How to choose a custom brass instrument

Are you ready folks? Here it is, everything you need to know about the different alloys used to make brass instruments, based on thousands of hours of helping players choose instruments:


Red brass sounds more brilliant than yellow brass, which sounds brighter than red brass. Gold brass and rose brass are the same thing, except when they're not, and neither is red brass, except when it is. And both sound darker than either yellow or red brass, except that they sound brighter when I play them. Or darker, depending on who's listening. I play a yellow brass bell because it's more clear, and because I can blend easier with most tuba players and most tenor trombone players. It's also darker than the red brass bell I used to play, except when I want it to be brighter.

(Actually, now I play a gold brass bell, except when I play a yellow brass bell, unless I'm playing a bell that is an alloy somewhere in between that stopped being available after WWII.)

Oh, and nickel sounds darker than any brass alloy. Also, it sounds much, much brighter than any brass alloy.

Heavier bells sound bigger and hold together better at loud dynamics than lighter bells, which sound broader and stay warmer at loud dynamics than heavier bells. 

And Sterling silver bells don't really exist. If you say you've ever seen or owned one, you're wrong. (That's a joke.)

Lacquer and plating make no difference at all unless you think they do. In which case they makes all the difference in the world, and you should immediately get your instrument lacquered, de-lacquered, plated, or re-plated.

How's that? Have I cleared everything up? Any other questions?

The simple facts are these: all else being as equal as you can get it, different humans sound different playing the same equipment, and the same humans sound different playing different equipment, except when they are the kinds of humans who sound the same no matter what equipment they play. These humans include most beginners and some of the best musicians in the world.

Practice makes...

I recently came across this succinct article from TIME magazine about practicing. Great stuff.

Bass Trombone advice for teachers, part 2: mutes

Bass trombone mutes are tricky. You can get away with a tenor trombone mute that doesn't have a low D or a pedal G, but we need those notes too often on bass trombone for our mutes not to work. I have a little bit of a mute fetish, so I've tried or owned almost everything. Here's my list of mutes that work and don't work:

Straight Mutes
The Denis Wick metal straight is my go-to straight mute. It responds evenly for me throughout the entire range, without having to drill a hole in it. I think if a Wick straight doesn't respond for you in the double valve register, you need to practice to make your tone production better in the double valve register.

Jo-Ral straight mutes are OK, but I find it's useful to drill a 1/4" hole in the center of the bottom of the mute, and then have a small piece of gaffer's tape over the hole for when I don't need the extreme low register. If you can find an old one, they are better than the new ones.

I don't know what happened to Tom Crown mutes, but they just don't seem to work anymore. I have an old one with a hole drilled in the bottom that's really banged up and has corks that are disintegrating, and it works OK, but none of the new ones I try seem to play below about low Eb.

I have other straight mutes I like for certain things (TrumCor Lyric, Marcus Bonna, H&B Symphonic, Beversdorf), but if you're only going to have one my recommendation is Denis Wick.

Cup Mutes
Denis Wick, yes.
H&B Large Bass Trombone, yes. If yours seems stuffy, try removing the rubber ring from around the cup.

I suggest having both of these so that you have the classic H&B sound and the somewhat better response of the Wick.

Jo-Ral, no. For me it's just too heavy and the response is just not that good. And I hate the sound.

My favorite cup mute is a Peter Gane made in England, but it doesn't sound anything like the cup mutes anybody else around me plays.

Wah-wah (Harmon) Mutes
Wick, no. I've had a couple, and they always seems to fall out of the bell. The top gets dented from the fall, and then you can't get it to stick for even a few seconds.
Jo-Ral, yes. It usually stays in the bell and sounds good. And when it does fall out, the metal and cork are thick enough that it usually doesn't dent around that top.

Practice Mutes
For "therapy" practice, the Denis Wick practice mute is great, although you might need to drill one or two more holes in it. I made one myself with an old Wick straight, some sheet cork, and a hand drill.

The only one I can practice with for any other reason is the Bremner Shhh mute. Every other practice mute I've tried for bass trombone makes the upper register go flat.

Actually, that's not true. I also have a mute made by a guy named Mike McLean in England. He calls is a pianissimo mute, and it can either be used as a loud-ish practice mute or a soft straight mute. The response is terrific all over the instrument, and if you don't have the control to play very soft with a mute, you can use this one, play about mf, and have it sound pp. Every once in a while I see these for sale on eBay for about $40, which is a bargain. You can't tell from the website, but the bass trombone pianissimo mute really does exist. I'll bet his straight mute is also really good, but it won't sound like a metal mute.

Bucket Mutes
The old H&B Bucket sounds great but it's a huge pain. Don't bother.

The Jo-Ral Bucket is ridiculously heavy and doesn't sound that great to me. 

Spend a little bit of extra money and get a Peter Gane Bucket. Sounds great, easy to use.

Solotone Mutes
There are a couple of shows that call for solotone mute on bass trombone. This is a dumb idea, but what are you going to do? Well...you can use an H&B tenor solotone (cleartone) and build the corks way up with sheet cork - or even duct tape - or...you can special order a beautiful handmade wooden bass trombone solotone mute from Paul Lawrence in England. How do you do that? I don't know. I got mine in England at a trombone festival.

Bass Trombone advice for teachers, part 1

I've decided to do a series of posts for my tenor trombonist friends who find themselves teaching young bass trombone players. I'll offer up my thoughts in no particular order. These are often my opinions, and there are plenty of people who might disagree with me, but here goes anyway.

1. Mouthpiece: start with a 1 1/2 G of some kind.

2. Etude material is a big topic that I will come back to, but to start, I like the Paul Faulise books for basic daily skill practice.

3. Don't neglect the middle tenor trombone register, or the high register for that matter. Bass trombone players need to be able to do nearly everything tenor players do and also sound great in the low register.

4. Long tones seem to be even more important for bass trombone than tenor.

There, that's a start.

Sometimes it's the simple phrase

A good and trusted friend got in touch to let me know that I had missed my intended tone on the original version of this post, so I've decided to edit it. I really didn't mean to get up on a high horse, but to provoke some thought and maybe some fresh ideas.

Basically, my point is this: we trombone players, particularly when we play orchestral excerpts for auditions, often choose to play something other than the natural, simple phrase structure of a passage, in order to accomplish or demonstrate some other aspect of what we are doing. Often, for some reason, it seems to me that we are trying to play simple phrases as if we were staggering breaths with a group of other players, in order to string together several phrases in a row and make a much longer statement.

I would like to suggest that in many cases the breathing strategy that would convey the music best and make it most logical and meaningful to the audition committee - and any other listener - would be to follow the phrase structure and breathe where it falls naturally.

Berlioz' Hungarian March is a great example. Once you get through the scale intros of the standard excerpt, you are faced with three 3-bar phrases. Many people breathe in the middle of the 2nd bar in each phrase, and then blew through into the next phrase without acknowledging the transition. I think it actually would make a tremendous amount of sense to play a complete 3-bar phrase, followed by a breath on the barline, followed by another complete 3-bar phrase, and then breathe in the middle of the third bar of the last 3-bar phrase in order to make the transition into the next set of phrases. We are consistently taught not to do that, and I can understand why - it's very easy to lose time that way, and we want to make sure the low note is long enough to speak clearly.

So, if breathing on the barlines is awkward for you, you can catch a quick breath somewhere else (I suggest the middle of the third bar of each phrase rather than the middle of the second), keep time, and still play the phrase convincingly.

I suggest deciding on a phrase structure and then practicing each phrase by itself for it's own shape. Find that shape, understand, it, convey it. Practice an entire passage with each phrase isolated. Take as much time as you need to breathe between phrases, and then start putting them together so that your sequence of phrases tells a complete story, each phrase like a perfectly structured and punctuated sentence. When you put it all back together you might need to breathe in different places, but for me it's a lot more useful to plan phrases and then figure out the breaths I need to do to to best serve those phrases.

That reminds me of the one lesson I had with J.J. Johnson...I'll write about that sometime later.

john cage: some rules for students and teachers

RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.

RULE TWO: General duties of a student - pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.

RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher - pull everything out of your students.

RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.

RULE FIVE: be self-disciplined - this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail, there's only make.

RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It's the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

RULE EIGHT: Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.

RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It's lighter than you think.

RULE TEN: "We're breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities." (John Cage)

HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything - it might come in handy later.

Frequency Bone

I have been very lucky to have great teachers, and the one that has always made me think most deeply is Norman Bolter. His own blog, Frequency Bone, is a wonderful resource for anybody who truly seeks to be a better, more fully integrated musician. His most recent post touched me deeply.