[Trombone-l] An alto neophyte asks for it--tuning slides

[George Butler]

This is very interesting!  A couple of years ago, I bought (on eBay, of all places!) a baroque alto made by Frank Tomes of London.  It is a great horn.  Responds well, good intonation, fun to play.  Like the museum original (Hieronimus Starck, 1670, now in Nuremberg) that it is based on, there is no tuning slide.  No cork barrel on the slide either.  (Frank did add a water key, so I've got the best of both worlds.  Ha, ha!)
   
  I think that as modern folks, we like to think that our instruments--like everything else--have gotten better, because of our technological know-how.  But, those early makers knew exactly what they were doing, and maybe there are some things our modern makers might learn from them.  (Isn't Bach working on a new Jay Friedman model that features a bell with thinner metal?)
   
  Somebody wake Uncle Howard.  When and where were tuning slides first added to a trombone?
   
  George Butler
  Lasnamae Muusikakool
  Tallinn, Estonia

Gabriel Langfur <glangfur at yahoo.com> wrote:
  ----- Original Message ----
From: Eric & Candice Swanson 

One thing to consider is that on every alto that I've ever played the 
slide is just a little too short to really reach 7th position. You 
really have to lip down the E naturals and the low As or they're going 
to be pretty sharp, and that's with the slide just barely hanging on. 


-----------------

There's a reason for that, and it has to do with getting the nodes in the right place for the partials to line up in a sensible way. The short slide makes it much easier to do.

We've done a couple of things with the new Shires alto to combat that. One has to do with the cork barrels, and I'll leave it up to techs like Eric to figure it out. (Eric, I think you'll be seeing Steve this week, right? He has at least one of the new altos with him). The other is...slide tuning. Fixing the bell section taper in place helps the partials line up well, and makes other adjustments possible.

Gabe
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