Quoting John Stacy: > > I am the same high school player who comes on occasionally, asking > about many things. > This time it is the second time I'm coming on about equipment. > > If you don't want my history, then skip the next block of text.
I think knowing your history is essential to any answer. I agree with the advice to ask your college horn professor if he prefers a certain kind of horn. Personally, I think **WAAAAY* too much is made of hardware, but my opinion and a buck will get you coffee if you go someplace cheap; and since you don't have an axe of your own, there's no point in getting something that won't get your college horn professor's Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. > I play on a school horn, a Conn 8D. There are bad 8D's. Even Elkhart 8D's. There are also 8D's that have been mistreated, badly repaired, or left unrepaired that started out good but went bad. My experience trying a lot of horns is that eventually I go back to my 8D. It sounds like you've only tried these other horns for a relatively short period of time, which, IMHO, is not enough to tell how you'd like them long term. A couple of weeks, or, better yet, a month is more like it. After that length of time, I usually end up sounding the same as I do on my 8D (I've recorded myself and don't think even I could tell which horn if I hadn't announced it on the recording!), and, if I've found something about the new horn that I like better than my old horn, I generally also either find something I don't like nearly as well or that there's some "deal breaker" or "show stopper" (e.g., bad intonation on a few notes) that make me unwilling to switch instruments. I also agree that a triple is too much horn--and, from what you said below, too expensive--for you right now. It may be true, as a good friend and local pro has told me, that the profesional world is moving toward triples; however, at the moment, the standard professional instrument is still a double, and professional-level players (definitely including my friend!) can get the job done on a double. Heck, the Vienna Philharmonic gets the job done every night on a single F! > Plus I had a high range. Like a real high range. From the high G > to an octave above that just sung out. This makes me nervous. If your only basis for comparison was the dog of an 8D, I'd ascribe this to the two horns, in particular to the 8D being, uh, a less-than-stellar example of the breed. However, by your own admission you've played some other horns that were good. So I suspect something was causing you to use your chops, air, or both differently. Whether "differently" means better or worse, I have no idea without hearing and seeing you play. Whether this phenomenon would last if you had the Schmid for a few weeks is also very much open to question, IMHO, because if you are using muscles differently, they may start to rebel, with the result that you'd be back to the same high range you had before. Or maybe not. As I said, it's impossible to know without seeing & hearing you. > Is there a way where I can just get a random horn, test it, get > another, test it, etc? Probably, but by the time you pay for shipping and insurance both ways--and you will--a couple of times, you could just pay for a trip to a shop that has several horns of the type you're interested in. Air fare, particularly bought well in advance, is pretty cheap. It won't take much shipping to go through a few hundred bucks. If you find one or more horns that seem like contenders, you could also ask a pro in the area where the horn resides to check it out for you. Though this would cost, again, it would be cheaper than a lot of shipping. > Preferably without a down payment needed? Probably not, unless they already know you well. > I don't want to ask this of the list, because I don't think I would > want my baby sent to some highschooler for testing. Anybody who sells anything should realize two things: 1) They have to talk to people, and a lot of the people they talk to aren't going to end up being customers; and 2) They are going to have to let people, including those who don't end up being customers, examine and test the merchandise. If they don't, they are fools (I'd actually call them something else if this were not a family-oriented forum) who hopefully will go out of business quickly. Unless someone's selling a horn that never makes clams, plays out of tune, and has a gorgeous sound (whatever your aesthetic of sound), he can't afford an attitude. Trust me, there aren't any horns you're going to be interested in that you can't get from someone else. (This is true of almost everything in life.) So, though I certainly think you should be polite and respectful (and think you are, based on your posts), I also don't think you should take any crap off a seller. HTH. Howard Sanner [email protected] _______________________________________________ post: [email protected] unsubscribe or set options at https://pegasus.memphis.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/options/horn/archive%40jab.org
