r/Trombone • u/Relevant-Composer716 • 2d ago
Tubing for traveling
To keep my embouchure in shape, i got 10 feet of tubing and my mouthpiece and brought them on vacation. (I really don't like just buzzing on the mouthpiece.)
Since it's not conical, the partials are all very stretched, so it's terrible for intonation. A funnel on the end didn't help.
I got bored with bugle notes, so I cut a hole about 11% of the way down, so i could get a whole step. (That's 2^(-2/12) for you math and physics people).
It's 3/8 inch ID vinyl tubing.
When i got back from vacation, i still sucked at trombone.
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u/ryebrye 2d ago
This is surprisingly similar to how Dubstep was discovered!
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u/Relevant-Composer716 2d ago
Same inner diameter tubing even!
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u/theDalaiSputnik 1d ago
large or small bore?
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u/Relevant-Composer716 1d ago
I think small. My "other" trombone is a Yamaha YSL 354. The mouthpiece measures around 0.44 inches at the tip.
If you're unsure, you should bring your mouthpiece to the hardware store. They have many sizes of this type of tubing.
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u/wutImiss 2d ago
Played a trombonium once, I gotta get me one of those! Especially for the compactness.
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u/SufferingNoisess 2d ago
Oh my fucking god dude it so ridiculous but it's so cool. I like making wind instrument like this too. This is so fun ngl
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u/Astrokiwi 1d ago
Fun facts on the physics/harmonics here:
Brass instruments act as a "tube closed at one end" when it comes to harmonics. It's instinctive to think of it as a "tube open at both ends", but the "openness" at both ends is different - your mouth is a pressure antinote while the bell is a displacement antinode, and these are actually opposites (pressure change is at a minimum when displacement change is at a maximum).
What this means is just a straight tube - like if you try to place through a long cardboard tube, or a didgeridoo - does not give you the harmonic series you expect. Instead of 1,2,3,4,5,6 you get 1,3,5,7. So if you start on pedal Bb as the fundamental, the partials for a straight tube go: pedal Bb; F in the staff; D above the staff; high Ab etc. You miss a lot of the notes.
The difference for a real brass instrument is that the curve of the bell and the mouthpiece and the overall tapering changes the impedance of the airflow, so that it's not a straight tube anymore. This has been engineered to approximately get you part of a harmonic series, which goes 2,3,4,5,6 etc. This gives you the low Bb, F, Bb, D, F, flat Ab, Bb series of partials. The pedal note is actually kind of faked - it isn't a harmonic of the instrument itself, but it's supported because you can resonate with all the overtones which are harmonics, and it lands pretty nicely; because you're filling in the gap in the harmonic series, all of the overtones fit nicely. This also explains how you can fake the low F in 1st position, and play the low Eb to B in that "fake" partial - there's a lot less support because only some of the overtones are supported (the harmonic series would be low F, F in the staff, middle C, high F, high A).
For a mouthpiece + tube, you're somewhere in the middle - the mouthpiece does adjust the harmonic series a bit, but you won't get the trombone's 2,3,4,5,6 series, but you won't get the big straight tube 1,3,5,7 series either. This is why you get the really big gaps between partials, and will be "faking" a lot of the notes (or squeezing the tube to adjust the impedance, apparently!)
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u/Relevant-Composer716 1d ago
This is quite the analysis. It's been a long time since I took Professor Bose's acoustics course. I'm a little rusty on eigenvalues and transmission line equations. I think you made a valiant effort here but I don't think it's possible to understand without some diagrams. There's a good site here:
https://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/brassacoustics.html#natural
When I first started on the trombone, as a guitarist it made sense to me that I'd get the harmonic series, but when I started making diagrams, I realized that it doesn't make sense. A first-order analysis suggests that you'd get odd harmonics. I suspect that what happened is that over a few centuries, people took some pipes and started squishing and stretching till they got what sounded good, and then some other people later did the helmholtz equations and whatnot to explain why it works so well.
I'm not squeezing the tube. I'm closing a hole. You can't just put a hole in a normal brass instrument, but with the tube, it's not a problem because it sucks anyway. Interestingly, I think I could make an instrument that plays 9 notes in tune in one partial if I cut 8 holes for my 8 fingers. The 9 notes could even cover more than an octave. You could pick your favorite 9 notes. (An octave and a half of pentatonic maybe?) But if you try to get more notes by exciting the next partial, it will all go south (or maybe north). I might try this someday. It would probably be better to cut the holes with something other than a jackknife, like I did in this case.
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u/Kind_Imagination6836 20h ago
Actually sounded pretty good, I wonder how good you can make a trombone sound
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u/Relevant-Composer716 17h ago
I couldn't wait to try a recording so I did this one at ~4 weeks into my trombone learnings, back in June. It's a ska wordplay song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBQPyYOMucAI'd never played brass before so it's a bit rough. I think I could do quite a bit better now.
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u/fireeight 2d ago
Not gonna lie, you don't sound bad on the tube. You might be on to something here.