Where do "your" horns come from??

[ZacharyThornton]

I didn’t request a history lesson on buffing, measuring, and assembling, but okay.

Great post and I respect the craft that goes into what M&W does. The design authorship point is the strongest part of the argument, perhaps even the real line, to ask: Did you actually draw the parts and understand the acoustics or are you just buying what a factory already makes?

But M&W is drawing that line right below himself and right above Bell, which conveniently makes him a “maker” and Bell an “assembler.” If say, O’Malley, drew that same line, would M&W not be on the other side of it too, since both companies made their own mandrels but the former spins and crafts the bells in house? Hmmm.

If all you got from Matthew's post was a history lesson in what you stated than you read what you read. And I completely disagree with your assessment on what is what. But that's my opinion.

Dense people out of their depth are often the loudest. As with everything online, an experts voice is just as loud as an idiots.

[TromboneSam]

^and then give people horns to be “artist” and get them to force their horns down people’s throats with social media marketing. Those “artists” are often band director or local freelance players that will endorse anything for a dime because it makes them feel special.
This whole marketing bullshit and false advertising is driving me nuts and making me cynical about the music world.
So I’m just going to practice more and ignore the rest.

this is the way

[hornbuilder]

For what it is worth.
None of the players who are listed on the M&W page as being Artists were given instruments. People that choose to play M&W buy their instruments.

[Finetales]

Do any makers still give horns to artists? I was under the impression that practice is gone for all but a handful of very famous players.

[ZacharyThornton]

People that assemble “read as unbox) instruments have artists. They can take the loss because of how cheap the horns are. Artist for most builders have to pay a reduced rate for their instruments.

[TromboneSam]

Do any makers still give horns to artists? I was under the impression that practice is gone for all but a handful of very famous players.

I know that quite a few (usually big brands) offer horns at-cost to their artists, which usually comes out to about half-price.

There was one artist program was a loan-out program at one point - if you worked out a deal to be an artist with them, you would get a horn to use for free. If you ever parted ways with that sponsorship or took a different endorsement, you sent the horn back. Not sure if it's still that way.

[RJMason]

If all you got from Matthew's post was a history lesson in what you stated than you read what you read. And I completely disagree with your assessment on what is what. But that's my opinion.

Dense people out of their depth are often the loudest. As with everything online, an experts voice is just as loud as an idiots.

Have you played an Earl Williams trombone on two different shows with Randy Newman and Erykah Badu within 24 hours? Have you played a NY Bach 30 on The Tonight Show with The Roots? Have you subbed for Steve Turre on SNL? I am not out of my depth. I’m actually the customer this entire industry wishes to sell to

PS: Nobody’s getting free horns anymore. Most artist deals are accommodation pricing so you’re still paying for the instrument. I’ve bought horns at various price points from multiple companies over the years, some worked out and some didn’t.

[ZacharyThornton]

Dense people out of their depth are often the loudest. As with everything online, an experts voice is just as loud as an idiots.

I’ve played Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden more times than most anyone on this forum ever will. Have you played an Earl Williams trombone on two different shows with Randy Newman and Erykah Badu within 24 hours? Have you played a NY Bach 30 on The Tonight Show with The Roots? Have you subbed for Steve Turre on SNL? I literally have no idea who you are. I am not out of my depth. I’m actually the customer this entire industry wishes to sell to

PS: Nobody’s getting free horns anymore. Most artist deals are accommodation pricing so you’re still paying for the instrument. I’ve bought horns at various price points from multiple companies over the years, some worked out and some didn’t.

LOL!
Just sounds like you don’t have a stable gig. I have play tested and worked on more instruments than you ever will.
I also had to look you up and asked a few manufacturers I know about you. You aren’t their star customer because they don’t even know who you are.
So many people show up in NY, sub a lot, realize they can’t make it, and settle for a non music related job. I hope you make it man.

[TromboneSam]

I’ve played Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden more times than most anyone on this forum ever will. Have you played an Earl Williams trombone on two different shows with Randy Newman and Erykah Badu within 24 hours? Have you played a NY Bach 30 on The Tonight Show with The Roots? Have you subbed for Steve Turre on SNL? I literally have no idea who you are. I am not out of my depth. I’m actually the customer this entire industry wishes to sell to

PS: Nobody’s getting free horns anymore. Most artist deals are accommodation pricing so you’re still paying for the instrument. I’ve bought horns at various price points from multiple companies over the years, some worked out and some didn’t.

LOL!
Just sounds like you don’t have a stable gig. I have play tested and worked on more instruments than you ever will.
I also had to look you up and asked a few manufacturers I know about you. You aren’t their star customer because they don’t even know who you are.
So many people show up in NY, sub a lot, realize they can’t make it, and settle for a non music related job. I hope you make it man.

what.

[Posaunus]

I'd enjoy this thread a lot more without the animosity and personal attacks.

[sf105]

I'd enjoy this thread a lot more without the animosity and personal attacks.

Agreed. Moderators. could we trim some of this?

[harrisonreed]

The word "modifier" should also be added to the list with "maker" and "assembler"...

If this is in reference to Sweeney (or "modifiers" like Minick, or Sandhagen, or the Brass Ark Sawday projects), I'd like to at least attempt to defend their work a bit. If you were just trying to clarify that they aren't the same as someone designing and building a horn from the ground up, fair play. It's tough to read nuances on a forum like this. Apologies if you were just trying to clarify the difference.

I don't believe Sweeney is doing ground up design, etc, but his work is *very* good. I have a "Sweeney" brass bar hanging from the case of my Silversonic, and I trusted him with that horn. The slide work, valve overhaul, and other mods he did were on the artisan level, for my money. He may be headed in the direction where Minick wound up.

No, he is not doing what M&W or Edwards is doing by any stretch, but it's also a bit unfair to lump him into a group of people/"makers" rebranding poorly assembled stencil horns and flogging them to parents who don't know any better. He can completely disassemble, modify, overhaul, and reassemble a stock horn so that it is significantly better playing than it was when it was brand new.

Minick was an interesting case -- I doubt anyone here is unfamiliar with his work -- he made some components like bells, innovated with valves and wraps, and mostly used stock parts to build better versions of the horns the parts were made for. He was basically an "assembler" / "modifier" ... But I feel like the modern trombone design and concept owes him a lot. Not just the modular bell concept -- his take on the open valve wrap, oversized rotor, linkages, bracing ...

In any case, I'm not trying to pick a fight, and have a deep respect for the quality of your trombones and the skill you put on display. Maybe I just juxtaposed your comment because it was right after the one I wrote about Scott. He's super cool, and very talented, and I just wanted to support him -- I see the value in being able to really clean up the shoddy assembly of otherwise great instrument parts, bringing out the full potential of the pure design! If I recall, I believe that this is somewhat the origin of Greenhoe and Edwards as well.

[Digidog]

I don't see the insight here that the whole discussion is about the ability to get paid for labor, balanced against the ability pay for a product or a service.

If anyone doing a job is to get a sustenance from that job, he/she has to get paid enough to pay for what that sustenance demands. Most often that payment is measured in money. In today's society that sustenance can be f.ex. food, rent, clothes, a car, energy et.c. If that money is to come from people also doing jobs in other, complementing fields, they have to have something they can do a transaction with for the first person's job.

In a society where people specialize in work in different aspects of the total societal needs (including non-essential consumption), the basic premise is that each product or service that has to be sold to someone whom also works doing a job, must be within the margins of what is left over when the strictly essential costs are covered. By default that means that almost no single specimen of a product can cover it's own production costs; they have to be priced lower than what it costs to produce one single specimen of its kind. Therefore products that generate profit do so by selling in numbers enough to cover first the initial, and then the subsequent costs for producing them.

The fact that companies copy eachother's designs and innovations, comes from attempts to minimize those initial costs in the production of a service or a product, but that gain must also be valued against the fact that noone can really know what a market wants or is willing to pay for in advance - though marketing and data harvesting are implemented in attempts to negate that uncertainity.

For me, regarding instrument makers stealing eachother's designs or producing cheap hit-or-miss instruments, the basic problem is twofold: The first, is that the capitalist market is a kind of pyramid game, where you have to sell more than you need to cover what you need from people who have to bring in more than they need to have a margin to spend, and the second that the over all market for specialized orchestral instruments is diminishing.

If, f.ex., the trombone market had been as large as it was only forty years ago, both boutique and factory builders could have sold enough horns to be more than they needed to break even and to make a margin enough to use to move on from old designs and (maybe) materials without being overly affected by a couple of other builders ripping designs for cheap knock-offs. Now, with a shrinking market and declining world wide numbers, the effect of even one single instrument copyist quickly can eat up and ruin a market for even the most scrutinous, quality builder, since the margins for a secure financial flow in and out simply aren't there.

If we want to negate the impact of plagiarists and support producers of quality instruments, the only viable, long term way forward, is to help more people to play; both individually and together, both younger and older, from all walks of life (this has a not too distant bearing to the "We're all equal"-thread here). To help expanding the market.

[hornbuilder]

Harrison
My comment about "modifiers" was pretty simple. Scott Sweeney doesn't just buy pre-made parts and assemble them to finish the product. He also doesn't make all new parts. He takes an existing instrument and "modifies" it. It is a completely separate category within the marketplace. FWIW, I still occupy some space in that arena, since I do a lot of valve section installation work on old Bach and Conn instruments. That was how I got into the industry in the first place, installing Thayer valves for players in Australia.

[harrisonreed]

Maybe the problem would be grouping these businesses flogging rebranded stencils in with "makers", "assemblers", or "modifiers" to begin with. They aren't really doing any of that -- they just say they are.

[hornbuilder]

Bingo

[RJMason]

I apologize for triggering players with a literal pinky finger of a résume as that wasn’t my intention. Since others in this thread felt like flexing their credentials and some questioned mine it seemed appropriate at the time, but I regret engaging that way.

Back to the topic at hand!

I truly admire the integrity behind Matt Walker opening up about his process, so thank you Matt! His candidness is deeply appreciated in an industry filled with marketing magic and sometimes complete guesswork.

In that regard, I find him leagues ahead of the other companies alluded to or mentioned. If his goal was to get us to think and discuss then I think he succeeded. I genuinely hope to try those horns one day. I also consider him a “modifier,” which I didn’t find pejorative but instead an important distinction. It’s got me thinking about commissioning a project on my vintage 36!

[officermayo]

[quote=ZacharyThornton post_id=297133

Dense people out of their depth are often the loudest. As with everything online, an experts voice is just as loud as an idiots.
[/quote]

Wondered when this would turn bitchy.

[officermayo]

I’ve played Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden more times than most anyone on this forum ever will. Have you played an Earl Williams trombone on two different shows with Randy Newman and Erykah Badu within 24 hours? Have you played a NY Bach 30 on The Tonight Show with The Roots? Have you subbed for Steve Turre on SNL? I literally have no idea who you are. I am not out of my depth. I’m actually the customer this entire industry wishes to sell to

PS: Nobody’s getting free horns anymore. Most artist deals are accommodation pricing so you’re still paying for the instrument. I’ve bought horns at various price points from multiple companies over the years, some worked out and some didn’t.

LOL!
Just sounds like you don’t have a stable gig. I have play tested and worked on more instruments than you ever will.
I also had to look you up and asked a few manufacturers I know about you. You aren’t their star customer because they don’t even know who you are.
So many people show up in NY, sub a lot, realize they can’t make it, and settle for a non music related job. I hope you make it man.

Time break out a ruler to see who's is biggest

[RJMason]

Time break out a ruler to see who's is biggest

Just checked online and unable to find a measuring device large enough.

I came away from this thread pondering a full custom from O’Malley, a new valve section and handslide from M&W, a reliable Yamaha trombone I could order from Sweetwater on a dime, and a vintage reconceptualization from SweeneyBrass. Time to budget! What didn’t cross my mind was any of the companies this thread was originally about.

When I was in school there were definitely not this many options, permutations, and combinations. Kind of overwhelming, but the last time picking a trombone was this interesting might’ve been 80–100 years ago. Looks a lot different now, but I’m pretty enthusiastic about it which is why I’m still here chiming in.

[officermayo]

Time break out a ruler to see who's is biggest

Just checked online and unable to find a measuring device large enough.


When I was in school there were definitely not this many options, permutations, and combinations. Kind of overwhelming, but the last time picking a trombone was this interesting might’ve been 80–100 years ago. Looks a lot different now, but I’m pretty enthusiastic about it which is why I’m still here chiming in.

Causes one to ponder how all those fantastic players of days gone by were able to ascend to such great heights with those old crappy Kings, Conns, Bachs snd Olds.

Oh yeah - it's the players who makes the horn perform and not the other way around. Kinda of like the more outrages the kit, the less talented the drummer (Neil Peart excluded).

[RJMason]

Causes one to ponder how all those fantastic players of days gone by were able to ascend to such great heights with those old crappy Kings, Conns, Bachs snd Olds.

Oh yeah - it's the players who makes the horn perform and not the other way around. Kinda of like the more outrages the kit, the less talented the drummer (Neil Peart excluded).

Couldn’t agree more that it’s the player. That’s exactly why Yamaha made me one of their few trombone artists who are not a band director, college professor, or member of an orchestra. And for what it’s worth, I still enjoy getting around on my 6H and Bach 8 every now and then as well as supporting independent craftspeople like SweeneyBrass.

[wayne88ny]

I don't know what the current state of affairs is, but...

Edwards gave a lot of players free trombones early on. Conn gave away trombones at one point (quite a few years ago). I think that Yamaha used to give instruments to their artists; I don't know if they still do. Yamaha definitely gave Doug Yeo bass trombones. XO (Jupiter) currently gives free horns to their artists. The manufacturers that sponsor brass quintets, etc. provide the group with free instruments.

[wayne88ny]

It has always been my understanding that "stencil" instruments are made by another (often reputable) company and rebranded with a different name. Conn made instruments that were sold by Sears as "Silvertone". Accord trombones were rebranded Blessings. I have a Sanders Tuba that's a rebranded Cerveny (Sanders was a Custom Music brand, the later Sanders were made in China). Custom music no longer sells Sanders tubas.

[Finetales]

It has always been my understanding that "stencil" instruments are made by another (often reputable) company and rebranded with a different name. Conn made instruments that were sold by Sears as "Silvertone". Accord trombones were rebranded Blessings. I have a Sanders Tuba that's a rebranded Cerveny (Sanders was a Custom Music brand, the later Sanders were made in China). Custom music no longer sells Sanders tubas.

Yes, there is a difference between stencils, copies/clones, and instruments made under license.

Stencil = one maker makes a horn for another, putting the other's name on the bell. Willson, Couesnon, B&S, Courtois, Yamaha, Cerveny, and more have all built stencils at some point.

Copy/clone = taking an existing instrument/design and copying it to sell on your own, with no communication with the original company. Jinbao clones, every non-Fender Stratocaster in the world. (Pretty funny how the entire electric guitar industry is essentially built on cloning Fender and Gibson designs, and people still buy Fenders and Gibsons by the truckload. Something to think about.)

License-built = one maker acquires the rights to build another maker's design. Buescher making license-built Alex 103s for example.

[Doug Elliott]

Before Kanstul became a known instrument name, their entire business was making stencils.

[Nomsis]

I currently count 13 brass instruments in my room, among them are:
8 made in Germany
2 made in USA
2 made in Czechia (probably, one is unmarked)
1 made in Taiwan

numbers will vary over time. I'm open to have instruments from all different places on earth but I'm generally only interested into instruments proudly manufactured by the company which stamps their name into the bell. I don't mind much if they buy some special parts from another pro company or if they even have some parts made to special order but nevertheless I value a high vertical range of manufacture.
I am most excited nowadays by the modern quality makers from Germany though. Many of them like Kühnl & Hoyer, Jürgen Voigt, Buffet Crampon Group (B&S, Courtois, Scherzer, Hans Hoyer etc.) make most (all?) parts in house as far as I know. Sadly I'm kind of poor and can only buy used and cheap

[Chronos91]

New link because the first one got a strike on youtube.

[OMalleyBrassInstruments]

Not looking to jump too far into this thread, but I’ll add this and then hide:

The ability to order instruments with your name on them is nothing new. The speed of communication today makes things feel new when they aren’t.

Small music stores and private individuals have been stenciling instruments forever. The practice hasn’t changed, only the pace has. If anything, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are fewer stencil instruments on the market now than in the past.

The issues being discussed here are of real importance to me personally, but I don’t think they carry much weight in the broader market. As I’m writing this, I find myself struggling to find the grandiose reasons we make almost all of our parts. When I was younger, the motivation was largely spite. I looked at the industry and saw bland instruments with margin layered on top of other people’s labor, and I had little respect for anyone simply assembling components.

That perspective has softened with experience, and of course I have respect for makers / assemblers / modifiers / whatever unnecessary labels we want to put on them.

Today I have a different perspective forged through experience. There is a place in the market for every level of craftsmanship. The only thing that truly matters is that the customer is satisfied, and that satisfaction hasn’t been built on being misled. Its not for makers to decide what the consumer wants, or where the "handmade" or "Maker" line should be.

Intentionally unclear marketing is the only real problem here, and I believe almost every company in the market, boutique and factory alike, is guilty of this.

The opinions above are exclusively my own,

Miles O'Malley

[Posaunus]

As I’m writing this, I find myself struggling to find the grandiose reasons we make almost all of our parts ...

That perspective has softened with experience, and of course I have respect for makers / assemblers / modifiers / whatever unnecessary labels we want to put on them.

... There is a place in the market for every level of craftsmanship. The only thing that truly matters is that the customer is satisfied, and that satisfaction hasn’t been built on being misled. Its not for makers to decide what the consumer wants, or where the "handmade" or "Maker" line should be.

Intentionally unclear marketing is the only real problem here, and I believe almost every company in the market, boutique and factory alike, is guilty of this.

I don't think there should be any shame in using materials / components / assemblies that are not completely "home made." If another supplier can make something better (valve / bell / tuning slide / mouthpiece / whatever) than you can, and it is responsibly made, ethically sourced, and fairly priced - then I would prefer that it be incorporated into your product. It's not important to me that everything be made in-house - I just want the best product for the price I'm able to pay. And that you are transparent about the "supply chain."