marching band trombones
Posted: Thu Jul 20, 2023 8:19 am
Yesterday, I fixed up three (yep) marching band trombones. I fix them up every year, and they're always in rough shape again, and I have to straighten them all back out. The three are a gold brass Bach 50G bass trombone with an axial flow valve, an Elkhart vintage Conn 72H bass trombone, and a 1970s Bach 42B trombone.
It just seems to me that pawn shop beginner trombones - with a half inch bore and with slides that works ($600?) - would be just as suitable, wouldn't have put so much wear and tear on instruments that were formally worth a total of about $10,000, and would offer a little brighter sound, which would have carried more when played outdoors.
The Bach bass trombone's case has a bunch of cute stickers all over it featuring pictures of tennis shoes. The humidity, though, has caused all the little stickers to curl up.
The 42B bell section was curved and twisted this year, and the F slide and its braces were loose in the case. The main tuning slide was too out of alignment for that slide to move.
I don't know where they found the vintage Conn bass to buy.
When I first saw it a few years ago, the original case was still in remarkable condition. (Some of you may have noticed that I'm sort of a fan of original cases.) After a year or two they tore it all up. I found them a nice new Conn bass trombone case on eBay for a hundred bucks (I'm guessing that the seller bought a new Conn and decided to buy a bag for it...??) that had gold anodized combination lock latches. The case is still holding up that I found for them, but they've torn the latches all up, so I had to pry them off and replace them with draw bolt latches yesterday.
This time of year is pretty good on the bank account, but sort of hard on the heart. On the news crawl yesterday, I saw that 173 shots were fired next to a gas station in Memphis near where I used to fill up fairly often. https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/polic ... 7a584.html It's near a favorite railroad crossing where some high school buddies and I used to love to wait for L&N locomotives ( https://www.condrenrails.com/MRP/Memphi ... 1165...JPG ) to pass through, as we were rail fans. That type of thing is some of the most high profile symptoms of societal decay, but I'm confronted with some of the less noticeable ones, each summer.
It just seems to me that pawn shop beginner trombones - with a half inch bore and with slides that works ($600?) - would be just as suitable, wouldn't have put so much wear and tear on instruments that were formally worth a total of about $10,000, and would offer a little brighter sound, which would have carried more when played outdoors.
The Bach bass trombone's case has a bunch of cute stickers all over it featuring pictures of tennis shoes. The humidity, though, has caused all the little stickers to curl up.
The 42B bell section was curved and twisted this year, and the F slide and its braces were loose in the case. The main tuning slide was too out of alignment for that slide to move.
I don't know where they found the vintage Conn bass to buy.
When I first saw it a few years ago, the original case was still in remarkable condition. (Some of you may have noticed that I'm sort of a fan of original cases.) After a year or two they tore it all up. I found them a nice new Conn bass trombone case on eBay for a hundred bucks (I'm guessing that the seller bought a new Conn and decided to buy a bag for it...??) that had gold anodized combination lock latches. The case is still holding up that I found for them, but they've torn the latches all up, so I had to pry them off and replace them with draw bolt latches yesterday.
This time of year is pretty good on the bank account, but sort of hard on the heart. On the news crawl yesterday, I saw that 173 shots were fired next to a gas station in Memphis near where I used to fill up fairly often. https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/polic ... 7a584.html It's near a favorite railroad crossing where some high school buddies and I used to love to wait for L&N locomotives ( https://www.condrenrails.com/MRP/Memphi ... 1165...JPG ) to pass through, as we were rail fans. That type of thing is some of the most high profile symptoms of societal decay, but I'm confronted with some of the less noticeable ones, each summer.