Claude Gordon Brass Camp 1987 - Tedd Waggoner on Claude Gordon Selmer Trumpet Construction
Transcript Summary
I really appreciate having the opportunity to work with you, because it's been probably four, five, six, I've been trying to do this for the beginning of this year, but I've been coming into some of this money.
You remember the first move?
Yeah, I remember because I showed up and it was way less than back when we were in Mohamed, which was when we took the pistol.
And our road representative took me to the clinic, to the camp, and this was on Sunday night, and we were getting acclimated to a whole camp and everything like that.
And just before he leaves for the week, he says, come on, I'll take you out for a session.
Not knowing that up there, you have to go 20 to 30 miles before you find any way to eat at all.
So we went out, and I was late coming back to the camp, and I mean, I was jumped hard on Claude.
He just comes over and says, you will be at the prep exercises in the morning, and you will be at the prep exercises in the morning, and you will be at the prep exercises in the morning, and you will be at the prep exercises in the morning, and you will be at the prep exercises in the morning, and you will be at the prep exercises in the morning, and you will be at the prep exercises in the morning, and you will be at the prep exercises in the morning, and you will be at the prep exercises in the morning, and you will be at the prep exercises in the morning, and you will be at the prep exercises in the morning, and you will be at the prep exercises in the morning, and you will be at the prep exercises in the morning, and you will be at the prep exercises in the morning, and you will be at the prep exercises in the morning, and you will be at the prep exercises in the morning, and you will be at the prep exercises in the morning, and you will be at the prep exercises in the morning, and
from the morning they start telling using the trombone and the French horn.
As they do with these smaller rashes, they only tell the smaller parts,
they just like to get in the suitcase and bring them up to it, but they're all
applied in the same kind of place. When we start out
in the manufacturers all I can say is I wish you were there so you could see it,
because you'd be, really I think you'd be amazed at all the tremendous amount of
work involved in making vanishing. It's not like, in fact, I've been with the company 15 years now,
and when I got out of college and I went to work there, I assumed the guys were back there with
big shovels of brass, shavings, and tenochoners, and a big oven type of thing, and every 30, 40
seconds out would come a CG cylinder or a box or something like that. And it doesn't work that way
whatsoever. They actually start out with flat brass. In this particular case here,
there are actually four, and let me back up a second, because when I talk about
vanishing manufacturing, I'm not only talking about the way that the box does it or the cylinder
does it, but the way that almost all vanishing is coming through. But we start out with a flat
sheet of brass. There are four ways, basically, to make bells. There's a two-piece bell, which we
have, we start out with a flat sheet of brass, and we start folding it over on a mandrel. A mandrel
is a steel tool that is shaped exactly like I want the final product to be shaped. So we
put it over a mandrel, and it will look something like this. Okay, then we sculpt it on, it's called
sculpting or soldering. We solder it on a bell flare, thus you get a kind of bell to look like this.
This basically is designed for a souvenir, because it's cheaper to make this way. You make the
flare, you put on the bell flare, or you make the stem, you put on the bell flare, and you've got
you've got a unit, and it's a less expensive way to make. The only problem with that is when you're
playing any acoustic instrument and you're playing and the horn is vibrating, all the horns will
vibrate, the vibrations are coming down, and if you were to put this on in a solo scope and watch
the sound waves, when the horn is vibrating and it comes down to this scene, then the vibrations
will dissipate in a kind of unusual fashion. It won't have a full true sound. Now it really
takes a discriminating error here all this, but it's true. Okay, that's one way of making a bell.
A second way of making a bell is rather than start out with a flat sheet of brass and fold it over,
because when you fold it over and spell it, you're going to have a scene running the entire length
down here, and then you're going to have a scene running the entire length over here,
but it is still considered a two piece bell, one and two. Some manufacturers choose to start out
with a two, rather than a flat sheet of brass, then they put it on a mandrel and they stretch it all
out to the shape that they want. That way there is no scene running the entire length. You only have
a two like so, and then you spell it on the bell flare. The problem with that is, that is when you
think and stretch something on a mandrel and stretch it in a cone shape like that, the farther
out it goes, the thinner it gets out here. It starts out the thick down here, but as you're
stretching it, and you're stretching it through lead, and it comes out like so, and it will thin
out very much down here. So you've got difference in thickness. Thick down here, thin down here,
and then you put it on a different thickness bell here. So it's going to have an unusual
thickness to it. By all the testing that's done by anybody, there's no, there's no
wrangly, there's no one better method than the other when you're talking about a two piece bell.
Okay, so that's the second way that we make bells. A third way then, is the way that we make the
CG cylinders that we made in the box, and that's made out of what we call a one piece hand hammer
bell. And we start out with a flat sheet of brass. We put it on a big hyper plane, a hyper plane,
hyper press, there's a type of press that has a cavity filled out, just like you see it here.
It lays just like that. We lay the flat sheet of brass over it, and then this big
cylinder is a oil come down, and they flatten all of the material down into this cavity.
Thus forming something similar to this, or exactly like this. Okay, then we go through
several operations. We can't, when you're working with brass, you can't just take it and snap it out
in one clean shot because the farther you stretch it, the thinner it gets, and it has a chance
or a likely lifted crack. So what we do is we, we, we heighten form it so that you see it like so,
and then we anneal it. What annealing is, is a very important process in any manufacturer of
advancements. You put it in another, and you bake or you cook it. We heat it up to about 1200 degrees
so that the brass softens. Then we bring it out, and we go through another high-performing process,
where we snap it out, one more step, so where the, the bell itself wears way up. This is the crucial
part of the bell, right in here. Because when we do the second form of high-performing, this will
really expand us out, so we see it like this. This part comes then very thin, that's why you have
to go through the annealing process. After we do that, we then take a trim saw, or cutter, and cut
out the pattern. I should see it here. Then the operator will go back to the mandrel, and he'll
pull this part down. I can see it here. He starts forming it around. So he forms it like so.
He'll trim it every so often to hold it, and then he beats all of this down. Then we go through a
process called speltering, where we take real fine pieces of brass that are made out of exactly our
material here, and it's mixed with soldering materials and flux and things like that, and they,
they put it on this seam, and then we take the torch that gets it up to 3,500 degrees, and it bonds
this whole thing together. At that point, this seam becomes as strong or stronger than the bell
itself, for all one interval part. So then we take it down to a mandrel, excuse me, we don't need it.
We take it into one of the noisiest areas in this plan, and we hammer out this portion of the seam
right here. We roll, on a big press, the guy puts it on another flat mandrel, because when we form
this, it has a seam, a very tough rock seam, and we roll it out on steel, and it just flattens it out,
really green puts the starch, so you can see it's just real flat right there.
And then we can't roll it all the way out to the end, because if we were to do that, this would
have a chance of crack right in here, because it becomes very thin at that point. So we,
about the last five or six inches, we hand hammer it on a machine that comes down and flattens
all of that out on a seam out. Okay, then the next operation would be to put it on the roundup
mandrel, which means the roundup mandrel looks very similar to this, and we start forcing this
back on the roundup mandrel to open the sweater back out. We're going to start to make it look
like a bell mandrel. And when we get done with it,
we put on the taper that we want. Now, I'll get into the papers in a little bit, but
Vincent Bach designed about 76 different bell mandrels. Each one of them are shaped differently.
And when you're talking about the sound of a horn, if you're playing the horn and you say,
well, geez, the horn responds great, but I want to change the sound, I want a brighter sound,
or I want a darker sound, then you do want to do things. You either change your mouthpiece
setup, you go to a different couple of back door or whatever, and or you change the bell,
because the bell and the mouthpiece are going to have the most to do with the sound. Okay,
then if you're playing it, and you say, well, geez, this plays great. Everybody says you sound
great, but the resistance is back in that one a little bit. Then you want to replace the mouthpiece
and where you're re-fighting two each side for the board. The board will have the most to do
the way the horn plays its time. The back of the bell, and so we put on the different papers that
we want. And when rolling the bell back on all of our professional measurements, like the seats
you're selling, and the box, we put a wire, a copper wire ring on the inside of this to help
that little Johnny little suit you have to buck their bell or drop or something. It helps hold
its shape a little bit without damaging the horn, but it does another thing. We go one step further.
These two bells are exactly alike. They both have a ring on the inside, but there's one
difference. We go one step further, and this is something that some manufacturers don't do.
We solder or let the bell at this point. That does two things. Number one, if we're rolling that
rim on, and the ring in there is not absolutely tight, and you don't get that down tight enough,
the ring is going to vibrate, right, through buzz, and you hear those buzzing sounds,
but it does one thing further than that, and I'll demonstrate that. This is by the sound,
I don't know what the acoustics like between here and this way, not working out great,
but I think you'll be able to tell a difference, again, between the two bells. The only difference
is this one's been letted, this one has not. If you're going like this,
I don't want to admit anybody doing this, but you're getting a flat, bloody type of sound,
kind of obvious, isn't it? That's the only difference between these two bells, in fact,
that's been letted. And again, that's one of the things that we do with the CG's. If you were to
do that in your hands right up here, when I'm tapping this, this bell is as live as it sounds,
I can feel it vibrating all over. Okay, that's actually the third method. There's a fourth method
of making bells that only a couple of manufacturers will do. And are you familiar with the Schokey
Morns? I'm not going to answer. The Schokey Morns, they have a process that they call
beryllium bells. And Mr. Schokey said that was his idea, and that's a much crap, because
Mike Anderson from Cannes invented that process long before he did, and they called it the old
Cannes-Comprion Bell. What you do, you take a mandrel with shape, is that the electric bell,
and you dip it down into a plating tank. Now plating is electric plating. It's got electricity
running through it. And you put the bell down there, and you've got electricity running through
there and all these copper particles, and you start building up the thickness of the bell.
After a required length of time, you bring it out, and you pop through. You take the bell,
and you've got a bell that's not made out of regular brass, but it's made out of particles,
made out of copper particles. That's why it's called coppery bell or beryllium bell. It's very thin.
So it's extremely thin, and for the one part, a lot of guys say it doesn't have the carrying power
that a regular brass bell will have. But all of the earlier ones look good for yourself,
but that's just another metal point of making bells. Okay, I'll say something about bells a
little bit. I'll talk about valves now for a little bit. Bells will make a couple of different ways
also on our student trumpet, and this is where we talk about what the difference between a student
trumpet and a professional trumpet. Why does one trumpet cost, you know, $429, and another trumpet
costs $1,000? What makes the difference? They're all made out of brass. I mean, the bells are made
out of brass, even though they're done differently. Well, a two-piece method is a real big difference,
and the way that it's formed, because we don't put a wire ring inside the two-piece bell,
and we don't let it, like we do the professional models. So that's a big cost right there.
Another area is in the valley. This is nickel turnover tube that will be nickel-plated once done.
On the professional trumpet, we make it out of monel material, which is a nickel alloy. It's three
times harder than nickel-sover. It lasts about three times longer, three or four times longer than
nickel-sover, but it costs quite a bit more than nickel-sover. The real reason for the monel is
that you can effectively machine monel, whereas the nickel-sover you plate. Whenever you plate
anything, you dip it into a plating tank, the plating characteristics will build up around
edges, so you're going to have thickness difference here. It's going to build up around here, and it's
going to build up around the core hole, and it becomes thicker at that point. So when you bring
it out and you start to laugh it down and do things to it outside, dye in your homes and things like
that, it still has a difference in thickness of the plating. So you can machine monel much more
effectively. At the end, that's one of the things that we teach in the ZG, some of us, is monel
pistons, just like Bach. They're made by the same guy. In fact, we never know they're going to be a
Bach pistons or a Honeypiston, so we put the board. That's three, because it's made out of the same material.
Okay, so then we cut the material, whether it be monel or nickel-sover. We cut it off the length,
and then we have a machine that's repeatedly going down and drilled out our core holes.
Then we put in these small pieces of copper. I'll pass them these things around. That is
trunched up and squished up and done everything that we can to get them to fit inside the core holes.
That's just to get them in place. Then we have a balling tool that comes down
and balls these out. Now, when somebody says, meeting large bore horn or large bore horn,
what does that mean? Do you know what that means? Okay, that was just common because that's the
answer I was looking for. Where do you measure the bore at?
I heard lean pipe. Where else do you measure the bore at?
Most manufacturers will measure the valve. When you talk about a valve, the bore of the valve,
our valves run 453 for a small bore, a medium bore, actually it's a medium bore, not a small bore.
459, I'm saying 0.459 inches for a medium average bore, which is pretty much the standard of the
box. Then we go into 462, which is a large bore, and then the CG, which goes up to a 478.
Now, Claude's got a special theory, which we'll talk about that in a little bit,
but he's got other ways when, and recently somebody says 474, I can't play a 474.
I don't care what it is that you've got. Don't ever say you can't play anymore until you try it,
because it sounds like what it plays like. You don't judge a bore by the specifications that you
judge by the way it plays in response for you. But anyhow, the bore is measured by the second
number. You pull the slides out, as I would do here, and if I had a set of calipers,
it would measure 0.45 by inches. If a bore large bore on, it would measure 0.462 inches.
Now, the difference then between a large bore 462 and a medium large bore 459,
is only 3,000 of an inch, 3,000 of an inch. That's only the thickness of the hair on your head,
or your some of your head. In any rate, it's only 3,000 of an inch, so it's very, very thin. You can
blow junk in your horn on one or two settings that will equal 3,000 of an inch. So you're going to
all of a sudden take what would be a large bore and want to make it into a medium large bore,
or if you've got a medium large bore and you don't clean it out, you're going to make it into a small
bore and nothing flat if you don't clean the horn. I'll be in the bathroom. But back to the piston.
After we've balled that out to the correct size, then we put a top cap on and a bottom cap on.
Some of that can just do a bit of go if we use castings on valves. Valves aren't made out of
castings. They're made out of tubings with brass ports that have a top and bottom cap
that have a solder, a silver solder, and then they put a spring barrel on top of it,
and it closed the spring barrel. That's important. It really is because some manufacturers will put
a stem on the outside and then wrap a spring around the outside of it. And if you're not
careful and you're oiling the valve, you're wrapping the whole spring and you're always
touching that spring and working with it. Sooner or later, you're bound to mis-shape that balance
and over a period of time, it's not going to have the same consistency in one, two, three valves.
So we put everything in an enclosed spring barrel. Any questions? I'll look them up real quick for valves.
Either I explain that thoroughly or you're bored with tears. Go ahead.
I need a lineup. Okay. I don't need to have a little bit, but I'll get into that since you asked.
When you align your pistons, we literally spend thousands of dollars to align valves. So make
sure that when you push the piston down, that these portals line up with one another.
They're done by felts. We do that with felts and all kinds of little things. You see these top
cap felts? Not only does the down match have to match up, but the upstroke has to match also.
So they're done with felts inside your caps here, felts many times inside your bumpers.
If you look at your pistons, you'll see felts all over. You'll think, well,
all those are for is to keep it quiet. That's not all they're for. They're used in
conjunction with lining up their valves. At this point, I'll interject something about
some crazy concepts that have gone around. Again, I emphasize that we spend thousands of dollars
to make sure that this lines up. There's one guy, I won't mention his name, but he charges you $200,
I think now, to misline your valve. It's not perfectly down to the down. He's got a system
that he says, well, theoretically, he's changing all around, and they can all make your want to play
that. And then you've got other guys that have stepped leaf pipes. You see me, I'll tell you,
I can sign leaf pipes that have steps in them that will change the pistons and stuff like that.
And there are other guys that have pitch finders that, I know these because the guy who gave them
a talk with me at the summer company about their products and just took our heads in amazement
and said no thanks. Because the pitch finder, are you familiar with that at all? The pitch finder
has a bunch of triggers on it. So not only do you have to worry about pushing one, two, and three
valves down in certain combinations, but you have to worry about pushing this trigger in
and pulling this trigger back and pushing that trigger up. It's got more triggers. So you're not
only working this hand, you're working this hand just as fast. It's really crazy. And it's called
to tell you from day one, don't go for that crap. Just learn to play your horn. What will happen,
and I guarantee it, you'll go to a show and this guy'll say, now let me tell you this
misaligning the valves here is the greatest thing on the sun. It will change your whole
100 now. And you say, oh, is that right? Well, try it. Well, what he does, he goes back and he
does some work on it, and you'll get it back the next day and you'll blow it and say, fine, man,
that does play pretty good. That's where the most part, it plays better than when you gave it to
you. But that doesn't mean it's a better horn. What happens is, and I'll get into this story now,
is he takes it back, and he first thing he does is clean it out. Because how many, I'm sure,
I know everybody, cleans your horn out once a week. Raise your hand once a week.
Look at that. Are you lost? Are you not good at cleaning your horn out once a week?
One of the exceptions to the rule, they must have taken it from law.
How about once a month? Who cleans their horn out once a month?
How many clean their horn out maybe once every six months?
Do I have any over six months to clean their horn out once every six months?
When you clean your horn out, what's happening is you're taking, I mean, if you scrub it out,
and that's what these guys are doing, they'll scrub the horn out and clean it out good to remove
all that junk that you've built up inside you. And I don't care how many times you brush your teeth
after eating, and you know, I'm sure nobody drinks on the job while they're playing in meetings
or casuals and nobody eats any sodas and blows that stuff. When you do that, you're blowing stuff
right into the horn. And if you don't clean your horn out immediately, that stuff has a chance to
collect an air, coagulate, harden it, and it plays that game back out. And it goes one step
further, the one guy asked me a little bit ago, I've got a horn that's got a lot of little
pink spots on my lead pipe. I'll often, as you see this later, but I've got, I've got a lead pipe
that we took off with the horn, back to factory, because the guy says, manufacturing's a lead pipe,
manufacturing's a lead pipe. And you'll see a bunch of little pink spots on the lead pipe,
they're rebuffing off the surface of them. And if you take this up and look right here,
you'll see spots on the inside of this lead pipe. What has happened,
here's your lead pipe, on the outside, you've got a little dot like that. On the inside,
it's all even out like that. It's all just, it's all even out from inside. So it's going to leave.
So you've got to replace parts at that point, at that point. Not only on lead pipes,
whether it'll happen on a tuning slide, usually if you go through the lead pipe on a tuning slide,
is where it all gets caught, because then it gets to the valve and sometimes drops off the bottom.
Everybody has a certain amount of acid in their bodies. And if you don't clean your horn out,
that acid will sit there and it will deteriorate a horn. Over the years, a wooden instrument,
like a violin or something, will age because there wasn't all that kind of stuff on the older
minors. It will get better or remain the same, not like a brass instrument. Brass instruments,
if you don't clean them out, the acid will sit there, it'll deteriorate the horn,
and these will throw away it because it doesn't get better, it can get worse.
Okay, so that's enough about the fact. Getting back to it, Lloyd Filio and I often thought that,
again, we would take a set up of time for $50, if somebody's coming to me,
from $50, we guarantee your horn will play better when we give it back to them. All we would do
is take it back to the hotel room and scrub it out and do it on it, you know, because you see,
you get out there, you clean your horn out, you see all this slide cheese that's running out,
kind of the same. Probably not for you guys to do it every week, but it'll happen. There was an
old guy who was working, in fact, he was playing Doc Wagon for an old Bishop company. His theory was,
the best way to clean your horn out is every time you play it. Just run it over to the water or
somewhere, go to places on the theoretical here, you take it over the water and you open it up
and just clean water for about 10, 15 seconds. The water will neutralize all the acid that
was going into it and it flushes out all the cheese before it has a chance to harden up and
cake up in there. Would that be taking the valves out or just leaving it as okay?
With the belts okay to get that way? It's not, you're not going to get the valves, the force,
if they're in good shape, the valves, if they're in good shape, you're not going to get water
blowing up past the valve, they're going to go, they're going to follow the channels here
down into the, you know, into the slides and stuff. Okay, now,
I'll go tell you how it's going to go.
When manufacturing game, when people go to certain degrees to make the instrument
destructive, I think most of you will probably remember when you were younger,
the pop, the leap, the modernism, the leap back, yeah, I got playing Star Wars, I remember that.
In fact, that was the first thing that I did when I got my mom and I was with my dad and
I jammed it into the pipe, my dad took it to the vise, he put it in place and started twisting it
until he twisted all of the braces loose and I took it back and I got all kinds of trouble for that.
What we do on our student instrument now is we put a nickel silver amount piece receiver
with a brass knob, even though this is silver plated, it's made of brass, brass and nickel
silver, tend to resist each other. Again, I can set a panel on that myself and it will come loose
if it's clean. If I were to do that on a CG or a box or something, it would probably split the
receiver or jam the instrument so you wouldn't get it out, but we do that to make it, I say,
kid proof or so that it doesn't have to go back to the repair shop. Another thing we do
on our, on our student appliance instruments, can you remember also when you oiled your valves
and your teacher said, okay, you put the valve in and you listen for the click? Right? Most of you
go through that? Okay, when I did that, sure I oiled the valves, I took it out and holed them up
real good and I turned them in, I heard the click, but what you didn't tell me was that you could
turn the valve around 180 degrees. So I started to play, right? And the valve all froze up. I mean,
when it froze up, there's no air through it, it's 100 degrees. So here I go again, take it to my dad,
we're going to go to the repair shop and I'm going to crawl over again. What we do on the student
line is we put a one star guide in it that when we hear that click, it's in the correct way,
it's in the exact way, it can always go in the right way. And I will relate a story that happened
because we're in the process of thinking of doing this on the block one time. Because are you familiar
with Wynton Marsalis? He's playing black trumpets and working with me, we picked out about a
morning prepared for him, I took it up in New York, I worked with him for two days to line this one up
and he's going to play it. About three days later, he's on the Grammy Awards. And this was back
about two years ago, if you remember, his group was on the Grammy Awards. And he was up there and he
played the, he played the Humble Trumpet from Cherryville, it was great and everything was lovely.
And the cameras panned back to John Denver, who's commentating, he says, man, not only can he play
classical music, but you ought to hear him play jazz. And they turn back to the cameras back to him
and he's commentating, stop, wait, wait, stop, hold, hold everything. And he starts banging on the
valve. And he's about 30 seconds full with the valves. Okay, here goes one. You know, on national TV,
it doesn't happen again, he starts beating the valves and I don't remember to stand real stiff.
And the camera's been back to John Denver, he's standing like this. And then he starts playing.
And everything worked out great. He won both the Grammy Awards and he walked away with, you know,
top honors and all that stuff. The very next night, he was on Johnny Carson's show and I called up and
I called him up and said, what the heck happened? Because I thought maybe the valves were getting
in front of him. I said, lesson number one, because I was in a hurry, I was rushed. Because I was nervous.
I oiled the valves, I heard the click, because I didn't check to see if I had any backers.
Yeah. So then it was a process of finding which valve, you know, you're on national television,
you're 30 seconds in an eternity, and he's trying to find out which valve.
So that's the kind of story of that. That's why we are attempting right now to make a horrible one.
There is a couple of other things. When we make
spread horns, I'm sure there are a couple of horn players here, when we make horns,
when we make horns, they are pretty much primarily all made of two-piece bells.
Because of the wide variety of the stretch and the spread of the bell itself, we have to. The
only other way we do it, or maybe on some kind of one of the two-pieces, is that we've got a larger bell.
If we make the bell like so, and then right about in here, we'll put in a pie-shaped piece,
and they'll throw it around. In other words, it'll look very similar to this, like you see it,
except on a warm scale. And then we'll piece in a section down here to form another bell.
So that's another one of the bells. Quickly, to get into, to talk about sound and stuff like that.
Again, that's designed with 76 different bell mandrels. He's signed with 70. He's made the
76 or so different lead pipe mandrels. Yes?
Yes, it's the biggest of the bell mandrels. Is there one star of bell mandrels that work to keep the bell
from twisting? Yes.
Yeah, I'll show you. Come up afterwards. I'll show you how. When you hear that click,
it falls right down into a slot. In fact, one's higher than one is lower, and it's right down
into a slot, so there's no way to twist it. That's right, there's still no twisting, no radio action.
Well, I heard some of the training about the bell in the case, and it's one of the bell mandrels.
Not as far as I ever thought, and you never, have you ever heard of it?
There is, you know, they say, don't twist your bell, and stuff like that. No, as long as the
bell is working, in fact, most of your repairmen will take it. There are good repairmen, and then
there aren't some that are absolutely repairmen. And when you get a repairman, somebody who we
talked about, I think it was Ken MacArthur, somebody we talked about, they took a pump or
something, and they started buffing the pump out. Worst thing you can do to a piston. I mean,
really, you can do it if you're good, but one of the worst things to do with a piston is if you've
got a scratch, to take it on a buffing wheel and start buffing it, because buffing takes material
away, and most guys will lean on it to get that scratch out, but they're taking all of a sudden
material away, so you normally, you've got the stress. If you sunk the piston in, it just usually
don't work with a darned one. Not at all.
Can you apply a third valve fly, so you don't drill it out now?
It's too depressing, it doesn't hurt anything. If you're getting a pop, you're gonna get,
if, after a while, some guys will drill a hole in it, your piston, to relieve that, so you don't
hear that popping sound. But if that's a depression, it doesn't need to be referred. You hold it out
later on, and you pull it out.
I mean, what's it gonna hurt?
Why'd you drill that thing? It's not gonna hurt.
Go out and do it outside.
What's it gonna hurt? I hasn't heard from anybody that's telling me what it's gonna do to the horn.
All it's gonna do is pop, but that shows you've got compression.
No, it's not gonna hurt.
It was doing it on stage.
Yeah, so that's making noise.
You're already fired from your job, it's not gonna make any noise.
Okay, back to the tables again.
76, different bell naps, 76 different, yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, because you've got two different bells, and so that is more of a convenience than anything else.
You know, a lot of things going on, it doesn't impact the pattern, but that's more of a convenience
where you remove the bell that's blackened up to the interior, and that's right.
Whenever, and that kind of gets into a lacquer, you've heard lacquer versus silver,
finishes, right?
Which is the darker finish?
Lacquer or silver, anybody tell me?
Which is the darker sound?
We can't tell me.
There's nobody here who can tell me that because there are too many variables.
There are too many variables when you're making horns like that.
Lacquer in a horn is when you take a horn and you scrape it, it's just like scraping in a car,
the guy's got a nozzle fat thing and he sprays it down and it's finished on it.
Okay, plating is electroplating, you dip it into an electrically charged tank,
that all of the particles are going around in the exact to the horn,
and that's electrically charged and that's plating.
If, and this is theory, if the guy lacquering the horn is lacquering,
everybody's got a routine that they've got a pattern.
They do it so many times this way and they do it so many times this way and one this way,
and they do everyone like that.
If he happens to miss one or sees that he didn't cover it all well, he'll go back over it.
And if he goes over it, that particular horn that he went over is going to have more lacquer on it.
It's going to have a bit darker sound because it's got more material on it to restrict the lean of the belt.
Likewise, if you're plating a horn and you're dunking it into it like a plating tank,
and the guy's working on something else and the buzzer goes off and he lets it in there 15 seconds longer,
then he did the trumpet before that, that particular horn is going to have a darker sound
because it's got more material to restrict the lean of the belt.
So that's just a little bit darker.
I mean a little bit, I'm not talking about great amounts, but a little bit.
But that's, you'll do more to change the sound with papers than you will with this.
Because everything will be changed by papers.
And when you start out with the trumpet, everything is a paper.
Your cup is a paper.
Your backboard is a paper.
Your lead pipe is a paper.
And your bell is a paper.
The only things that aren't paper are your bell.
And that's, it will be on the corner, that kind of board thing.
But on a cylinder before a trumpet, these will be paper surfaces.
Just like a French horn.
Why is a French horn, let's back up.
Why is a frugal horn darker than a trumpet?
If you took it all out, stretched it all out to one length,
there are 52 and 38 inches, I believe, exactly what it is.
If you took them all stretched it all out, I say eliminating all the sightings,
but it will be 52 and 38 inches.
That means tapers are exactly right.
You start out with a smaller board and it gradually gets larger.
That's your taper.
That produces a darker sound.
French horns are darker sounding,
or they have a different sound because of the taper of the thing.
That's why we can change the sound of a trumpet a little bit by changing the bell.
I'll get into a few box things.
If this comes up, everybody asks a question.
That's a lot.
What's the difference between a 37 bell and a 72 bell and a 43 bell?
Again, if this...
It has a 37 bell, which doesn't mean it's just being kind of a medium down the middle
of the road type of sound, a nice big little sound.
Then if we want a 72 bell, a 72 bell...
I'm not sure how to teach this, but it goes like this.
What am I showing you?
Where's that one?
It starts out fatter down here and gradually gets larger down there.
What kind of sound should that produce?
Darker sound because it's getting more tapered after it.
Whereas a 43 bell comes down like this, and kind of the last minute
does a number of words, spread it out faster.
Now, you can't tell what I'm looking at.
It's done so where you can't hardly see it by the naked eye.
But that in theory is what it's all about.
So that will produce a little bit brighter sound down here.
So you're saying a 43 bell is smaller than a 37 bell?
It's more cylindrical than a 72 bell.
It will produce a bit brighter.
Everything else being equal, it will produce a bit brighter sound than a 72 bell.
And a 37?
And also a 37.
Now, you get a lot of guys that are playing lightweight 72s, and it's a good lead horn.
And they're kind of looking for a little more heads or a bright sound.
But we're talking about a different animal now.
We're talking about a lightweight horn.
Again, lightweight, there are regularly horns, and then there are lightweight horns.
Lightweight horns are lighter in material, just like Claude's CG, extremely light.
I mean, they're thin.
They're to produce a real, you know, when you're playing into it,
the sound generates right now.
Because you're going into it and it's thin material, zap, it responds.
It does a number on it.
The only thing that's not changed on a lightweight is the valve section.
But all your tuning slides, all your receivers, they are made of lightweight material.
One more, isn't there a model now that you're selling the two bells that have a lightweight body?
That's what I'm talking about.
It is a light weight.
No, no, no.
Let me talk about body.
We're talking about the LR series.
When we say lightweight body, we're referring to the lead pipe, tuning slide, the valve, the slides, and all that stuff.
The only thing that's not light-weight on that is the bell.
That's a regular cell in a particular model.
But when we say lightweight, never the valve section.
That's always one standard speciality.
I'll mention briefly about model pieces.
Model pieces.
One of the responsibilities I had about five years ago
where the company was reviewing our catalogs, kind of updating certain things and the proofread.
I read across it, it said in the book there, it said that Vincent Bach offered over 80,000 different combinations of models.
That's an easy thousand.
You can't possibly be right.
So I called our advertising guys and said, what is going on?
I said, can't be. It's got to be maybe 800 or 8,000, but certainly not 80,000.
He said, wait a minute.
Trumpet model pieces, and Cornish model pieces, and Frugal one, and French one, and double-hungry model pieces.
Santa Frumbo, and Bay Frumbo, and physical model pieces.
He says, just in Trumpet alone, you've got over 106 different backboard readers.
And he says, and you've got one cup, and one and a half, and two and a half, and two and a half, and two and a quarter.
And all the way up to 20s.
I said, you got that, right?
He says, you can go. You've got 80 cups, and B cups, and C cups, and D cups, and E cups.
He says, you can go from the 29th row.
You can go more than half. It's the 29th row.
Easily down to maybe 16 or 17th row.
He says, you've got extra wide rims, and cushions rims, and all these different things.
You're making it so, and you're making it gold.
He said, by the time you add all this up, and screw it in,
he says, by the time you add all this up, it's not 80,000.
It's almost a half a million something.
He says, but I thought it was totally ridiculous to say you've got to pay over a half a million in a house.
He says, I was ordered to pay about 80,000.
I thought it'd be cool.
But there are all kinds of things.
Cup shapes, and floor sizes, and things like that.
And that's a very crucial part of the instrument, which I'm going to be into right now,
because I think my time has done it. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
And the wire is torn, stripped, and we play it.
It's a little crazy, but I think it's cool.
I've always thought about it that way.
I think it's okay.
He says, why did I get it?
He says, next to me.
I don't know what this is.
So, two or three weeks later, he came back in.
He says, Donna, where's your home?
And this is next to him.
I don't know what this is.
So he came back to this.
All of a sudden, Donna comes in.
I'm telling you about that.
Everybody used to go see the old Donna for a while.
Great.
She was running back in.
I look on the space.
And all of a sudden, he runs for the shop.
When the guy came in, he wanted this one right away.
He put it in an acid.
And he could never thought of it again until this day.
And he went back. There's one little grace left.
He went back to the acid.
He said, completely.
So, I think it's really a feral thing.
And I want to thank you again.
And, uh,
Okay.
I want to thank you again.
I'm not just wondering from you,
but also, next time when you do a video thing,
we'll be in practice.
You're welcome.