Posted by Joe Baker on December 20, 1999 at 12:39:18:
In Reply to: WILLSON 2900 Euphonium 5th valve? posted by ANON on December 19, 1999 at 09:35:35:
Not a pro player, but played a good bit of bass-bone and majored in music long enough to take one whale of an accoustical physics class. The trombone is an unusual instrument, in that you can change the key at will by adding more tubing, and still play it in tune by just increasing the distance between slide positions. You can't do this with valved instruments. Take a double french horn, for example. You have two 'sides' of the instrument, the Bb side and the F side, each with its own (significantly different length) tuning slides. You can't change the basic key of the instrument by a sixth and still find usable* key combinations.
Now if you wanted to REALLY try an interesting experiment, take a compensating euph, and use the extra (compensating) valve holes for a 'D side' of the instrument instead of for a compensating system. But when you send the horn away to have it worked on, you better head for the gym. With the extra tubing and valve to put the horn in D, and the extra valve tubing, all much longer than the Bb valve tubing, this horn is going to be more appropriate for Arnold Schwarzenegger than for Arnold Jacobs.
Any millionaire weight-lifters out there want to ship this off to Joe S. or Matt W. to see what they can do with it?
*'usable' does not include pitches used only by Don Ellis. He has left us, and his quarter-tone trumpet moulders in a closet at Eastfield Junior College in Mesquite Texas.