Kanstuls...finally

[bloke]

A new band director was hired to teach at a middle and high school - roughly an hour and a half away - which are both large and where the band program had sunk to almost nothing.. about 30 in the high school band. Encouragingly, he managed to sign up a whole bunch of beginners at the middle school. Mrs bloke and I got a call to look through the high school instruments for repair quotes, and we wrote up quotes on all but a handful of them for repairs as sort of a wish list. We also dropped off a stack of repadded used Yamaha student saxophones that we sold to the Middle School, because - when the big city music store went in there and told them how much it would cost to rent a saxophone for beginner band - all of the saxophone parents just walked out. (Whatever you may think about those 500-bucks Chinese alto saxophones on eBay, they actually do play, parents aren't stupid, and they also aren't ignorant - as they were in the past, when there was no internet.)
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Anyway, the predominant marching brass were Kanstul, which I rarely see around here, so it was interesting to encounter them. Some of them were the tune-any-note things and surprisingly/admirably all of those mechanisms were working that were in place. They also had some old junk condition Blessing marching stuff, but it was pretty rough, and much of that were those marching French horn things (not mellophones) as marching French horns have fallen out of favor. One of the Blessing instruments was a marching trombone with stainless nickel plating on it. I'll let him know that - if he forms a jazz band and he's a trombone short - he needs to rope in a euphonium player and put them on that Blessing marching trombone. Anyway it was interesting to see several Kanstul instruments all in one place.

tubas and sousaphones...?

The two tubas - disappointingly are were both banddirectorbrand. One tuba was a rotary 641 that could use just a little bit of love, and the other one was an ugly old 321 that was actually playable.

There was a nice condition 321 euphonium, a nearly-nice condition King four valve euphonium, and a okay condition 201 3-valve euphonium.

Due to past things that had occurred prior to this band director accepting the job, there was a strict rule about moving instruments back and forth between the middle and high schools, but I suggested that he work out a sign out system, whereby both principals have a list of instruments that are signed out to the other school with both of their signatures in the band director's signature on it so they could move a single three valve horn and that three valve euphonium over to the middle school - along with some pea shooter trombones that were on the shelf, and probably move some pretty fancy instruments from the middle school to the high school, but that's obviously their business and not mine.

The sousaphones were a couple of Kings, a pretty darn good condition 14K with good valves, a couple ofJupiters, and a Yamaha - all silver. There were also a pair of those Jupiter fiberglass silver bell hybrids (something else that would be great for the middle school). Only one of the King sousaphones was playable, and it was very stuffy. I shook some sort of (probably UT ??) orange rag out of the inside of it and then it played fine. In a box of loose parts, there were just enough 20K short action parts to hint that the school used to own one, but maybe (??) someone took it with them as a "parting gift".

The first forty-five minutes to an hour at a school - where there's a new band director - always involves going through boxes of parts and figuring out with which instruments those parts belong, so that my repair quotes don't include buying parts that they already have.

When I see messes like I saw in there, and the new band director is in the process of cleaning up the messes, I think about the fact that being a band director is quite a hard job, but it's not that damn hard.