What I've learned about the trombone
bryanhu.com53 points by bookofjoe 6 hours ago
53 points by bookofjoe 6 hours ago
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?
But you'd only adjust the position of that A if the band is playing an F major chord. Only then.
The D in 1st position - it varies from horn to horn but more often than not yes it'll be a little flat. If you're playing the D as the third of a Bb major chord, then you're already adjusted, easy. If you need a really in-tune D, either 1) tune the whole horn such that 1st position is not quite "all the way in" so you have some room to sharpen the D, 2) use the D in 4th position instead.
Lowering the thirds of chords when you're playing them is generally not something people worry about until they're serious players. And it's really more of an ear training thing than a neuroticism thing. The exercise is to play a static drone over some speakers (say a D), and then play each note of a D major chord up the range, sliding in an out until you can sort of feel the overtones locking in. On the F# you'll feel the lock-in at a flatter position that F# normally is. And the idea is that this proprioceptive sense of intonation will then carry over to your playing.
Most instruments tend to pitch sharp or flat depending on the partial. I don't recall any music teachers giving advice that specific positions should routinely get adjustments, but instead that notes in a particular partial should be adjusted. For example, F above middle C should be flattened when played in 1st position to compensate for 6th partial tending sharp. Or the G in 2nd position above that F needing to be pulled in a bit to compensate for 7th partial tending flat.
Manufacturers have different philosophies around this as well. I have a vintage mid-1960s King 3b whose partials line up differently and require different adjustment from my modern XO 1634... and both of those horns are extremely similar .508 bore tenor trombones.
That advice makes more sense according to my understanding of the physics -- the entire partial might be slightly off and every position in the partial should be adjusted similarly.
The just/equal temperament thing lead me to suspect that it was the 5th partial (a major 3rd partial, the D) that would be the one most likely to be off, but a trombone is neither a perfect cylinder nor a perfect cone so simplified models might be off. The perfect 5th (aka both the F partials) is pretty exact on an ideal model, but a real trombone isn't ideal.
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.
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).
> 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).
I don't think intervals are unique to trombones. If you understand that X+1 is a half step above X, and you know note X is 1st valve and note X+1 is 1+2, then you know adding 2-to-1 adds a half step even if you've never seen a trombone.
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.
Do you get wolf tones?
not with EBVTIII. Some temperaments would, but Bach showed it was possible to do without. (Bach did not use equal temperament)
JS Bach did not use a piano either.
Because so much of music was written around the organ (e.g. vocal music sung in tune with a church organ) tuning was what it was.
The well tempered clavier is exceptional because it is an exception to the vast majority of JS Bach’s work.
> 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.
Piano is great for people who learned to play by sight.
Trombone is great for people who learned to play by ear.
For those who can easily hear the 13 cent difference between a justly tuned major third and an equally tuned major third, justly tuned instruments can be really hard to play.
But I am, like most, like you. I first learned on the piano and my ear is pretty bad for an experienced trombonist. I have a pretty good ear compared to the average person, but compared to a typical trombonist, it's really bad.
I play with others who have incredible ears. It makes me jealous.
P.S. Here's Jacob Collier demonstrating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwRSS7jeo5s
The learning curve is really not that steep. You pretty quickly learn the landmarks for the 7 positions of the slide.
And micro adjusting positions isn't that hard either. If it doesn't sound right, you adjust. The hard part is figuring out whether to adjust up or down. And that's just experience. My ear still isn't good enough to know whether I'm a little sharp or a little flat. But any note I get wrong at tonight's practice will likely be a note I've hit wrong many times in previous practices.
Programming sequencers visually and with tons of help from the tooling pushes the ear sharpening later in the learning process - and I'm only now starting to realize that maybe making music is about deciding what sounds right... I suppose the trombone and violin's "sink or swim" approach ensures the early acquisition of that skill.
Eh I played trombone in high school and it is very forgiving. You can vibe play a trombone.
I suppose one's ear gets sharpened fast, out of necessity - but I recoil at imagining what the other band members have to get through meanwhile. The process for violin is the same though.
It's not too bad. By the time the rest of the band is also not sounding like a sick animal the trombones have figured it out too. I'm not sure if it's something about the brass tone being more forgiving, the volume of audio coming out of the instrument, the fact that the slide is much physically larger than the violin or viola making it easier to make fine adjustments (and now that I think about it, when I think "the middle orchestra sounds pretty bad" it is mostly the violins and violas, so that's plausible), something else, or some combination of all of the above, but it doesn't take too long (relatively speaking) before the trombones are in tune.
(I played trombone throughout middle and high school.)
You're in an ensemble with many other people also learning the intricacies and peculiarities of their instruments, that's the process.
A bad embouchure can put pretty much any brass instrument a full semi-tone out of tune. Trombone is not noticeably different in a beginner band. In my experience it's the beginner French Horn that's usually most out of tune.
But brass being out of tune is not as hard on the ears as the squeaks from a beginner clarinet or saxophone...
Probably the most parent friendly is the flute. It's really hard to get good volume out of a flute so beginners are really quiet and inoffensive. :)
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.
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?
The role of the tongue is heavily emphasized in modern brass pedagogy. Try Claude Gordon, Physical Approach to Elementary Brass Playing, 1977
Oh, by the way...
Pink Trombone
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
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)
"The trombone is the only brass instrument in a classical orchestra" is a statement that requires further support.
It’s slightly confusingly phrased, but the full sentence is:
> The trombone is the only brass instrument in a classical orchestra […] where the main mode of pitch control is by moving the tuning slide.
Which is correct.
Their terminology is odd. The thing you move while playing is generally called the hand slide. There's nearly always a separate tuning slide located in the crook of the bell section.
(Some relatively rare instruments like the Shires Alto do "tuning in slide" with a mechanism for fine adjustment in the hand slide).
If you're also moving the tuning slide in the middle of a piece you're probably a bass trombonist doing the now-impossible glissando (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWJPeA_1g48) in the Bartok concerto for orchestra.
The trumpet, french horn, tuba, and euphonium also rely on the tuning slide to control pitch, so that's not an accurate statement.
Do you mainly control pitch with the tuning slide or the valves on those instruments? I think you mainly control pitch with the valves and only supplement with a tuning slide for certain notes, depending on the instrument, and therefore the statement is accurate.
Mainly the valves. The tuning slides help with a number of things, including the fact that the harmonics (notes above the first ocatave) are not precisely in tune with the fundamentals. A trumpet typically has a trigger lever or a loop for your finger on one or two of the tuning slides.
You use it as needed. If you're playing a really fast passage, you'll likely skip it, but shorter notes are harder to place the precise pitch anyway.
If you really want to see tuning slides in action, find a video of a good tuba soloist.
The slides are needed, at least on the trumpet, because the tuning is perfect when using one valve but it's way off when you use two at once.
Indeed, a trumpet has one slide for tuning only and two more slides that are used while playing, so it's not even technically correct.
Oh, I read that as an independent statement, rather than one qualifying the first.
You read "where the main mode of pitch control is by moving the tuning slide" as an independent statement? What does that mean on its own?
The interrupting parenthetical was so disruptive to the sentence that I thought it said, essentially, "The trombone is the only brass instrument. Parenthetical. The trombone is played by moving the slide."