Hello Jake, I'm curious as to what problems you are encountering in learning to play. You used the phrase high maintenance in two of your emails. Could you be more specific as what these issues are? I was once asked to look an Orca from Olympic Instruments. A friend had borrowed it from another friend(who been give it as a gift but never played it) and thought that the bridge needed to be lowered(or the string notches made deeper) and wanted me to look at it and see what I thought. It turned out that he was trying to tune the open chanterelle to D and so the string was not making good contact with the wheel. I looked at the paperwork that came with the instrument, found the chanterelle should be tuned to G, tuned it, cottoned the string, did a bit of shimming, and the instrument played. (This was a couple of years ago and I still haven't seen the friend play it.) But it seemed like the instrument was close to being good to go when shipped. When starting out the cottoning and related shimming is the first hurdle to overcome. Neil Brook has a youtube video that is helpful for this. Next is getting used to turning the crank and playing notes. The Muskett book is good for this as are Neil Brook's DVD tutorials. Aftre that work in trompette technique. Scott Gayman has a great series of youtube videos on this. And as with any instrument consistent practice yields best results. You will of course have to replace the cotton from time to time. A tangent or two may shift and need to be realigned. There could be other issues that arise, however once the instrument is set up it doesn't seem to me to need constant tweaking. Other folks may have other experiences.
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