There’s also a ‘trigger trombone’ variant, where pulling a trigger routes the air through more tubing, bringing a different pitch.
Source: I’m a sponsor of the trombone arts. My kid played trombone in high school.
One trombone feature not mentioned here is that the length of the pipe apparently affects the timing enough that they have to compensate for it.
> But, how can a trombone ever be better than the piano when there’s so many variables? Well, unlike a piano, where each key produces a fixed pitch, a trombone lets me subtly adjust every note as I play.
Thanks, but I'll stick to my keyboard's pitch bend control.
The trombone's great expressiveness comes at a steep learning cost.
If you play piano you should find a tuner who does something better than equal temperament. When you accept that changing keys will change the tone of the song you can get a lot better music. You don't need to go to just temperament (and since you still need octave stretch it wouldn't be ideal anyway - though if you can live with playing music in exactly one key it is nice).
I tuned my piano to EBVTIII and I like it. (well I tuned 3 notes and then got my son interested and he tuned the rest). It isn't as hard to tune a piano as professionals make it out. However it takes me about 5x as long so if you can find a good tuner I'd call it worth it.
One of my favourite albums is Stuart Dempster's Underground Overlays From The Cistern Chapel.
A group of trombonists all playing in a giant underground water tank with incredibly long reverb.
I loved playing trombone in school. It's such a simple mechanism, it invites a lot of curiousity, and this piece captures that well. Instruments like piano, violin, and guitar are very visual, essentially wysiwyg. Instruments like saxophones, clarinets, flutes, take a long to mentally map and reason through (this combination of keys achieves note X). Trumpets, and other 3 valve instruments map exactly to trombone positions! Eg. no-valves = 1st position, 1st valve is 3rd position, 1+2 is 4th position. But visually you don't see this, and it doesn't invite the curiousity. Trombone super unique in that you get a little wysiwyg, but you have to square that with embouchure. But learning trombone, and then mapping that knowledge to a euphonium, trumpet, tuba, etc, gives you a knowledge about that instrument (eg ok if note X is 1st valve, and note X+1 is 1+2, then i know adding 2-to-1 adds a half step, because position 3 is a half step from position 4).
This seems a decent introduction. The only thing mentioned that I wasn't really aware of is the effect of the tongue in addition to the lips on the embouchure of higher notes. Can anyone recommend some more info on that?
Everything I know about trombones I know from the game Trombone Champ.
It's a good game for every aspiring trobonist (or people just remotely interested in music-related video games)
Oh, by the way...
Pink Trombone
https://github.com/imaginary/pink-trombone
Evy Kassirer - !!Con 2019 - Reverse engineering your mouth! by Evy Kassirer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTwjirrCuDE&t=34s
Zack Quattan - Pink Trombone Playlist - Gamepad / MIDI / Machine Learning / Phoneme Classifier / etc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LflxVULOtLs&list=PLzgiV7-SLJ...
https://deepwiki.com/zakaton/Pink-Trombone
pink trombone controlled by max msp via OSC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7eJ209ayFw
Circuit Bending - Pink Trombone "Speech Synthesis"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_qd116njyk
How to break Pink Trombone
"The trombone is the only brass instrument in a classical orchestra" is a statement that requires further support.
I've been trying to square the physics and my experience.
Pedal B flat is the fundamental, low B flat is the 2x, F 3x, mid B flat the 4x, D the 5X, high F is 6X, G half sharp is 7X and high B flat is 8X.
The position your music teacher most likely will have told you to adjust is 2nd position - you play it slightly sharper for an A vs the E or C sharp it's also used for.
Why is that? It's the major 3rd that has the largest variation between just and equal temperament. The A is often a 3rd against the F, is that why?
But it seems to me that it's all the notes on the D embouchure that will be off -- 1st position D on the trombone is 5X the fundamental, so it's justly tuned, not equally tuned, so shouldn't it be the one that needs the most adjustment? I guess all wind instruments have this problem, so maybe I don't notice because usually I'm playing in a wind band with very few equally tempered instruments like piano, guitar and glockenspiel?