Re: Comparing old-timers equipment to today


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Posted by Eric on October 15, 2003 at 13:17:34:

In Reply to: Comparing old-timers equipment to today posted by Mark Heter on October 14, 2003 at 01:41:46:

There seems to have been a great lust for power that has changed instrument design in recent decades. In 1920 the average trumpet had a .438 bore and a trombone was .500. Now tuba players are having to compete with 8 pound $20,000 .470 bore C Monettephones, .547 bore "tenor" trombones, and bass trombones that sound more like baritone bugles. All have heavyweight this or that so that they dont "distort at high volume". Its really difficult to get any expressive nuance out of horns designed for power. It bores the audience too since they have no reference against which to compare and be impressed. They just want to hear good, expressive music.

Tubas have evolved for more power as well. I dont mean necessarily bigger, since 6/4 tubas have been around for a long time. Rather I mean instruments that, for a given size bell, handle more air before the tone turns disgusting.

Using horn loudspeaker modeling programs I've input typical tuba designs and, interestingly, beyond about a 9" diameter bell throat for a BBb tuba the efficiency of the instrument goes down. The best way to keep efficiency and allow the horn to accept more energy is to make it shorter. Distortion of sound waves is what limits the maximum volume of a brass instrument. Sound waves distort when travelling in a confined space, and the distortion is cumulative with distance. A loud but mellow sounding sine wave entering one end of a long pipe can in an extreme case emerge from the other end as a very bright sounding sawtooth wave because the hot high pressure part of the wave travels faster and catches up to the cold, low pressure part of the wave. A shorter or more rapidly flaring horn ends up wih less of this distortion and can handle more input energy.

I think power is the main motivating factor for the use of CC tuba over BBb. Its not a bad thing, its just a fact of life. Music is louder now. Symphony players wanted more power and switched to CC, then made their students also switch to CC regardless of what kind of group they wanted to play in. The same thing is happening with trombone teachers making students get these monster large bore tenors, and trumpet teachers making students get Monette mouthpieces. Most people dont need this stuff.


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