Good Evening! I'm seeing what you're typing and looking at your avatar, seeing sunburstbasser typing trumpeter, and I'm afraid to make a suggestion, thinking you got some tricky avatar that will turn and hollow-graphically reach out to swat me, or wrap the chain around my head and drag me into some sub-symphonic world evolving under rock.
What kind of mute are you using? Most of the response I get in my thread would tell me to use the rubber from a toilet bowl plunger. I was in the Dollar Store and saw some little florescent orange safety pylons that made me think of a mute for a trumpet and a bigger horn. I'd toss in a couple metal Spiderman action figures into a sax bell just to add some nasty jangle to those mids. Why Spiderman and not The Hulk or The Fairy Princess? I thought the Spiderman figurines would work like shaking jacks in your hand, all arms and legs, and the others were more solid-bodied and would clunk around. If it wasn't for one of the girls there coming up to me to talk, I might have been consumed by more acoustic thoughts, and started blowing something through the holes in the fingers of the life-size plastic troll lawn ornaments, thinking the open mouths and holes for wiring would give me something to blow through.
One thing I think would be a natural for any horn player today would be stretching some kind of membrane over the horn, like maybe a condom, where you had to play hard and blow hard to puff it up and made your reputation popping it, after several attempts. Trumpeters blowing them up with a reserve of spit all over the front row could be a hot thing. A tuba player better be careful, as losing pressure and inhaling the balloon could create a semi-back-blast, a new acoustic phenomena.
When I was looking at the rubber and synthetic gloves at The Dollar Mart, I was thinking you could stretch one of those over the bell, and cutting the fingertips off, let them puff up and wiggle around as the air escapes, making semi-flatulent sounds or pin-hole squeals, a different pitch for each finger.
If you cut the bottom off the soft, rubber-like torso of the fat gringo pineta,
you could do the same thing with it, getting ten toe-nals.
Drill some holes here and there and put rivets in like drummer's cymbals.
or use some piercings you don't wear no more.
or ear-rings and studs you made off with on vacation in Egypt
hitch-hike through the Andes looking for some, uh, ancient crystal, uh, skulls,
and install pieces of it like stained glass around the bell,
start posting you've got a semi-crystal-bell trumpet
and say you're afraid to play it in the moonlight because...
then post pictures of it with rays shooting from the eyes
and get some free publicity by getting busted big time
shooting it into the windshield of passenger jets
and the orbiting space station
This is the forum that's going to get me in trouble. All these unused field potentials, no-one really classical posting here, although I haven't looked that much, and I'll get put down for typing here when I could be making a video of my guitar.
And I don't know how much dust you're knocking off that horn, but did you ever hear that Miles Davis "hip-hop" C.D. about ten years ago? Where he's playing with some deep groove producers? I've never lost interest in hearing that. It's mostly instrumental with chants and some lines and every track is like a song waiting to happen.
Yeah, come-on-Miles, you'gotta'gimme'that trip-hop-sound.
as always, John Watt
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