Is my Equipment helping?

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MichaelBarski
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Is my Equipment helping?

Post by MichaelBarski »

I'm a freshman in college and I wanted to hone in on equipment for playing in the orchestra and for solo literature. Right now I play on a Yamaha 8220R with an Artisan Bach 5g mouthpiece. Currently, my goals for my sound are 1) to be able to maintain a darker tone quality with as much resonance as possible throughout the range 2) to avoid getting bright or brilliant tones as much as I can 3) to be able to have a crisp and efficient response for flexibility and articulation. I know that most people will say to not look to equipment to solve your problems, but I wanted to see what your guys's thoughts were on whether I'm on the right equipment to make achieving my goals easier. Thank you for whatever input you have!
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BGuttman
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by BGuttman »

Your equipment should be fine. If you need to change, ask your private teacher, who should know your playing a lot better than any of us sitting here reading what you are writing.

I could tell you that you should be on a bigger horn, a more expensive horn, a bigger mouthpiece, etc. But that assumes you need to make a change. Remember, there is no free lunch and you have to balance what you are going to gain with any change against what you will lose.
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Burgerbob
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by Burgerbob »

Don't change anything for a while. That should be fine.
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paulyg
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by paulyg »

A lot of players aim for "dark" and wind up with "dull." I'd say that's the most dangerous pitfall with large equipment.

More specific to your situation, chances are that at your school you will have limited venues for practicing. Chances are they will be a lot smaller and a lot more live than a recital hall or concert hall. This can REALLY push people in the direction of a dull, lusterless sound. Something to be avoided, know the room!
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norbie2018
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by norbie2018 »

Your equipment is fine. Rely on what your teacher recommends as s/he will likely know you best.
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LeTromboniste
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by LeTromboniste »

Dark is good, bright is good, being able to have both colors and everything in between is best.

Now about your equipment, choose what works for you, not what the companies market as "sounding darker". That being said, is that a typo in your OP? You meant Yamaha YSL-882O or YBL-822? One is a tenor, the other is a bass.
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norbie2018
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by norbie2018 »

I saw it as 882-OR. Thanks fur catching that!
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hyperbolica
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by hyperbolica »

paulyg wrote: Sun Sep 30, 2018 12:37 pm A lot of players aim for "dark" and wind up with "dull." I'd say that's the most dangerous pitfall with large equipment.
+1

Concentrate on making the sound you like, don't worry about words or equipment. Your equipment is good stuff, so it's probably not slowing you down. Play in ensembles and try to sound like you belong in the section regardless of the style. In tune, in tine, match articulation. Listen to your teacher.
fwbassbone
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by fwbassbone »

Before you decide dark is good and bright and brilliant is bad please listen to as much orchestral literature as you can either recorded (good) or live (best). Bright and brilliant aren't bad and in fact they are called for with some lit.
MichaelBarski
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by MichaelBarski »

fwbassbone wrote: Sun Sep 30, 2018 4:28 pm Before you decide dark is good and bright and brilliant is bad please listen to as much orchestral literature as you can either recorded (good) or live (best). Bright and brilliant aren't bad and in fact they are called for with some lit.
I'm not really saying playing bright is bad. I'm at a point in my playing where playing bright is far easier, especially as I get closer to the edges of my range. And "dark" was probably the wrong word. There are notes on the horn that I feel like I can achieve what I call my maximum resonance. It's weird, but when I hit a note with my maximum resonance in the middle range it almost feels like a pedal tone in how much the lips and horn respond. I'm looking for equipment that will help me achieve best resonance consistently on as many notes as possible and its possible that I might already be on a very adequate setup, but I'm still curious.
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Matt K
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by Matt K »

I normally wouldn't make recommendations so specific but it sounds so close to the problems that I had when I was a freshman down to basically the same equipment (I played on a YSL882O with a 5G at the time as well). My sound was bright and didn't blend well with other orchestral players. To this day I can turn on the bright without any effort, but I have a core to my sound that I was trying for at the time.

Basically what solved the issue for me was Doug Elliott. It took maybe 2 years of on-and-off studying to get to the place where I wanted to be and I was fortunate that I was able to be relatively close so that I could work on what he gave me and then come back when I had the funds for it. I "side-graded" around the same ~5G/4.5G size for most of my undergraduate. He handed me one of his pieces to try in the lesson and it was like an immediate parting of the clouds. Everything was easier. It wasn't perfect, but it was what I needed. Unbeknownst to me, it was a 104N rim with a similar cup (G/G8) to what I had been playing prior but the rim was larger than anything I had considered even trying before.

Between the change in rim and knowing that 1) it's okay to be a high placement player and 2) how exactly that works I was able to finally practice in ways that were useful specifically to my physiology. I normally highly recommend checking him out too because he's great to work with and in this case even more-so because the situation seems very, very similar to what I had to solve.
Redthunder
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by Redthunder »

If you haven't been doing so, start recording yourself daily. In the practice room, in rehearsal, on performances or gigs. It's really the best and only way to find out if your perceptions of your own sound are accurate. Obviously there are limitations to this based on the quality of the device you use, but even simple recording apps on phones can give you a good and honest representation of how you sound day to day. You might find that there's less to be unhappy about than what you feel needs to be changed. Or maybe you were completely right.

Also, while equipment changes won't always solve or alter problems you encounter, there's also nothing wrong with experimenting. It's obvious that you have thought a lot about your sound, and what you hope to achieve. Not to outright disagree with some of the other posters so far, but if you're curious about how different mouthpieces might affect things, I think you should find a practical and sane way to experiment. It can be a valuable learning experience to try and alter different variables about mouthpieces in order to find out what does, and does NOT work well for you and your horn. When I was in college I had dozens and dozens of mouthpieces, because I was searching for an answer to a question that the mouthpiece wouldn't solve - chop problems caused by a combination of both poor embouchure function AND mouthpiece selection. BUT that doesn't mean it was a worthless endeavor. I learned a crazy amount about mouthpiece design and construction, and now I often can make informed recommendations to students or colleagues based on their needs - as well as allow them to try many different options. It didn't make me a better trombonist, it made me a more informed one.

Lastly, as Matt K suggested - seek out Doug Elliott for a lesson. If you feel like you're constantly trying to achieve something in you're playing and you're not quite getting there, usually there's a logical reason why, and Doug can always figure that factor out and show you HOW to achieve it. Sometimes it's how you practice, and other times it is in fact an equipment thing.
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Tooloud
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by Tooloud »

It seems to me a very typical thing of young Americans to blame it all on equipment...

The horn is more or less irrelevant. Good musicians alway sound like themselves, no matter what they play on.
As long as the instrument works, it is never the point, why you sound bad.

Lack of practise and self-criticism is the point.

You can't just buy a decent sound, you have to aquire it by working.

Your equipment is absolutely decent, middle of the road so to say. So go and practise!
RoscoTrombone
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by RoscoTrombone »

Tooloud wrote: Sun Dec 30, 2018 6:12 am
The horn is more or less irrelevant. Good musicians alway sound like themselves, no matter what they play on.
As long as the instrument works, it is never the point, why you sound bad.

You can't just buy a decent sound, you have to aquire it by working.

Your equipment is absolutely decent, middle of the road so to say. So go and practise!
I work with a guy called Alan Fernie... he's quite well known in the brass band world...he can pick up the cheapest of cheap crappy Chinese made trombones and it's like liquid gold coming out of the bell. He doesn't really play much any more but his go to trombone is a Yamaha 354, whether that's doing a show or playing in a brass band contest.

It's not all about what you're playing.

Ross
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Matt K
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by Matt K »

RoscoTrombone wrote: Sun Dec 30, 2018 6:46 am
Tooloud wrote: Sun Dec 30, 2018 6:12 am
The horn is more or less irrelevant. Good musicians alway sound like themselves, no matter what they play on.
As long as the instrument works, it is never the point, why you sound bad.

You can't just buy a decent sound, you have to aquire it by working.

Your equipment is absolutely decent, middle of the road so to say. So go and practise!
I work with a guy called Alan Fernie... he's quite well known in the brass band world...he can pick up the cheapest of cheap crappy Chinese made trombones and it's like liquid gold coming out of the bell. He doesn't really play much any more but his go to trombone is a Yamaha 354, whether that's doing a show or playing in a brass band contest.

It's not all about what you're playing.

Ross
That proves that, for one guy, - maybe - the optimal setup is something conventional and on the smaller side. How do you know such a claim is universal?
Tooloud wrote: Sun Dec 30, 2018 6:12 am It seems to me a very typical thing of young Americans to blame it all on equipment...

The horn is more or less irrelevant. Good musicians alway sound like themselves, no matter what they play on.
As long as the instrument works, it is never the point, why you sound bad.

Lack of practise and self-criticism is the point.

You can't just buy a decent sound, you have to aquire it by working.

Your equipment is absolutely decent, middle of the road so to say. So go and practise!
If someone always sounds like themselves (provided they are practicing?) then people could play what are pejoratively called tubas-on-sticks for everything and it would be indistinguishable from whatever they are currently playing. Right? Of course that's false; there are obvious gradations of equipment and a plethora of combinations, each of which has their upsides and downsides including:

1) The amount of time willing to put into that equipment
2) The degree to which your physiology is sufficiently compatible with that equipment and the other myriad options that you have available to you.

In other words, there is a great deal of the idea that correlation does imply causation when it comes to pedagogical thinking in the music world. E.g. equipment A works for player B, therefore equipment A is sufficient for any player who practices. That may be the case for some; but you also wouldn't be able to tell for those whom equipment A does not work as they may well quit after stagnating without improvement.

And it also doesn't determine what practice constitutes. Or the value of how much more time someone might need to make a certain set of euqipment work. For example, I use one rim size for all of my tenor and alto playing. That is a potential tradeoff because I don't have to practice as much as if I had a second (or more) rim sizes to deal with. And then there are other tradeoffs... I play on a very narrow rim. Some players would find the rim choice very unpalatable for a myriad reasons despite putting lots of time on it.

And on that note, a younger player seems to have a lot more demands than someone from say, 50 years ago. I know a lot of younger players that do commercial and classical alto, tenor, and bass. If you could have, for example, in 1960s just stuck to one of them, putting more time in on a single piece of equipment may have been an acceptable solution. But if you have to be competent on 3x as many (or more instruments even), there may well not be enough hours in the day to fully satisfy that approach. So you seek solutions that allow you do do both.
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BGuttman
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by BGuttman »

For most of us the brand on the instrument is almost immaterial. I've been able to play to my standard (I'm not going to win an audition to a major symphony any time soon) on several Chinese trombones and other beginner horns.

On the other hand, when you get to the elite level the horn does matter. It either helps or hurts your efforts to make it do what you want. Sometimes the same horn can help in one situation and hurt in another. But the people for whom this applies are few and not too many of them habituate this Forum.
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Doug Elliott
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by Doug Elliott »

Tooloud wrote: Sun Dec 30, 2018 6:12 am It seems to me a very typical thing of young Americans to blame it all on equipment...

The horn is more or less irrelevant. Good musicians alway sound like themselves, no matter what they play on.
I would largely agree on these two points.
But not about mouthpieces.

One of the reasons I started designing and making mouthpieces was that the usual middle of the road mouthpieces were not working all that well for me, after a lot of years of serious study and practice, and I realized there could be better options for me.

And with my long time study of embouchures and function, I understand why, and how various mouthpiece sizes relate to other players and other embouchures.

I see little point in spending years trying to get great results out of a mouthpiece that is a less that optimal size for you. Just like the years I spent trying to find shoes that fit, before I realized I needed a very wide EE width. That's an American thing too I guess, the have different width shoes. My feet don't actually measure that way, it's due to an overall shape that doesn't measure as wide on the scale.

"Good musicians always sound like themselves, no matter what they play on."

I recently got to gig without my horn... and it was 4 hours away from my house. Fortunately there was a music store only 2 blocks away. They had only one trombone, a beat up Bundy with a dent in the slide at 4th position, and only two mouthpieces, a 12C and a tiny antique raw brass with no name, which I chose - far from the size I normally use. I got through the gig, playing very carefully. I was very uncomfortable but sounded like myself.
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Tooloud
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by Tooloud »

Just to make the point clear:

Of course I did not mean that you can or at least should play alto parts with a bass. That' rubbish!

Of course the mouthpiece must fit. But the TO uses very normal equipment that 95% of trombonist could use without sounding odd.

Of course in the "ivy league" of orchestral playing it might make a difference. But even in orchestral auditions rhytm, accuracy, clarity are the principal items to judge.

And since he just started serious playing the last point probably does not yet apply on him
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by harrisonreed »

MichaelBarski wrote: Sun Sep 30, 2018 12:01 pm Currently, my goals for my sound are 1) to be able to maintain a darker tone quality with as much resonance as possible throughout the range 2) to avoid getting bright or brilliant tones as much as I can 3) to be able to have a crisp and efficient response for flexibility and articulation.
Goal 1 and 2 are not good goals. Goal 3 is a great goal.

Your goal should be to be able to have control over the widest range of tonal color possible. Bright and brilliant is a key feature of tenor trombone playing. So is dark, sonorous playing.

With standard equipment like you have, both should be possible.
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Doug Elliott
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by Doug Elliott »

harrisonreed wrote: Sun Dec 30, 2018 8:46 am With standard equipment like you have, both should be possible.
Possible, but as someone like me who much prefers very large rims, you know very well that it would not be optimal for yourself.
"I know a thing or two because I've seen a thing or two."
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harrisonreed
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by harrisonreed »

Doug Elliott wrote: Sun Dec 30, 2018 8:53 am
harrisonreed wrote: Sun Dec 30, 2018 8:46 am With standard equipment like you have, both should be possible.
Possible, but as someone like me who much prefers very large rims, you know very well that it would not be optimal for yourself.


Of course, perhaps a different rim would help. The mouthpiece is very important. I wish people would post more videos, it would help everyone know what the situation actually is, but the OP really has given us nothing to go on. I was talking more about his horn and his goals.
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Matt K
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Re: Is my Equipment helping?

Post by Matt K »

Tooloud wrote: Sun Dec 30, 2018 8:43 am Just to make the point clear:

Of course I did not mean that you can or at least should play alto parts with a bass. That' rubbish!

Of course the mouthpiece must fit. But the TO uses very normal equipment that 95% of trombonist could use without sounding odd.

Of course in the "ivy league" of orchestral playing it might make a difference. But even in orchestral auditions rhytm, accuracy, clarity are the principal items to judge.

And since he just started serious playing the last point probably does not yet apply on him
The standard for collegiate playing these days is a bit higher than "not sounding odd". Sure, I can be confident that almost any setup would "not sound odd" depending on that subjective definition, but that's far removed the point that practice + any equipment will produce the results one is after.

In other words, suggesting that practice will fix any problem is just as naive as suggesting that equipment will fix any problem. Some combination of equipment, practice, and correctly utilizing your embouchure will produce the optimal results. Anything short of that for a collegiate or professional player probably lucked into a combination of equipment and correct approach to the instrument and so they can just focus on practicing after coincidentally having the first two right.
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