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Comment by liotier | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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Piano is great for people who learned to play by sight.

Trombone is great for people who learned to play by ear.

For those who can easily hear the 13 cent difference between a justly tuned major third and an equally tuned major third, justly tuned instruments can be really hard to play.

But I am, like most, like you. I first learned on the piano and my ear is pretty bad for an experienced trombonist. I have a pretty good ear compared to the average person, but compared to a typical trombonist, it's really bad.

I play with others who have incredible ears. It makes me jealous.

P.S. Here's Jacob Collier demonstrating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwRSS7jeo5s

The learning curve is really not that steep. You pretty quickly learn the landmarks for the 7 positions of the slide.

And micro adjusting positions isn't that hard either. If it doesn't sound right, you adjust. The hard part is figuring out whether to adjust up or down. And that's just experience. My ear still isn't good enough to know whether I'm a little sharp or a little flat. But any note I get wrong at tonight's practice will likely be a note I've hit wrong many times in previous practices.

Programming sequencers visually and with tons of help from the tooling pushes the ear sharpening later in the learning process - and I'm only now starting to realize that maybe making music is about deciding what sounds right... I suppose the trombone and violin's "sink or swim" approach ensures the early acquisition of that skill.

Eh I played trombone in high school and it is very forgiving. You can vibe play a trombone.

I suppose one's ear gets sharpened fast, out of necessity - but I recoil at imagining what the other band members have to get through meanwhile. The process for violin is the same though.

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.

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