Core, Resonance, Colour, Projection

[Drombone]

Time and time again I see these terms. I have NO idea what they mean.

I have 40+ years experience of playing, to a good (amateur) standard. I had my chance at 16 to go pro musician, but chose medicine instead, thinking (remarkably maturely for that age) that it's better to be a professional, say, gynaecologist and an amateur musician than the other way round.

I bought a modular horn from an auction site. I took it to the factory to try different bits. The yellow brass bell apparently helps with projection. I swapped a bronze lead pipe out for one of 2 nickel ones. I thought I could slot better and go higher with more security. I swapped a red brass, nickel plated tuning slide for a yellow one. It helped me feel more secure. I didn't notice much difference in sound.

My suspicion is that the terms in the title of this post are what the Emperor's tailors said. I think the little boy has it right. A trombone of a given bore sounds much like its cousins from another factory, and the only difference is to the player.

Over to you.

[RJMason]

Here is the perspective of someone who has been playing trombone for 26 years, had a similar fork in the road, but decided to become a professional trombonist and has been thriving for a long while.

Your skepticism is healthy (and the marketing world around these terms deserves most of the blame for making them feel like snake oil) but I think there’s a real distinction worth drawing.

The fact that you noticed differences in slotting, security, and response, but not in sound, is telling. The player is often the worst person to evaluate their own sound and what the audience receives is a genuinely different signal. A recording would tell you more than your own ears ever could in the moment.

The terms do point at real things even if they’re used sloppily or incorrectly at times. Projection is essentially about directional energy and how efficiently the instrument “throws sound” into a room. Core relates to the strength and clarity of the fundamental. Color (to me) is timbre which could be translated as the ratio of overtones present in the sound. Resonance describes how readily the instrument responds to and amplifies the player’s input. These are measurable acoustic phenomena.

The bore argument I’d also push back on gently. Bore is one variable in a fairly complex system including bell flare rate, bell material, wall thickness, bracing, leadpipe taper, which all interact. Two .547 horns from different makers don’t produce identical results and in a professional context where contractors and producers are making decisions about who plays what on a session those differences are noticed and acted on by the musicians.

All that to say you are right that a lot of what gets written about equipment crosses into Emperor’s New Clothes territory. Gear culture in the brass world is not immune to placebo and confirmation bias. The little boy has a point but it doesn’t mean the clothes don’t exist at all.

[LeTromboniste]

Here is the perspective of someone who has been playing trombone for 26 years, had a similar fork in the road, but decided to become a professional trombonist and has been thriving for a long while.

Your skepticism is healthy (and the marketing world around these terms deserves most of the blame for making them feel like snake oil) but I think there’s a real distinction worth drawing.

The fact that you noticed differences in slotting, security, and response, but not in sound, is telling. The player is often the worst person to evaluate their own sound and what the audience receives is a genuinely different signal. A recording would tell you more than your own ears ever could in the moment.

The terms do point at real things even if they’re used sloppily or incorrectly at times. Projection is essentially about directional energy and how efficiently the instrument “throws sound” into a room. Core relates to the strength and clarity of the fundamental. Color (to me) is timbre which could be translated as the ratio of overtones present in the sound. Resonance describes how readily the instrument responds to and amplifies the player’s input. These are measurable acoustic phenomena.

The bore argument I’d also push back on gently. Bore is one variable in a fairly complex system including bell flare rate, bell material, wall thickness, bracing, leadpipe taper, which all interact. Two .547 horns from different makers don’t produce identical results and in a professional context where contractors and producers are making decisions about who plays what on a session those differences are noticed and acted on by the musicians.

All that to say you are right that a lot of what gets written about equipment crosses into Emperor’s New Clothes territory. Gear culture in the brass world is not immune to placebo and confirmation bias. The little boy has a point but it doesn’t mean the clothes don’t exist at all.

Yup, this!!!

Time and time again I see these terms. I have NO idea what they mean.

My suspicion is that the terms in the title of this post are what the Emperor's tailors said. I think the little boy has it right. A trombone of a given bore sounds much like its cousins from another factory, and the only difference is to the player.

The terms you mention are hard to define because they refer to complex parameters that combine several raw characteristics, and different players might define them somewhat differently. Also, those are all about the player just as much (or more) as they are about gear, so no, it's not an emperor's new clothes situation (which doesn't mean there is never an emperor's new clothes syndrome with gear).

Projection is self-explanatory, it's how the sound projects into a space. It's possible to play in a way that feels loud to the player or people directly around them but doesn't project well at a distance, for example. And likewise it's possible to play in such a way that sounds loud and clear from a distance, yet sounds softer up-close.

Resonance is closely related: people usually describe a horn that projects especially well and easily as "resonant". It's about how efficiently the instrument reacts to the vibrations that match its modes of resonance and how much louder it plays them compared to the volume of the input. There is such a thing as an instrument being too resonant (to the point where dynamic control is difficult and soft dynamics are less accessible).

Colour is about the harmonic content of the note. Broadly speaking, a higher ratio of high overtones sounds brighter, while a higher ratio of low overtones sounds darker A tone that includes too much of the higher overtones and too little of the fundamental and lower overtones will sound too bright, even shrill. A tone that had too much fundamental and not enough high overtones will be too dark, and feel dull. Then there's also the nature of the harmonics themselves. A tone where the 5th harmonic and its multiples (corresponding to the major third) are more prevalent than usual will have a different colour than a tone where the 3rd harmonic and its multiples (the fifth) are more prevalent. And there's how many overtones are produced at audible amplitudes (the more audible overtones, the more complex the colour of the tone).

Core is a trickier one. I find it is related to both tone colour and response. There's usually a region of the harmonic spectrum of a tone that's significantly louder than the rest (even than the fundamental itself). How well-defined that region is, and how consistent it remains across different registers and dynamic levels, can be described as having more or less core (and the "core" can have different sizes). I believe this might also correlate with how wide and/or well-defined the slots are, in terms of response. "Core" is not just a binary characteristic that's either good or bad. Too much core is possible, at the expense of flexibility of . And "lack" of core can go in different directions. There are instruments that are just unstable and sound dull and might be described as lacking core, but there are also instruments that produce much more complex overtones, with a less clearly-defined core, which I would describe has having less core and more colour.

[ghmerrill]

I have 40+ years experience of playing, to a good (amateur) standard.

I have about that much playing time in -- but not on trombone. Many years ago I was a "good" saxophone player and a "decent" flue player, later in life I became quite a "good" tuba player. I've been a "mediocre" euphonium player (community band level). As a trombone player, I'm struggling for adequacy, but I love bass trombone.

In the cases of tuba and bass trombone I have spent a completely unreasonable amount of time and money experimenting with differences in mouthpieces and (in the trombone case) lead pipes. But I've learned a lot for all that money.

I had my chance at 16 to go pro musician, but chose medicine instead, ...

I thought briefly about going the musicician route when I was 17-18. As I recall, "briefly" amounted to about 15 minutes of analysis. I went in a different direction (actually, it ended up being three different -- though related -- directions over my professional life). But it was really a matter of what mattered most to me in terms of what I wanted to do.

I bought a modular horn from an auction site. I took it to the factory to try different bits. The yellow brass bell apparently helps with projection. I swapped a bronze lead pipe out for one of 2 nickel ones. I thought I could slot better and go higher with more security. I swapped a red brass, nickel plated tuning slide for a yellow one. It helped me feel more secure. I didn't notice much difference in sound.

I haven't messed with tuning slides because I doubt that (certainly for my own purposes) any results would matter to me. When a year ago I switched from ~ $600 Laabs "American Heritage" (mostly/sort of 7B clone) to my Getzen 1052, I'd already experimented with several different lead pipes and could definitely tell the difference among these. Some of this involved recording myself playing, but unfortunately not in a venue very dependable for making generalizations about sound.

The mouthpiece/lead pipe combination definitely seems sensitive to properties/dimensions of the components (no surprise there), and often is difficult to perceive and make choices if you're switching among rim/cup/shank/lead pipe type/lead pipe material combinations. I've a recently been surprised ( ) to discover that I have six different lead pipes from three different courses, and in three different materials. Several times I've thought that I found "the one", only to discover some time later that one of the others (in combination, of course, with the mouthpiece rim/bowl/shank and provider differences) seemed "better" for what I wanted. Certainly there is some subjectivity in this -- if only because I'm looking for some particular effects in terms of the sound being produced. And part of this is because all of that experimentation has trained me to better levels of both perception and performance.

But not all of this is "subjective" -- it's just difficult to evaluate -- particularly in an environment where your criteria of evaluation may be changing as you proceed. And I'm pretty sure that I'd be in the same position in comparing trombones (I.e., conceived of as a bell section, hand slide, materials for bell and various slides, slide configuration, valve types, etc.). My tale about lead pipe and mouthpiece experimentation illustrates how merely changing one component -- and even just a small change -- can have significant overall effects.

So ...

My suspicion is that the terms in the title of this post are what the Emperor's tailors said. I think the little boy has it right. A trombone of a given bore sounds much like its cousins from another factory, and the only difference is to the player.

I view this conclusion as too broad and simplistic for me to make any kind of real judgment about it. What exactly does "much like" mean, and what counts as a "cousin"? Given broad enough meanings for these words, I can shrug and say "Sure, okay. But what are you striving for in offering this?" Do you really think that a "given bore" size is what determines all of the (evident? interesting? characterizable?) aspects of a trombone's sound, or determines it within some sort of narrow range. I do doubt that.