Claude Gordon Brass Camp 1990 - Larry Souza on Brass Construction and Maintenance

The next person on staff is Larry Sousa, who's a player up in the Bay Area.
He works, well when I first started to get to know the guy, he was over at the Circle Star playing away for a while,
and now he's up at the, in San Francisco doing a lot of The Current, is that the right theater?
That's right.
The Current Theater right now doing Les Miserables, and he's done all the, well a lot of the shows that have been coming into San Francisco,
over the last number of years.
A recording artist, and he also has, does some of the most excellent horn maintenance work on trumpets.
I send all my students up to him, mount pieces and horns, dent work, everything.
He's the guy I trust.
So this is Larry Sousa.
Everybody get three pages.
One, two, and three.
Does everybody have one? Let's start with page one.
So we're missing page ones and we're out.
By judging from the paper, the first thing we're going to discuss is the construction and materials used to put together what we call a brass instrument.
And basically the reason being that the instruments are made out of brass or similar non-ferrous metals, okay?
Non-ferrous, meaning it won't conduct like a magnet.
So it's non-magnetic.
And we have a few categories there.
We have basic raw materials that are used to build a brass instrument, and that would be either copper, silver, gold is used, nickel is used, and sometimes beryllium is used.
These are the raw materials.
They're not always used in that form, and of course some of them aren't used very much because of their expense, and that's gold.
But as you get into the next category, we have what we call alloys.
Does anybody know what an alloy is?
A mixture of metals so that we can come up with the different types of non-ferrous metals with a different timbre and tone and a different amount of hardness to it.
You can change it quite a bit of ways just by changing what you mix it with.
When you mix and create alloys, they also use zinc as a basic mixture with copper, and we end up with what we call yellow brass.
And that's probably the one we see the most, and that's what most brass instruments are made out of.
Sometimes you'll see red brass, which is more copper in it, less zinc.
So those are our basic alloys that we use, which is brass and red brass or bronze-y type of metals.
We also have broilium sometimes is used and mixed with copper, and it creates a different kind of sound, too, or a different type of metal alloy.
So those are the basic metals that are used to make an instrument.
And every one of those metals or the introduction of it into the horn creates a different timbre or quality.
Does everybody know what the word timbre means?
T-I-M-B-R-E?
Okay, who can tell me what timbre is?
Timbre is a basic resonance of the instrument and a spectrum of what we call overtones of our basic harmonic series.
Have you folks talked about the harmonic series in any of your classes here?
The harmonic series is the basic musical spectrum that all instruments and all things around us resonate to.
Everything has the same series of overtones based off of a fundamental pitch.
Some of them collide and happen at the same time, and we call that noise, like a difference from that and a real pitch.
The harmonic series is involved in this tone, too.
In fact, if I hit it in the middle, you might get a pitch.
Everything resonates to the same harmonic series that we know, our heads, everything.
So this harmonic series can be brought out in different fashions by the different materials that we use.
We use wood and clarinets, we use brass and trumpets, you get different sound, different timbre, different resonance or quality.
Let's do the quick harmonic series here.
Do we have a staff maker here?
No.
I guess it's me.
I've been spending this whole week doing everything based on the harmonic series.
The harmonic series is the natural series that occurs on all brass instruments, and of course it occurs on every instrument, too, in some fashion or another.
And it keeps going.
As we get higher, what happens to these intervals?
These are intervals. The difference between two notes is called an interval.
What happens to these intervals as it goes higher?
It gets closer together. We start off with perfect octave.
What's the next one?
Perfect fifth.
It has names.
Perfect fourth.
Major third.
We'll use a big M for that.
Minor third.
They're getting smaller, aren't they?
And I've locked in this one, it's like a quarter note, for one reason.
It's a minor third, alright, but what's wrong with it?
It's a little flat, so it's a closer minor third.
Nature doesn't discriminate between tempering the scale.
It has its own series which doesn't follow a tempered scale like we use.
So it's getting to be a closer together minor third.
Then what happens?
We have a flat, B flat, and a regular C, and that interval is a what?
Major second.
And it's a big major second because this one's flat, so the gap is big.
Another one here with kind of a sharp D.
Not real sharp, but a little sharp.
It's a little smaller major second.
Then we go to this one, it's a smaller major second.
And the very next one I think it skips to your first minor second,
which would be a large gap between E and a sharp F.
That's your first minor second.
If we continue with the harmonic scale, what happens?
They get into quarter steps, eight steps, it keeps going.
At fifth and octave it just keeps going forever until pretty soon you can't discern it.
We can't.
We usually have trouble with quarter steps.
Sounds like a lot of the tune.
There's the series.
Now you play a note on a trumpet, you get a sound.
And you can distinguish that sound from a clarinet.
Why?
The timbre.
The overtones are different.
And if we had a computer readout of the timbre of a concert C on a clarinet
and a concert C on a trumpet, the picture would look totally different.
Some of them might favor this note more.
You can hear more of this coming out.
Way up three octaves later you'll hear a lot of shine on a silver-plated trumpet.
On a flasher one you don't hear it at all.
You hear a lot of this area.
All these overtones are all ringing to create a composite of pitches
to create one pitch with one timbre.
We can mask that timbre just by taking your horn out, play the pitch.
Put your hand on the bell and play the pitch.
What happens to the timbre?
It gets different.
You've cut out some overtones.
Some of the overpitches do not ring anymore.
So you have a different sound.
So that's what we're doing.
When we build a trumpet, we start with the raw materials
and we make alloys to create a timbre or quality.
Okay.
That's one thing you can do.
Now other things add to the change of this timbre.
This is the next step.
Now we're now moving to the next part.
And that is thickness of the metal.
By adding, to make a trumpet out of thick wall tubing,
you're going to get a different sounding horn
than you do with a real thin horn.
Now the Claude Gordon trumpet is what kind of horn?
Does anybody know?
Thin horn.
It's a lightweight horn.
Thin gauge metal creates a different spectrum or timbre.
And that's what it's designed to do,
is to create a very right kind of resonant sound.
Okay.
When you get into the heavy wall horns,
what kind of horns are heavy wall horns?
Bach.
Okay.
There's two examples.
Same company, two kinds of horns, right?
One's heavy, one's thin.
They're both made at the same factory by the same people.
And they're designed specifically to create
a different timbre or overtone series.
Okay.
So with a thicker horn, you're going to knock out
certain partials and add others.
It's just going to change the horn.
Okay.
So that's another tendency to maybe want to make it
lock in better.
It doesn't have a slippery,
it doesn't run through these harmonics as slippery
as you might with a thinner horn.
You find that they're more easy to play,
a little bit more accurate on sometimes.
This is what everybody says anyway.
So that's a matter of opinion.
But that's another attribute of a thick and thin metal.
Okay.
That changes the horn drastically,
just by changing the thickness of the metal.
If we take a bar of aluminum and hit it,
it'll have a tone like a vibraphone.
If we scoop metal out of the back,
we can change the pitch of it.
So the thickness of that metal changes pitch as well.
So it stands to reason that by the thickness of a metal
on a trumpet, it's going to change the overtone
ringing ability, its ability to ring.
Okay.
So thickness of the metal,
the alloy that's used for the trumpet,
and what else now would affect the quality of tone
of your horn, your brass instrument.
That's the next category.
Dimension.
Because now we can take, now we've created
so many different possible things to make a horn
that you can start to understand why people
get confused about what to get.
Because there's not just a metal type and a thickness,
there's a dimension to each horn.
We can start with bells.
Bells have a taper to them.
They all have a very different taper to them,
depending on what timbre or overtones they want to favor.
And also that creates a restriction to the horn
as to how much airflow can go by.
But let's say if we deal with the bell first,
we're talking about more, not less restriction,
but more or less a tone change.
When you take that bell section and change the taper
of the bell, it's going to change the tone
of the horn drastically.
That's why one example would be the bench company.
They make a whole ton of bell shapes.
So does Bach.
Bach makes at least seven or eight, nine, ten bell shapes.
And all of these shapes are designed to create
a different sound, a little bit different restriction
or feel in the horn.
Now we're talking about dimension.
Let's talk about the other part of the dimension.
We can change the bell taper.
What else can we do?
Change the lead pipe.
That's how the horn starts.
We're taking this air that's coming to a mouthpiece,
and it comes out.
Now we change the lead pipe.
Are we going to change the sound?
Yep.
You're going to change the sound because it's going
to change the air velocity.
When you change the air velocity,
you again change the sound because you're going
to allow either less or more air to pass by
at a certain rate of speed.
Also, there's a little bit of resonating quality
to a lead pipe, and the whole horn vibrates
to a degree, so it's not all the bell.
But you have something in that lead pipe.
Then what about the center part of the horn?
The size of the bore.
The size of the parallel tubing can be
different bores. We can start with small bore,
medium, medium large, medium large plus,
large, extra large.
It starts as low as 400 thousandths
of an inch for a trumpet,
and maybe a flugelhorn,
all the way up to
480, 490
for some large cornets and some trumpets.
That's a big variety
in size of bore.
Now another phenomena occurs when you change the dimension
besides the sound. What happens
it lets a little more air go by,
doesn't it? So it changes
the feel of the horn, too.
But there now is an infinite
number of things we can do to change the quality
of a horn. We can change the metal,
we can change the thickness, we can change the taper
of the bell, the dimension of the bore, the size of
the lead pipe. Forget it. I'm lost.
What was the range of
bore sizes again?
Oh, and that
most companies operate between
0.400
and
a half an inch, you might say,
0.500.
But you'll find most
horns are in the
460 to 470
area.
Or I should add 458
since Bach passed it over to
488. There's various sizes
and now this not only
changes the tone because of
its air velocity change, but it
also changes the resistance of the horn, too.
You can feel that when you play a smaller horn
and a bigger horn.
Now, let's just stop there for a second.
Is there anybody that can question about this
subject only?
Does the size of the bore change the intonation
problem?
Anytime you change a dimension, you're going to
change where the intonation occurs.
You can tighten up a
horn in a certain place and get rid of one
note that might be, let's say, flat.
But it might create a problem somewhere else.
So every horn's unique in that fashion.
If you change it, you're going to move things around
a little bit.
Anybody else have any questions about that?
You said, how the heck do you know
what to get?
If you're beginning,
you have to trust somebody that's been in
the business and know. So that's why we have
instructors and people to kind of guide us
in the right direction. I must say that
the first four horns I bought,
I didn't know what I was looking
for. And most of them
I purchased because I knew somebody
that I really respected
to play it.
A lot of times I made some big mistakes.
They weren't right
for me. My first
horn was a Selmer K
Modified.
It was before K Modified.
It was 1953.
And after, yes?
Would you mind describing the characteristics
of your horn and why you make those
and what they do? Absolutely.
I will. I'll go through that.
And then after that,
I bought a
Kahn, I think I bought a
Reynolds because somebody I knew had one.
And then I bought a Kahn Constellation because
Maynard Ferguson played one.
Well, maybe that'll help.
So it wasn't
until I started feeling for myself
when I had been playing professionally for a long time
what I actually wanted to feel when I
played, that I started leaning towards
a larger bore horn for the kind of work
that I do, which is usually
show or dance band or
kind of work where you want to get the sound out.
So my choice
of horns is always for the last
20 years I guess
or 18 or 20 years has been
a large bore horn in the
468, 470 area.
And that's why I
started using
a large bore bench first
and then Claude
came out with his CG band and I went to that,
which I liked
a lot. And then now I'm playing
a regular Claude Gordon
470, which I've been playing
for, this is serial number 4.
When did they come out Claude?
What year did your horn come out?
The Selmer? The Selmer.
About 10 years ago.
So this horn is about 10
years old. That's how long I've been playing on this one.
This is a unique
phenomenon in horns. It's basically
copied from a French Besson design
which is a very open lead pipe
going to a large bore
470 all the way through the
parallel part is large bore. When you get to the
part that comes out of the bell
it restricts back
by four thousandths
of an inch for about
five inches or so until
it comes to the flare and then it goes out.
Now this restriction was put
in there years ago by Besson
to give it more shine and put a little
bit back that you lose with a large bore
horn and gives it a little bit more
resistance and puts a little brilliance back in the
tone. That was the concept anyway.
And Claude had a beautiful
French Besson
that he played on for years and all of his
horns have basically been a concept
off of that horn and
since that time he's refined the concept
to the things that he wanted
to have the horn do.
So this is a lightweight
horn. It's a thin wall
horn to get a certain kind of response.
It's a very free blowing large
bore with a little bit of restriction here
with what I would call a
medium large size bell.
I've seen much larger bells and of course
a lot smaller bells.
This horn is a good horn and a lot
of you people know you're all playing on it.
So this is my favorite.
So Larry that's
a standard
stock horn. You've not heard of it
anyway. No this one has had a
brass pipe made on it but
it's the same dimension instead of
nickel. When Claude
had the horn designed he wanted a brass
pipe but they couldn't make it thin enough.
He wanted it thin.
They had trouble with it so they went to
nickel which you can manufacture a much thinner
isn't that right Claude?
Yeah I couldn't hear you. I'm sorry.
You went to the nickel pipe because summer
couldn't make it thin enough right?
If it were brass it would collapse.
It would collapse. It was so thin.
So they wanted that. Now this is a little bit
thicker and it's the same exact dimension
in brass.
That's the only change in this one except for
buttons. That doesn't mean anything.
Okay now
moving along here
we're talking about the design of the instrument.
We've talked about its metals and its dimension.
The next thing we're going to talk about is the introduction
of the chromatic instrument.
Okay early attempts at
chromatic instruments.
One would be during the renaissance or
Bach period is a clarino
or a very
extra long natural
horn. And these horns
were played in the upper register
so that they started
dealing with only the notes
in this area
and above.
But they'd make the horn very
low starting maybe
a fifth below that or low F.
And that would allow it to have
diatonic being whole
steps and half steps available
to them all through this area.
Now some of them
even introduced
supposedly introduced
horns with holes in the instrument
here and there. Now later
I've heard it said that they didn't play with any horns
with any holes in it so who knows.
But they would actually relieve a
hole in places maybe to
flatten the pitch so that it would
play a half step where there wouldn't be one normally
in the overtone series.
So with that
kind of a set up they could play
pretty much all chromatic
pitches. It was a
very, very difficult horn to play.
It took a lot of practice and most great clarino
players played
were very specialized
and played in the upper register type pieces like
the grand berkin jowl and so on.
Things of that nature. That's one way
that chromatic pitches were done.
Later on Joseph Haydn had
a trumpet designed with
keys on it and he wrote a piece especially
for it. And the instrument
when it was first performed it was so
atrocious and so out of tune and played so
terribly that he removed the music
from the performer and hid it
for years. Nobody could find
it because he didn't want it performed on
that instrument. He thought it sounded so terrible.
So it was almost like a saxophone with
a brass mouthpiece and a bunch of holes in it
with keys.
Another attempt has been sliding systems where they
slide open baffles to let air
transfer through another area.
They usually leaked a lot.
Bad seal, bad sound.
Okay the next thing after that
of course and very early and one of
the most successful and still successful ways
of creating a chromatic pitch was a slide.
A slide trombone
is still of course a major
instrument and very effective
way to approach a chromatic instrument.
Another
modern way now other than the slide
is the use of rotary valves.
Everybody understand the difference between
a rotary valve and a piston valve?
Well the piston
operates in a cylinder, drops
up and down and it drops
from one set of holes that allows it
to go through extra tubing to
another set that it bypasses the extra
tubing unless it goes straight out of the horn.
The rotor does the same thing by turning the
rotor half turn
like this and going to the extra tubing
and then diverting the
air the other direction bypassing the extra
tubing. What is
essentially a brass instrument is nothing
more than a bugle.
A natural instrument that has nothing
but these overtones that we've discussed here
and by adding
valves or adding a
slide position we create
seven bugles in one.
And these seven bugles
are nothing more than natural instruments
like that.
We introduce more tubing what happens
to the pitch when we introduce more tubing?
Pitch goes
down.
So as we do that if I press second
valve we have let's say
this is not exact but let's say that we have three inches
of tubing that we've added.
Oh great thanks.
No sugar in it though it's good for your horns.
Let's say that this is three inches
and that on a trumpet
that maybe is four feet long
will create a half step.
Okay.
This tube is how long?
If we say this is three what do you think this one would be?
Six.
It's exactly double the length of this
it gives us a whole step.
This one is? Nine.
Nine gives us a step
and a half right?
Minor third correct?
Okay. What other way
can we get nine?
One and two.
So that means everything you do with one and two you can do with three
right?
So it's a double up in the system.
Now we take the next step
which would be past nine inches would be
what?
One and three.
Two and three.
Two and three we add nine inches plus another three
inches and what's
the pitch difference? The interval
distance.
Major third okay from open
to here we have a major third.
Now we go to the nine and six
and the last one is
nine, six, and three.
So we've added seven right?
Two ways to do that.
On each one of those you have
an overtone series.
So we have seven
bugles in one. That's all there is to this thing.
Well how come it's not easy?
Anyway that actually this is the
simplest fashion anyone can create
a chromatic instrument that there is.
It's the least amount of buttons and the least amount of
ways to do it. Yes?
When you get a minute can you back up on your outline
a little bit and talk about the mouthpiece
and how that works?
Yeah, oh I sure can.
Did I skip it?
Yes, dimension. Yeah I did
didn't I?
Oh okay
good, thank you.
Let's go back to the mouthpiece
again and we'll talk about dimension. Of course
there's a million zillion dimensions on these things.
Some of them are for comfort.
Some are designed to fit people's needs as far
as their makeup. Some people have maybe
more flash, more lip, less lip
teeth in a certain
shape so you pick something that feels
good for you. The next part of the design
is another way of getting the air to the
horn. So remember this is just
the start of the instrument.
And basically we're talking about
a simple kind of picture.
Any more chalk or I'll use it all.
Is this.
This is you.
That's the horn. You're taking
an air out of a large source
and what do you do with it? You control it
through your body with your tongue.
You bring that air to a point. You focus
at your armature and from
that point on it goes the
other direction and reverses.
Did you know that if you take a pitch
and you blow through it you receive
sound back? You get sound out the end of the bell.
If you suck in
and were capable of getting vibration
like a mechanical object can,
the same sound comes out of the bell
whether the air is going that way or this way.
Exactly
almost exactly the same sound.
Air does not have to travel out
but to function
properly for a human being to blow the instrument
we blow the air out.
So we take the air out of a big source, we bring
it to a point and we bring it the other
way. This is the start of the other way.
Various sizes are going to change the tone
timbre of your horn. We know that
very well. We have preferences
in sizes and what
certain players prefer.
It's not the only way
but there basically are a lot of better ways
and there are a lot of wrong ways too. There are a lot of mistakes made
without these. Claude
talks about sizes and dimension
of what he prefers.
He's definitely on the right
track. The more room you have the more
ability you're going to develop on your own.
You're not developing a crutch or something you're
not depending on the job for it. You're developing
this half of the picture.
Not depending on this half of the picture
is the work for it.
Yes?
Can you switch to different types of horn?
Can you also change different
types of horn pieces?
No.
Once you become a professional you can deal with
that problem because certain other ones
will give you a certain inequality. As we heard
in the concert last night, Evans did
a beautiful job of demonstrating that you can sound very
nice on a lot of different sizes.
We were dealing with a ton of different horns there
and he played them all beautifully.
You adapt to that to make the quality
that you want to create.
No, it shouldn't create a problem.
Basically, your piece,
always your bread and butter instrument is your B flat horn.
You know, symphony work
they're kind of leaning more towards C now.
But still, for most players the B flat
horn is the horn that you play the most.
This is the one you want to
learn to play on.
This is the one you want to perfect.
It's like they asked the doctor
when he was over.
One of the professors said,
what do you use for the smaller horns?
He said,
I play B flat horns.
That was his answer.
See, he takes no chances.
That's it. He prefers
to play the one horn.
As you well know, a lot of players will play
a lot of different horns depending
on the quality, timbre they want to get.
The timbre changes drastically
with the size of the horn.
That's why you change. If you're playing something
that requires a different kind of sound,
you can't always get it on a B flat horn.
Yes, now, let's go back
to what else did I forget? Plating?
Finishes.
We're going to take a piece of metal,
and this one is unfinished as you can well see.
This is going to sound
a certain overtone series.
I take the same horn and take it to the player,
and if there's a coating of silver on it,
it's going to come back playing slightly
different because now we've added metal,
we've added thickness, and we've added
a different timbre
to the horn by changing the kind of metal
that's on it. We can also do
the same thing with lacquer. Lacquer changes
the tone by, in a way,
it might mask certain series because basically
what you've done, you've coated it, you've covered it.
You've covered it with something that's going to cut
some of these partials and overtones out,
and you're going to get a different tone out of it.
We have lots of different finishes.
There's basically lacquer
and silver are preferred.
Gold is preferred, but nobody can afford it.
It's very expensive to be today.
Sometimes it doubles the cost of a horn
just to add a gold plated. It's beautiful
though, but basically
it too has its own sound
because it's a softer metal that's going to create a different tone.
What other kind of finishes are there?
Anodized.
Anodized aluminum. Can you anodize brass?
They have something new.
They have new ways of coating colors.
This has none.
This can be either very, very dull looking
or you can polish it.
The trouble when you polish one, it won't stay.
That's why people usually prefer lacquer
because it's trouble free, maintenance free,
and if you're acidic,
you won't eat holes in your horn.
I don't eat anything.
I don't ever do a thing to it.
It just never wears out. It just kind of stays the same.
I'm very acidic at this time in my life.
My acid has changed a lot.
It depends on what's going in.
What are the things you put on the covers
to keep your acid from eating out?
And then take that off if it's all lacquer?
I personally think that sometimes
they hold more acid against the horn
than using nothing.
What do you do to keep that off?
I'll show you when we get into that other part
of the lecture.
I use a spray bottle with alcohol
that I carry with me.
Before I put the horn away, I just spray it down.
It's just isopropyl rubbing alcohol.
And wipe it off.
Rubbing alcohol.
70%, 100% doesn't matter.
70% is fine.
And wipe your horn down.
This doesn't matter if it's silver, lacquer,
like this, whatever.
Wipe the acids off your horn
and your horn will last a long time.
It's people that just take it and put it in the case
and the acid sits in there while it's in the case
and they really tear it out.
And that's when you start getting pits and ugliness.
Ugly horns.
Yes, anybody?
Alcohol doesn't affect the lacquer.
No, it doesn't hurt at all.
I use it all the time on lacquer horns
to wipe them down, clean off the dust and dirt.
Always change your rag.
You can always get yourself a clean rag.
Keep your rags clean because they're holding dirt
and you're taking grit and wiping it on the horn.
Vacuum your case out.
Get the garbage out of the case.
People leave the junkiest cases, cookie crumbs
and pieces of weed and seeds
and God knows what in them.
Sand from the beach, all this junk.
And then they say, gee, my valves keep hanging out.
Well, you got all this garbage in there
and it's all washing into the horn
and getting in there and screwing it up.
Keep your articles around your horn
as clean as you can.
Keep your mouth as clean as you can.
Brush your teeth as often as you can before you play.
At least rinse out.
That way you're going to keep the food out of them more.
Okay, now let's get back to
where did I leave off?
You got through chromatic instruments
pretty well. Any questions about
what makes an instrument chromatic?
That's all we've done with pistons
is add seven bugles.
What do we do with the slide?
How many do we have?
Three positions?
Seven, same thing, right?
Seven bugles.
Okay, except it's a much more tunable
situation where you can adjust as you go
because you can move it around to adjust
as you want.
Okay, now you notice when you play
your overtone series, some of them are out of tune
so we have some double up of pitches
within the spectrum of various
harmonics, right?
You can play a B flat, how many ways?
Play a real B flat, only one way,
in tune with first valve
or open.
What happens with open?
It's flat, you don't use it, right?
It's two out of ten.
What about A?
We have two ways
of doing that because we have
two A systems, right?
One on third and one on one and two.
Okay, but when you get up on the top of the horn,
how do you do that?
Okay, when you get up on the top of the horn,
how many ways do we have to play a high F?
Just about anything.
It doesn't make too much difference. Now you notice they shifted a little bit
but they basically,
they're so close together up there,
there's a million ways to do it.
Okay, that's
one way you can use to adjust your intonation.
There are multiple combinations of
valve positions that will help you out there.
Okay.
Any questions
about that part?
We're going to talk about maintenance, how to take care of this thing.
We talked a little bit about it, we crossed
over a little bit.
You've got to wash your horn,
keep your horn clean.
Well, I repair horns,
I've been doing it now for quite a few years
and most people, especially pros,
they don't remember.
They've heard all this but they don't
remember to clean their horns,
they don't lube their slides,
slides freeze up,
things keep going wrong and it's so simple
to keep your horn out of the shop.
So what I'm doing is trying to give you a little layout
that will keep you out of
anybody's shop other than an accident
like a drop or something
happens. Corrosion is
inexcusable if you know how to take
care of your horn.
This is a
sink. We're going to wash the horn now.
The part over here on the paper
is not the sink, that's the counter. This is the
actual sink. If you have a
lacquer horn, you must not use
any hot water because hot
water could possibly peel your lacquer off
the horn. So use warm
or cold. You can add
soap to it, dish soap
is fine, it'll break down the
dirt. So
sudsy water is fine, warm is preferable
and on a silver or gold horn you can use hot water.
This is no way you're going to hurt that.
It won't take it off.
This is oil that
they
put in the jars and sell
and any prescription counter will sell you a jar
of anhydrous land one.
Is that written down?
Okay.
So that stuff is
very good and the reason I use it is that it doesn't
create corrosion with brass
and it's good on slides.
My horn doesn't build up that
funny color too much and it's been
I have an acid dip this horn for everything
and that's basically I think because I'm using
that. Lately I've been experiencing
experimenting with this space
filler stuff. Has anybody ever seen that?
It's pretty good.
Some of the valve oil is
too thick for new valves.
It's a little slow but it's good on an older horn
that's got a lot of slack in it.
The space filler oil works real good.
It comes in two viscosities.
This is thin
and the opposite of pro-oil. The red is thin
and the blue is heavy.
So that gets very confusing when you've been using
pro-oil but it's a good oil
also and this is a grease.
The grease is in kind of a semi-liquid form
and I use that once in a while
too. I've been playing with this to see if it works.
But by and large this is fail
safe stuff, anhydrous land
and won't cause any tarnish.
And holds up pretty well in all weather
except for maybe Alaska
where it gets real cold because if it gets real
cold it kind of slows down
that grease really.
Space filler.
That's the name of the product so if you
ask for it you ask for it by that.
They won't say.
That it's very possible. I'm assuming that it is
but they've improved on the use
of silicone lately and it doesn't do what it
used to do. They used to try and mix it
with petroleum based oils.
It didn't work well together.
So they discontinued. Holton had it for
a long time where they had a silicone
additive. But it seems to work great by
itself. Yeah it's the opposite
from pro-oil.
Right and then the blue is for tight
valves. In this case the red
is for tight valves. Anyway it
works good. I'm not trying to sell
it. In fact we don't have any here to sell.
I've used the slide stuff and I love it
but I kind of shied away from the valve
oil. Well clean your
horn out good and make sure you dry your valve casing
off and get everything old stuff out of it before
you use it. And then put it on and it'll
feel too heavy but wait a few minutes
play and let some moisture get through the horn. All of a sudden
it starts to loosen up and it feels pretty good.
And it stays on the horn.
The valve oil stays on the horn sometimes
two weeks without adding oil.
Grease up a horn with Vaseline, put it in a case
and leave it there for ten years. Pull it out
nine times out of ten it'll be corroded.
For some reason it dissipates with
brass. Something goes wrong.
I was wondering why you would recommend it on two
of the sides.
Silver Smith polish.
That's a good one. A low abrasive good polish.
And the other one is Tarnished Shield
by 3M.
I've used some others like the Miro Blaze
that was in a compact item like
that. So those two are safe and they're
available. There are probably other ones
that are just as safe but I trust those.
That's my recommendation.
3M
Minnesota Binding
Tarnished Shield.
Another thing about Tarnished Shield is
that it has a tarnish preventative
in it that once you wipe it in if
you don't wipe
off Tarnished Shield it'll
keep your horn from turning black
or rose colored.
Whereas if you rinse it off with water then it'll
get tarnished faster but it's easier to clean
it off. So that's a good one
for that.
Hardware? Grocery?
Usually hardware is better luck.
Valve oil down the horn. Blow it through the horn.
Coat the inside of the horn.
Then your acid stays off the metal.
If you've got a caustic acid
we have a metal rot problem with
some people and you get these pink spots in your horn.
It's when the zinc leaves the horn and the horn
gets rotten. I've seen lead pipes with a bunch of
pink spots. You've got to probably
replace the pipe. You can cut down on
that kind of rot by adding
oil coating to the horn as much as
you can and that usually will keep your
acid sitting in there.
So that's about it.
Thank you.