[Trombone-l] Trombone Wind Controller

[Daryl Burch]

I wanna see what kinda contraption he comes up with so I can ding my 
finger on the bell to know where 3rd position is!  #X-)

<kidding, of course!>

Cheers!
-D-
www.radionoise.com <- Rock star by night
www.burchinteractive.com <- Tech-nerd by day #;-)


On Mar 26, 2007, at 11:58 AM, David Goldfarb wrote:

On Mon, 26 Mar 2007, Chris Graham wrote:
> Here are a a few questions:
>
> 1) There are two available trumpet oriented wind controllers, and on 
> both
> the designers have chosen to make the fingering of all octaves the 
> same.
> The "harmonics" (which on these instruments are selected with the left 
> hand,
> not the lip) go up in alternating fifths and forths so every second 
> harmonic
> takes you up and octave.
>
> Would this system make sense for trombone?

> The alternative, which is also possible is to model the overtone 
> series of
> the trombone exactly, but this gets you a smaller playing range for a 
> given
> number of harmonics.

I think it would be more intuitive to model the overtone series of the
trombone, otherwise you would lose all the alternate positions that use
the higher harmonics, which are handy for playing fast technical 
passages
or sometimes just for legato passages where you want to avoid jerky 
slide
movements.

Also, not everyone thinks the same way about this.  Some players like to
keep the slide always moving in a circular way.  Some play a lot of 
upper
range stuff infrequently going past fourth position.  Some think of 
fourth
position as "home base" so they can be equidistant to the ends of the
slide.  If you make it work like a trombone, then any player should be
able to pick it up and play it, no matter what their general approach to
the instrument is.

If the output is midi, it's easy enough to shift octaves electronically,
if need be.

> 2) For a given harmonic the minimum number of semitones of range that 
> are
> necessary  to play all pitches is seven.  However, for faster playing 
> its
> desirable to have the harmonics overlap.  Would say an octave range 
> for the
> slide on a given semitone be sufficient?

See above.

> 3) From my listening to trombone playing, trombonists (almost?) always
> tongue a note when the harmonic is to change.  How often is is done 
> that the
> the lip and/or slide are used to jump or drop a harmonic without 
> tonguing?
> How much of a limitation would it be if I required a tongued note 
> (even if
> very lightly) in order to change harmonics?

If you had to tongue every note, you couldn't play a lip trill, and as
another poster mentioned, you couldn't play "against the grain," which 
is
also fairly idiomatic to the trombone, and sometimes for legato 
playing, a
lip slur or a lip slur with a very light tongue that might be hard to
detect is appropriate.

David Goldfarb
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