding JP as the "middleman") I got the same quality valves and the same quality inside-outside slide tubing fit, but what I did NOT get was the same ASSEMBLY quality of all of the components...so (regarding the instruments made in that factory not exclusively for JP) I only bought one of each - as I had to take them apart and "fix" them, prior to selling them...and I've got PLENTY of USED stuff ALREADY HERE that needs to be "fixed" prior to being sold. The luxury of being a JP retailer is that I do NOT need to crack open boxes and look stuff over prior to the customer receiving stuff. (I even had to do that with AMERICAN make instruments that I previously carried in my old brick-and-mortar location...but - as the USA has noticeably been in decline since the 1970's - this is no surprise, yes?)

[pjv]

The Olds Flugelbone often surprises me with it's ripe, mellow sound. Great intonation!

The Weltklang is also a winner in sound and intonation. And just like my B&S Symphonie F, it has only one seam in the bell, going from top to bottom.

[bloke]

The Olds Flugelbone often surprises me with it's ripe, mellow sound. Great intonation!

Those are difficult to find in good condition.
I barely like King better (just about equally well) and have a King.

Beat-up Olds "flugabone" (marching trombone, as King copyrighted "Flugabone") valveset parts are identical to the (sought-after) Olds valve trombone parts and are much more commonly found (particularly "beat-up") than the valve trombones, so they are very handy for Olds valve trombone restoration.

Arguably - of all the American made "best era" valve trombones, Olds was the best. Further, the valve section will bolt up to most of the other small-shank Olds bell sections (from Ambassador to Recording).

[Finetales]

I'd love to get one of those Olds(/Bach/Blessing) flugabones to compare to my King. I really like the Olds/Bach/Blessing marching baritone, and it would be neat to have a matched pair (not that I own either one yet).

[bloke]

Blessing were different from Olds.
Their own mellophone was wretched (they paid Walter Lawson to design a new mouthpipe for it. The mouthpipe wasn't the problem; it was the rest of it). I've never encountered one of their marching trombone things, because they were already fading from popularity when I was in band and when I started repairing. I was in the Blessing factory several times, and never saw one in there. Their marching baritone was the best of all of them that I've ever played. It sounded better, played nicer, and featured European made valve sections made by the same shop that was making Willson valve sections at the time - I believe the same one that Adams now owns.

[Finetales]

Blessing were different from Olds.
Their own mellophone was wretched (they paid Walter Lawson to design a new mouthpipe for it. The mouthpipe wasn't the problem; it was the rest of it). I've never encountered one of their marching trombone things, because they were already fading from popularity when I was in band and when I started repairing. I was in the Blessing factory several times, and never saw one in there. Their marching baritone was the best of all of them that I've ever played. It sounded better, played nicer, and featured European made valve sections made by the same shop that was making Willson valve sections at the time - I believe the same one that Adams now owns.

They sure look to be the same designs - here's examples of each pulled from used sale listings.

Olds O-21 marching trombone: https://images.reverb.com/image/upload/ ... vbv0aw.jpg
Blessing Artist M-200 marching trombone: https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-rfj6008 ... 49.jpg?c=1
Bach Mercedes 883 marching trombone: https://images.reverb.com/image/upload/ ... atd8ci.jpg
Reynolds Contempora TV-29 marching trombone: https://images.reverb.com/image/upload/ ... 4exfek.jpg
McCormick marching trombone (??): https://images.reverb.com/image/upload/ ... ovsagp.jpg

Olds marching baritone: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kbK9WwcxOAw/hqdefault.jpg
Blessing M-300 marching baritone: https://images.reverb.com/image/upload/ ... ufbfhc.jpg
Bach marching baritone: https://starcitymusic.com/update/wp-con ... scaled.jpg

The only difference I notice between the marching trombones is that the Blessing has different valve buttons.

The marching baritones have a few more differences. The valve buttons are a bit different, the Blessing has an extra ring in the middle of the leadpipe (could be a repair?), the Bach doesn't have the lyre holder on the curved part of the leadpipe, and the Olds seems to put the front bottom brace closer to the middle.

Otherwise, I don't see how these could be separate designs. But maybe not made by the same people? The only one I have personal experience with is the Blessing marching baritone, which I marched with in high school and liked so much I tried to buy it from the school when I graduated. Of course, to further confuse things Bach and Blessing now have marching baritones that are the same as the Yamaha, and Bach used to have one that was the same as the King.

[bloke]

I've had them all apart and all back together. There are different. The Olds/Bach marching baritones are okay, but the Blessing ones are exceptional. I'm talking about tone, resonance, and response, and not just the much nicer Bauerfeind valve sections.

As far as the mellophones are concerned, the Olds/Bach ones are mediocre, but the Blessing ones were terrible. King are remarkably good - almost musical instruments, and Jupiter are okay. Yamaha intonation - regarding their mellophones - is okay, but they don't put out enough sound...particularly not compared to King... and I realize that I'm arguing over which ketchup is best, when a lot of the people reading this are chefs and connoisseurs of haute cuisine.

Once Bach bought all of that Olds tooling, Blessing realized that it would be missing out on a huge market if they didn't come up with something to compete with it, because even Getzen and DEG were coming up with stuff to compete with it.

Outside of the fact that I know they are different - from working on them hundreds of times, it wouldn't have made any sense for a big company like Selmer USA to make stuff for a little company like Blessing, and I know that those Bach instruments were made by Selmer USA in Bach Factory #2...I was inside that building in the early 80s as well, and saw them making them, including the 869 tuba, which is almost exactly the same as the O-99, other than the Bach valves being a couple of thousands larger - to discourage people from buying those valves to repair Olds instruments.

No argument here, and no "I know better than you", but I just know. I was inside those buildings, and I've repaired too many of them. Parts are not interchangeable.

Today, Blessing is just a name that has been bought by St Louis Music Supply. Anything made today with that name is Chinese. All USA Blessing tooling was apparently (??) mothballed.

[Finetales]

That's all excellent information to know, and I certainly appreciate your expertise so that I (and future people who want a marching baritone and will inevitably come across this thread) can learn that they are all different despite looking the same. Are the Olds/Bach/Blessing/Reynolds flugabones the same story? I see the Olds get talked about the most.

As for the mellophones, I'm still slightly keeping my eye out for a cheap King 1120. I have a Yamaha and it is nice, but I'm curious about the King. I have a Kanstul KAH-175 alto bugle in G which looks exactly like the 1120, just shorter and smaller. It even has the same funky 3rd valve tubing wrap. But I also have 7 other mellophones of various shapes vying for my attention, so I really don't need another one!

[bloke]

King MELLOPHONE partials are pretty well in tune, The feature on-the-fly slides, and those things put out SOUND - particularly with a trumpet-shank flugalhorn mouthpiece (like those cheap DEG 6V mouthpieces - which are no longer offered, other than the Kellyberg plastic version, and through higher-priced mouthpiece makers.

(Here's one: https://www.ebay.com/itm/295582709239 )


=================================================
B-flat stuff:

The "Flugabone" name belongs (ed?) to King, which is why all the others had to call them "marching trombone" (as "compact marching valve trombone" sounds even worse).

I'd had to say (even though these were already falling OUT of popularity by the time I was in ha-skoo and kolij mid-1970's) that Olds/Reynolds/Bach MARCHING TROMBONES were all parts interchangeable, BUT I would NOT be surprised if the Bach ones' valves were slightly too large to fit into Olds/Reynolds (same reason as with the tuba).

Kurath (Willson/Switzerland) made the "marching trombones" for DEG - until they didn't (and I'm thinking that at the same time DEG quickly moved past KHS Music (Korea) to Weril (Brazil) to make their marching instruments, they didn't bother to offer a "marching trombone" after Korea...but I'm not always completely informed.

Getzen made (in their own factory?) some marching stuff which tended to be elongated and "blech" (in my opinion).


==================================================
back to mellophones:

Typically, there are King (these days: engraved "BACH") mellophones on eBay for CHEEP, as there currently are three CHEEP ones listed there.
The overwhelming majority are repairable and the valves are usually still just fine.
Several years ago, I bought a batch of five of them (various sellers) for less than $200 (TOTAL), slicked them all out, had Anderson silver plate them, found some secondary-market never-used "BACH" aluminum boxy cases for them, and sold them to a school for $_ _ _ _ (pretty good dough). In my view, the older "King" ones were a bit better constructed than the current (basically the same) "BACH" ones.

Of the currently-listed cheep KING ones, this one looks to need the least amount of shop time:

[pjv]

I've found that most valve trombones suck in general, marching or normal.

The Olds works and plays like a real musical instrument! Why this is magic and other similar designs aren't? No idea. Maybe that .508 opens up the horn just enough to make the instrument one I like to play on. (As opposed to; "Interesting. Curious. Unique. Hate to play an entire gig on this!"

The bell is closer to the mpc than most bass trumpet/marching bones. The gives the horn a better weight distribution (balance) and makes it possible to use hand manipulated mutes possible (plunger, wah wah).

Add all this to the fact that in a gig bag it's legal hand luggage size you can probably understand how this instrument has earned it's keep!

[bloke]

I'm not going to disagree at all, but it's really easy to overpower most valve trombones with a mouthpiece. Even a 6-1/2AL is probably (??) too big for most of them.

Forty-five years ago and more - back when there were a whole bunch of gigs in Memphis, I was playing some R&B and mostly dixieland stuff using a Memphis State University owned Couesnon valve trombone - that those in charge let me use as a student and later to keep it in my shop "to be repaired" - since no students nor faculty were the least bit interested in it. (Probably - quite a few sir years earlier, it was bought to flesh out the trombone section in the fledgling jazz band, when the school was much smaller and had far fewer students. I even suspect that I can guess where they bought it, because accordion was still a thing, and there was an accordion store and school in Memphis - "Central Academy of Music" - that had also picked up a Gretch guitar and drum franchise, and Gretch supplied cheap Couesnon brass and Lafayette woodwind band instruments to their combo stores to sell to band students.)

Of course, I was playing tuba on most of those types of gigs, but I would get hired to play trombone on some of them as well.

That thing didn't play anywhere close to as well as the Olds that I own today, but I learned how to manage to play it. It earned the nickname, "the moneyophone", because I only spent time playing it when I was earning money playing it.
Using that Couesnon playing jazz, I tended to do the same thing I do today with my Olds: I mostly stayed out of the low range. That strategy works regardless of how stuffy or open a trombone is, because otherwise the trombone tends to step on the bass... and I'm not saying anything here that people don't know.

[BopEuph]

That strategy works regardless of how stuffy or open a trombone is, because otherwise the trombone tends to step on the bass...

Man, get off my note!

[arpthark]

[Blessing's] marching baritone was the best of all of them that I've ever played. It sounded better, played nicer, and featured European made valve sections made by the same shop that was making Willson valve sections at the time - I believe the same one that Adams now owns.

Not at all in the market, but I thought of this comment while I was browsing Marketplace. This'un? Or is this newer Chinese?

https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/it ... 861476998/

[bloke]

That's "the one"...European valveset - stainless steel pistons.

=======================================================

This one BELOW is Olds tooling Bach...NOT the same...but PRECEDED Blessing:



=======================================================

This is the old DYNASTY one...made by Weril in Brazil:



=======================================================

KING:



=======================================================

GETZEN:



=======================================================

jimbo:



=======================================================

YAMAHA OR JOHN PACKER (same configuration)

[Rick Denney]

No pics at present.

I have an American baritone (a very old King that was over-overhauled by a sweatshop overhauler in San Antonio).

But if I’m actually going to play something, it will be the beat-up Besson—old enough not to be a Sovereign but new enough to have a bass-trombone-size receiver. It plays nicely. Used to belong to a college in Oklahoma.

Denis Wick SM3.5 for the latter, 6-1/2AL for the former.

Rick “rarely plays either” Denney