Perception and Reality: A Sad Awakening

[JTeagarden]

I focus on bass trombone these days, and have a Bach 50, and a Bach 42.

I decided to try out a Bach 50 lightweight slide on the 42 to see if that made it easier to double on from a 50, and indeed it does, and put my 42 handslide in the basement, and practiced both the 42 (with the lightweight 50 slide) and the 50 (with the regular-weight 50 slide) side-by-side for a good week.

Except that, when I went to put in another leadpipe in the 50/50 set-up, I determined I had been in fact using the 42 slide with the 50 bell that whole week, and really noticed no difference to speak of.

Which draws me to an unflattering conclusion: Unless my mind thinks there is going to be a difference (such as a different slide/leadpipe/what have you), I may very well not even notice one, and its corollary: new components may not make as much difference as you imagine.

[hyperbolica]

Ah, that stings. I've been doing something similar with a 62h and 88h, swapping slides. Not as big a difference as you might think or wish. In either direction.

[harrisonreed]

[Matt K]

I did that with a leadpipe once, except in my case, I almost sold the horn after a week before realizing what I'd done. However, I was working on something at the time that really tested some extremes. On typical bass bone work, it isn't unusual to have something that could easily be played on a tenor. In my experience, even other musicians, who aren't trombonists, often have trouble telling the sonic difference between a tenor and a bass... let alone the layperson listening to us.

[robcat2075]

...Which draws me to an unflatering conclusion: Unless my mind thinks there is going to be a difference (such as a different slide/leadpipe/what have you), I may very well not even notice one, and its corollary: new components may not make as much difference as you imagine.

The placebo effect!

I've had that experience switching among several similar but not identical mouthpieces. I'd grab my horn up off the stand, play a bit, and think, "oh, this is the 'slow' mouthpiece I've got here. Don't want that!"

Then I'd look and, no, it wasn't the "slow" mouthpiece. I'm just slow today!

I think that unless we are in the top tier of highly-aware players, the variation in our own playing from day to day is already wider than what many equipment changes would bring.

But since it's me that made the change and not the horn, then a highly-aware player would be able to call up all these variations at will without changing anything on the horn.

[JTeagarden]

Yep. My equipment is definitely in a higher weight class than I am.

The variability in my playing (and especially my utter inability to do anything about it) is what made me conclude some 40 years ago I could not become a performing musician: On a day when the stars align, great, the next day, I want to wrap the horn around the nearest tree.

Am I better than 99.5% of all people who ever played the instrument? Probably! But I admire those at the 99.99% level.