What I've learned about the trombone | Hacker News Reader

What I've learned about the trombone

bryanhu.com

101 pointsbookofjoe81 comments

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

My high school band teacher and my father have both performed with New Horizons. Great group.

i loved when they reached Pluto, great job!

Me too! Except it’s the tuba. Whomp whomp.

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?

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.

I like how you say 6th partial is "tending sharp" and 7th partial is "tending flat", like they're comparable. I don't know about your horn, but on every one I've played that 6th partial is pretty close but the 7th partial is so far out that we refer to positions on the 7th as half positions. Euphoniums don't even play the 7th partial because it's so far off. They'll play the F# and G from 8th partial.

(Didn't mean to imply you didn't know that, I just was humored by you using the same term for both).

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.

I guess high school teachers can get away with mentioning the A as a global rule simply because high school music rarely has a key with sharps. You're usually playing in a key that uses A-flat instead of A, or it's the third on an F or the sixth on a C or a seventh on a B-flat. Playing that sixth a little sharp might or might not be wrong, but it's unlikely to be a held note of a chord in high school repertoire. The seventh might be part of a chord, but that's going to be pretty crunchy for high school curricula.

> 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.

I've always been amused at how many sources state the "tube with one end open" model, derive the "odd harmonics only" behavior from the model, and then never engage with the observable behavior of the instrument or reconcile it with the model.

I did find this when trying to understand that disparity, but I don't know enough to confirm/refute/amend the explanation:

https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/292724

Thank you! I did notice that "odd harmonics" thing but never connected the dots and realized I was contradicting the article.

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

That is awesome! Back in the '90s I participated in Tuba Christmas in NYC - I played sousaphone. The performance was on the Rockefeller Center ice rink, but the rehearsal was in the sub-sub basement parking garages of 30 Rock (I think).

Imagine hundreds of low brass players activating this enclosed volume of air - I've never experienced anything like it before or since!

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!

Spoiler: trumpet section DGAF. Cocky bunch, we were.

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

You can make adjustments on a guitar to make a note flatter by pushing the neck/headstock forward, relaxing the strings slightly

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.

This is a feature of every instrument. Even with piano you have to start pressing down a key slightly before you want to ring out or you will be behind time.

Yes, but for trombone it varies markedly from first position to seventh.

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...

That's wild. I suppose it's just a long baritone?

No. It has a trombone look but more important, it is not as conical as a baritone so it doesn’t sound as rich.

Similarly, so do slide trumpets!

I have a bunch of them, but I prefer to play marching baritones because I’m less likely to bang them into a music stand.

> 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.

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.

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. :)

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.

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

> 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.

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.

Organs are and were tuned all the time. While he didn't have a piano, the organ was tempered in some way.

His well tempered clavier was a plea to give him organs that could play in any key. We don't know what temperament he used (there is plenty of debate), but it is clear he was trying to show how the key in his system changes the sound/mood of the piece - something lost in equal temperament.

By "tuning was what it was" I did not mean that JS Bach's organs were out of tune with themselves. But rather the obvious thing that pipe organs can't be retuned to arbitrary temperaments in a practical manner.

And to be clear, Well Tempered Clavier is generally believed to have been written for harpsichord not organ. There is not more evidence that it was a plea than that it was simply JS Bach writing experimental music for the latest technology.

Granted tuning an organ is an all day (or even multi-day) problem, but it is perfectly possible to change temperament. Tuning a piano to change temperament will take a skilled tuner some time as well.

harpsichord - I knew that, but couldn't think of the right instrument...

My family has a harpsichord, so I've learned a fair amount about it, though I'm not the one who plays it.

Harpsichords went out of tune easily and quickly, so they had to be tuned at least as often as every performance.

The way I look at it, a musical scale is a technology. Often, a particular technology is chosen because it solves multiple problems with acceptable compromises. A problem for the harpsichord is that the musician has to tune it themselves, often quickly, to make it sound good enough for a performance.

We don't attempt equal temperament on the thing.

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

Doesn't really sound like a trombone?

There are limits to the web audio API :) but I did conform to the known waveforms of the trombone when setting the synthesizer values. The frequencies and proportions of the slides and partials are very precise!

>The tone is generated using two sawtooth oscillators

I interpreted "acoustically-accurate" to mean physically modeled in some way. Filtered sawtooth makes a simple brass-like timbre, but 80% still sounds synthetic.

Really neat anyways, thanks for sharing.

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.

I guess, but the sequence of positions 6->5->4->3->2-1 maps to valves

- 1+3 (6)

- 2+3 (5)

- 1+2 (4)

- 1 (3)

- 2 (2)

- open (1)

All I mean to say, sliding a little bit at a time up the slide is easy to map to "short slide higher pitch" in a way that valves don't

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?

The role of the tongue is heavily emphasized in modern brass pedagogy. Try Claude Gordon, Physical Approach to Elementary Brass Playing, 1977

Thanks, I will.

For embouchure mechanics, I'd highly recommend Dave Wilken's blog. That was his doctoral research focus and he's got a good intro to brass embouchures on his blog [0]. The tongue is usually not as much of a focus when it comes to embouchure, but he does have a post discussing his thoughts about the so-called Tongue Controlled Embouchure [1] which you might find interesting.

Dave has been building on the work Donald Reinhardt started in methodically categorizing embouchure types and figuring out how each type best functions. They seem to be part of a minority in the brass community who actually care to approach things scientifically - I could go on about my own experiences of brass teachers who aren't interested in furthering their understanding of embouchure mechanics, but Dave covers that topic pretty well already [2]. Reinhardt's stuff can also be worth reading, but Dave simplified some of the categories that seemed unnecessarily complicated.

[0] https://wilktone.com/?page_id=5619

[1] https://wilktone.com/?p=307

[2] https://wilktone.com/?p=5496

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.

More formally that's an "F attachment", lowering the key of the instrument (assuming a standard tenor trombone) from B♭ to F. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trombone#Valve_attachments

"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.

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."

I had the same confusion - I'd move the [...] to the following sentence.

The trumpet, french horn, tuba, and euphonium also rely on the tuning slide to control pitch, so that's not an accurate statement.

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.

Yep. A basic trumpet has more slides than a basic trombone.

Your trumpet maybe, but my trumpet from 1957 only has tuning slides, which cannot be used while playing.

Interesting. A student horn I guess? I've never owned one that didn't have at least a third valve slide ring. I think they were widespread around the time that the trumpet really took over from the cornet, around 1900-1920. My pre-War Olds has moving slides.

I know a few cases where slides were added later. I don't know when they became common but impression is layer.

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.

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.

I was thinking the same thing. The tuning slide is not what you use while playing, it's the separate slide on the bell side of the trombone for fine adjustment to ensure you're in tune with the rest of the band.

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

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