Tubas, euphoniums, mouthpieces, and anything music-related.
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With remarkable gratitude, I rarely work with trumpet players other than those I would rate as "top drawer".
Interesting, most of those play stock trumpets and stock mouthpieces (though one or two of their stock instruments and mouthpieces might possibly have been purchased from "boutique-y" places - but places which offers the same models to anyone).
When I service/repair their instruments, I NEVER see appliances (such as these) stuck on them.
ONE friend had one of those extended length bottom valve caps on one valve...
They explained that their finger had rubbed on the stock cap's knurling, and the replacement cap dropped the knurling down below their finger.
bloke "Stuff - as is seen in the picture - is the sort of stuff that I regularly either toss in the scrap brass box, or (due to size) simply toss in the trash."
My favorite is the Cannonball "Stone" trumpet with supposed mojo depending on which semi-precious stone you inset into the collar where the lead pipe enters the third valve. Now, there may be something to the metal collar damping spurious vibrations and helping the tone center, but the stone? Aesthetically, my favorite color is blue, so I would get the lapis lazuli. I can see onyx to compliment the black nickel. But for tone??? Here's the selection: http://cannonballmusic.co.uk/stones.php https://www.cannonballmusic.com/stones.php
FORTY DOLLARS? That is just so way beyond the Acousticoil.
Funny, I have a tone ring on the shank of my horn mouthpiece, but it's because it looks cool and was free.
iiipopes wrote: ↑Mon Sep 04, 2023 5:59 pm
My favorite is the Cannonball "Stone" trumpet with supposed mojo depending on which semi-precious stone you inset into the collar where the lead pipe enters the third valve. Now, there may be something to the metal collar damping spurious vibrations and helping the tone center, but the stone? Aesthetically, my favorite color is blue, so I would get the lapis lazuli. I can see onyx to compliment the black nickel. But for tone??? Here's the selection: http://cannonballmusic.co.uk/stones.php https://www.cannonballmusic.com/stones.php
Stone Trumpet.jpg
That website is an excellent example of “puffery”.
iiipopes wrote: ↑Mon Sep 04, 2023 5:59 pm
My favorite is the Cannonball "Stone" trumpet with supposed mojo depending on which semi-precious stone you inset into the collar where the lead pipe enters the third valve. Now, there may be something to the metal collar damping spurious vibrations and helping the tone center, but the stone? Aesthetically, my favorite color is blue, so I would get the lapis lazuli. I can see onyx to compliment the black nickel. But for tone??? Here's the selection: http://cannonballmusic.co.uk/stones.php https://www.cannonballmusic.com/stones.php
Stone Trumpet.jpg
That website is an excellent example of “puffery”.
Ooh. (Raises hand) Does this qualify as "puff"? I have a 1969 silver Olds-99 l that I was trying to find a bell for to replace the one that was totally trashed. I found a 1965 vintage of the same on ebay and got it for $130, including the case, but missing a 3rd valve. The body was in way better shape than the silver one but not the 2 valves it had. So my Franken project turned out to be just swapping the 3 1969 valves and their silver top caps into the 1965. It plays really well in all registers, so this was kind of a steal. My tuba-playing repairman friend, Vurl Bland, will fix the stripped 3rd valve stem and hopefully pull all the totally stuck valve slides, as well as fixing the bell dent. Should make a good Octoberfest horn.
As far as resistance is concerned, I'm resistant to picking up the instrument up at 9:00 p.m. - after I've finished working for the day - and practicing to maintain my skills. If I do go ahead and pick it up and start working for thirty minutes or an hour or so, the instrument becomes less resistant to me trying to play it well. For those who are skeptics - or might be re-coiling in disbelief, maybe they're just being resistant to accepting the plain truth. It seems to me that if bore restrictions are desired or required, all someone really need do is to fail to clean or oil the inside. Lime scale (or maybe even working on a melodic minor scale after 9:00 p.m.) will probably do just as good a job as a plastic spring, and - in the spring - time manipulation makes it a little easier to stay up after 9:00 p.m. - maybe in the same way that my metronome manipulates time and speeds up when I try to play 16th notes.
Last edited by bloke on Tue Sep 05, 2023 8:21 am, edited 1 time in total.
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arpthark (Tue Sep 05, 2023 7:53 am) • Mary Ann (Tue Sep 05, 2023 12:58 pm)
Anyone play electric bass, and believe that the type of wood used for a solid body will make an iota of difference in the sound?
Fender has a handful of youtube videos with one of their "custom shop" (?) guys knocking on pieces of wood with a hammer and sort of implying that the pitch of the sound he gets has real significance for the end product, but not making any effort to offer a coherent explanation of how a marimba translates into an electric guitar.
I have played electric bass, and what mattered was the strings. I was borrowing a Beatle Bass from a friend who was so attached to it he would not let me put decent (new) strings on it. It sounded like a bass blanket. Finally I realized that if I offered to keep the old strings for him so he could put them back on, he'd let me put new ones on it. Then it sounded like a bass.
I'm thinking that the wood does matter in violins, but not as much as what is done with it.
donn wrote: ↑Tue Sep 05, 2023 12:36 pm
Anyone play electric bass, and believe that the type of wood used for a solid body will make an iota of difference in the sound?
Fender has a handful of youtube videos with one of their "custom shop" (?) guys knocking on pieces of wood with a hammer and sort of implying that the pitch of the sound he gets has real significance for the end product, but not making any effort to offer a coherent explanation of how a marimba translates into an electric guitar.
That is the tradition: alder = even tone; swamp ash = scoop tone; mahogany = mids tone. Maple top = slight emphasis on highs and lows. OK, there may be some truth to this, but I am more concerned with the weight of an instrument on my shoulder that I'm standing up 3-4 hours per gig playing. The electronics color the sound much, much more than the body wood of the instrument.
Hofner's Beatle Bass, and various imitations thereof, are technically hollow body instruments with a soundboard, and the strings resting on it via the bridge, in the style of the violin family not just in the shape of the bouts etc. How real that is, I don't know - many "hollow body" basses have blocking underneath the bridge - not just a post, basically solid through the middle where you can't see, just hollow under the f-holes. If you don't have that blocking, in principle you might get a teeny bit of tonal action out of that little soundboard ... and some feedback potential if you're close to the amplifier and the soundboard picks it up. It's nutty, but I have to admit that's how I roll - two full hollow body arch top basses in the basement. They sound different to me, but that's largely because they're in my lap, which is something of a virtue - they're faintly acoustic, so practice doesn't strictly require amplification.
Does anyone care what wood is in those soundboards - the one case where it would at least in theory matter a little? Nope. Maple laminate is what's easy, and maple laminate is what you get.
For a fun example of the things makers think someone will buy, I saw a video on an electric bass, basically solid body, but with chambers routed out in the body - and rods fastened at one end inside the chamber, to resonate. Yes you heard me right, folks, this bass has extra, hidden resonance! if someone here has this bass ... well, sorry, dude.
I mean...everything DOES make a difference (even if it is indescribably small), and that is magnified on smaller instruments like trumpet.
I think those Lefreque plates are the most hideous-looking accessory ever invented for a musical instrument, and I would certainly never pay money for one. But I was trying a horn at NAMM this year and the Lefreque rep walked up to me and insisted I let him put the plate on the horn. So I humored him, and it made a massive difference (for the better), especially in slotting in the upper register. I'm still never going to buy one, but again...everything makes a difference. Unlike that Lefreque on that horn, it might not necessarily be a positive difference though...
That website is an excellent example of “puffery”.
Ooh. (Raises hand) Does this qualify as "puff"? I have a 1969 silver Olds-99 l that I was trying to find a bell for to replace the one that was totally trashed. I found a 1965 vintage of the same on ebay and got it for $130, including the case, but missing a 3rd valve. The body was in way better shape than the silver one but not the 2 valves it had. So my Franken project turned out to be just swapping the 3 1969 valves and their silver top caps into the 1965.
If you don’t want to be the epitome of “puffery”, I’ll trade you three good lacquered top caps for those silver ones.
Your silver finger buttons? Those enhance the valve action!
P.S. I’m glad that project sorted itself out so frugally. That is awesome!
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I'm reminded of the silliness that high-end audio has become. At least trumpets are musical instruments used in the creation of art, so if a player believes something to be true it might still result in a placebo improvement. But audio stuff is pure engineering--if it produces "art", it's taking away from the art someone attempted to faithfully record into some playback medium. Those same people then revere the great gurus of the audio world, not seeing the irony that if outcomes can't be merely engineered, then the brilliant engineer has no tools to express that brilliance. It's funny how all that stuff crumbles at the first sign of properly controlled blind testing. (Which is vastly easier to do with audio equipment than with instruments.)
Examples of stuff that produces no measurable effect and elicits claims that measurements aren't enough to reveal their qualities:
- A box of dirt into which a wire is inserted and then attached to the chassis grounding point on the equipment. (This costs thousands of dollars.)
- Speaker cables made of #00 welding wire and kept to a maximum length of six feet for playing back signals from a 30-watt tube amplifier. (People spend thousands of dollars on speaker cables. I use 12-gauge zip cord up to 25 feet long for amplification up to 350 watts into my 6-ohm speakers.)
- Interconnect cables (RCA to RCA) that cost more than ten or twelve bucks. (Even Best Buy has Audioquest interconnects that cost $175 for a stereo pair, and it only goes up from there. I buy mine on Amazon.)
- Replacement "audio-grade" duplex receptacles for the wall socket where the equipment is plugged in. (From a guy who spent thousands on an amplifier that has "massive" soda-can-sized filter capacitors in the power supply precisely to provide extremely clean power to the amplifier, not that these replacement receptacles actually do any useful filtering.)
- Five-pound brass weights on vinyl LPs that totally compress the suspension on the turntable so that you can hear your your wife putting a foot down three rooms away.
- Little stands used to lift speaker/interconnect cables off the floor. (People spend hundreds on "cable lifters".)
- Magnets/stones that are strategically placed here and there around the equipment. One such set of products is marketed by a guy named Ted Denney, and I have had to explain more than once than he and I are unrelated.
The standard descriptions for these sorts of things are:
1. The difference was PROFOUND! (Which begs the question of what happened to the "profound improvement" from the similar snake-oil product the guy--and it always seems to be guys--bought last year?)
2. I heard the music for the first time. (What were you listening to before? I can hear music on my iPhone. It sounds like crap but I can hear it.)
3. My wife heard the difference from the kitchen. (Yes, dear--whatever you say.)
4. The background became blacker. (You mean residual noise was lowered? No, that's not it--many of these products if they do anything at all increase residual noise.)
5. (My personal favorite) "Veils were lifted."
Sigh.
Rick "Everything we hear is merely frequency, phase, and amplitude" Denney
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Rick Denney wrote: ↑Wed Sep 06, 2023 9:10 am
I'm reminded of...
...all of that.
compared to me (a "blue collar tuba player") who reads scores online at IMSLP - while listening to performances on youtube through my laptop with some (yes, really) 1990's Walgreens headphones...
This mahogany electric guitar with new strings sounds better than this ash different-make/model electric guitar with old strings...
Therefore, mahogany is better than ash.
