For those who played in high school and then put your instrument down for 40 years, you can pick it back up and play again! One of the great joys of my life now is playing trombone in a local band with other people just like me--relearning their instruments and making new friends.

New Horizons Band: https://newhorizonsmusic.org/Find_a_Group

I've been trying to square the physics and my experience.

Pedal B flat is the fundamental, low B flat is the 2x, F 3x, mid B flat the 4x, D the 5X, high F is 6X, G half sharp is 7X and high B flat is 8X.

The position your music teacher most likely will have told you to adjust is 2nd position - you play it slightly sharper for an A vs the E or C sharp it's also used for.

Why is that? It's the major 3rd that has the largest variation between just and equal temperament. The A is often a 3rd against the F, is that why?

But it seems to me that it's all the notes on the D embouchure that will be off -- 1st position D on the trombone is 5X the fundamental, so it's justly tuned, not equally tuned, so shouldn't it be the one that needs the most adjustment? I guess all wind instruments have this problem, so maybe I don't notice because usually I'm playing in a wind band with very few equally tempered instruments like piano, guitar and glockenspiel?

One of my favourite albums is Stuart Dempster's Underground Overlays From The Cistern Chapel.

A group of trombonists all playing in a giant underground water tank with incredibly long reverb.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=4tvMp4XDICU

The best part about playing trombone in high school band was not having to learn concert pitches. Concert F? I play an F. Concert Bb? I play Bb. Suck it, trumpets!

Oh, by the way...

Pink Trombone

https://dood.al/pinktrombone/

https://github.com/imaginary/pink-trombone

Evy Kassirer - !!Con 2019 - Reverse engineering your mouth! by Evy Kassirer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTwjirrCuDE&t=34s

Zack Quattan - Pink Trombone Playlist - Gamepad / MIDI / Machine Learning / Phoneme Classifier / etc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LflxVULOtLs&list=PLzgiV7-SLJ...

https://deepwiki.com/zakaton/Pink-Trombone

pink trombone controlled by max msp via OSC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7eJ209ayFw

Circuit Bending - Pink Trombone "Speech Synthesis"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_qd116njyk

How to break Pink Trombone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4FWmlJPxsE

A couple of comments:

> But any instrument that’s not the piano or guitar can actually make micro-adjustments while playing a song

You can make micro adjustments on a guitar, but only to be sharper[1]

> But for now, one obvious advantage is that this allows us to do “real” glissandos, where the pitch smoothly transitions from one note to another

For a famous example of a "fake" glissando, the opening clarinet solo of Rhapsody in Blue, which, as typically performed, is rather smooth from D5 to C6[2]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_bending

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykFWUEHhkMw

I recently learned that valve trombones exist [0], where there is no slide and the notes are selected via valve-presses like a trumpet.

[0] https://usa.yamaha.com/products/musical_instruments/winds/tr...

One trombone feature not mentioned here is that the length of the pipe apparently affects the timing enough that they have to compensate for it.

> But, how can a trombone ever be better than the piano when there’s so many variables? Well, unlike a piano, where each key produces a fixed pitch, a trombone lets me subtly adjust every note as I play.

Thanks, but I'll stick to my keyboard's pitch bend control.

The trombone's great expressiveness comes at a steep learning cost.

> This system ensures that every key and every note sounds equally good, but it sacrifices the purity of just intonation.

Bach wrote two books of the Well-Tempered Clavier over 300 years ago that explain musically why that sacrifice is worth it:

* Book I: pick a prelude/fugue in any key and it will sound ok on a keyboard that you tuned ahead of time

* Book II: modulate anywhere you want[1] in the middle of a piece and it will sound ok

That same system works all the way through high-Romantic Wagnerian operas and atonal pieces of the 20th century. Use equal temperament and let the singer/violinist/horn player "sweeten" a third by ear where applicable.

Edit: well, anywhere Bach wanted. Hee hee.

I think you'll enjoy this: an acoustically-accurate trombone in the web browser. https://github.com/bignimbus/trombone.js

If you play piano you should find a tuner who does something better than equal temperament. When you accept that changing keys will change the tone of the song you can get a lot better music. You don't need to go to just temperament (and since you still need octave stretch it wouldn't be ideal anyway - though if you can live with playing music in exactly one key it is nice).

I tuned my piano to EBVTIII and I like it. (well I tuned 3 notes and then got my son interested and he tuned the rest). It isn't as hard to tune a piano as professionals make it out. However it takes me about 5x as long so if you can find a good tuner I'd call it worth it.

I loved playing trombone in school. It's such a simple mechanism, it invites a lot of curiousity, and this piece captures that well. Instruments like piano, violin, and guitar are very visual, essentially wysiwyg. Instruments like saxophones, clarinets, flutes, take a long to mentally map and reason through (this combination of keys achieves note X). Trumpets, and other 3 valve instruments map exactly to trombone positions! Eg. no-valves = 1st position, 1st valve is 3rd position, 1+2 is 4th position. But visually you don't see this, and it doesn't invite the curiousity. Trombone super unique in that you get a little wysiwyg, but you have to square that with embouchure. But learning trombone, and then mapping that knowledge to a euphonium, trumpet, tuba, etc, gives you a knowledge about that instrument (eg ok if note X is 1st valve, and note X+1 is 1+2, then i know adding 2-to-1 adds a half step, because position 3 is a half step from position 4).

Everything I know about trombones I know from the game Trombone Champ.

It's a good game for every aspiring trobonist (or people just remotely interested in music-related video games)

This seems a decent introduction. The only thing mentioned that I wasn't really aware of is the effect of the tongue in addition to the lips on the embouchure of higher notes. Can anyone recommend some more info on that?

There’s also a ‘trigger trombone’ variant, where pulling a trigger routes the air through more tubing, bringing a different pitch.

Source: I’m a sponsor of the trombone arts. My kid played trombone in high school.

"The trombone is the only brass instrument in a classical orchestra" is a statement that requires further support.

No one has yet mentioned that getting good tone quality on a trombone is perhaps its biggest challenge.

The same as true with violin and viola. The older and more primitive and instrument is, the more work you have to do.

Contrast this with the trombone’s cousins, the baritone and euphonium, which have infinitely better tone quality with little to no effort at all.

I will get downvoted for this, but modern players like Trombone Shorty have nowhere near the tone of players like Tommy Dorsey. this is clearly a matter of preference because he could nail that smooth smooth sound if you wanted to. I just don’t like the blatty sound.

This is your reminder to stop touching the bell when playing third position.

tromboner

[dead]