[Trombone-l] 51 positions of the trombone?

[Wessner, John]

I've found (and my two horns differ among their infinite variations of the basic positions) that unless I am playing a rapid passage, I play pretty accurately on pitch no matter how badly I've neglected the tuning slide, to say nothing of the hand slide - within reason.  Playing in tune is as much the embouchure and the head as the slide: once you have the basics down and a few thousand hours of experience.  It sounds better and is a lot more comfortable to have the hand slide in exactly the right place for each note, consistent with the ensemble pitch and what you did to approximate it.  An awful lot of intonation is in the head of the player and playing with a poor ensemble can be agony for the chops as well as the ear.  Good trombone sections can play a series of notes involving recurring alternate positions in tune irrespective of the twitchings needed to play them individually as sustained tones.  The notes just won't be quite "centered."

But then I haven't much classical training.....
jw

-----Original Message-----
From: trombone-l-bounces at samford.edu [mailto:trombone-l-bounces at samford.edu] On Behalf Of Peter W. Schroth
Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 2:57 PM
To: Trombone-L
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] 51 positions of the trombone?

Howard Spindel wrote:

I think you might as well take the position (pun intended)that there are 
NO fixed positions on a trombone. They vary from horn to horn, player to 
player, mouthpiece to mouthpiece, day to day, temperature, plus more I'm 
sure I'm missing. Every note should be listened to and tuned appropriately.

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

I'm not convinced.  It seems to me that, by the time I hear that the 
note is too flat or too sharp, I've already played it and it's too 
late.  I need to have a pretty good idea, in advance, of whether to 
adjust, say, a 5th position Db or a 6th position A up or down, and how much.

On the other hand -- and let's keep this purely hypothetical -- suppose 
we are playing Liberty Bell and the other trombone players see me 
playing the dumpty-dump part in fifth position, instead of jumping all 
around.  So, maybe they start playing it in fifth position also.  
However, maybe they just hold it in the same fifth position for all the 
notes, whereas I move the slide in a little for Bb, out a little for Db, 
and so forth.  Just supposing that were to happen, just possibly it 
might sound worse than before, because (1) most of their notes would 
then, hypothetically, be out of tune but (2) at least they would be 
more-or-less together and I would be doing something different.  So, I 
could hypothetically try to explain about adjusting the positions, but 
this wouldn't be a lesson and I wouldn't be the teacher or the boss and 
there wouldn't be enough time to let that very complicated idea work 
through into actual playing anyway.  IF that ever happened, which I am 
not exactly saying it ever did (in three different bands so far, 
counting only Liberty Bell), maybe it would have been better if I had 
just played it their way in the first place.

Peter W. Schroth


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