rowuk

THE BORE SIZE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE BLOW, the size or "darkness of the sound" or volume achievable!
This myth keeps coming back and has NO TECHNICAL BASIS!

The resistance that we sense when playing is MUCH different than when just blowing air through the horn. The resistance is caused primarily by your chops AND the combination of leadpipe and mouthpiece.

Only a properly BALANCED horn will give optimal results. These instruments can be found in medium, ML and L bored trumpets!

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Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.

Walter

On this one I am not so sure....I thought that everything has everything to do with the blow and sound................including bore and bell taper I find it difficult to believe that once the sound has passed the leadpipe it is not affected by the rest of the horn....I may be wrong.....but if not why bother to have different bore sizes.........I do agree that a horn can be balanced in ways that affect the blow and sound. My Taylor is 470 and gives a big warm sound but is balanced so that it is manageable from ppp to fff....my Bach LB I found more difficult to control and I regularly felt puffed....I think generally large bore horns require more air to fill them and that is why ML horns are the most popular.




Walter

brem

Walter, it's the backbore of the mouthpiece that will have the most influence on how much / how easy it is to blow in a horn. I would think. The bore would have more to do with resonannce, and how easy it is to make the air tube resonnate.

Just a thought.

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brem
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NYTC Stage 1 California Light - Schilke 15B mpc
Bach Stradivarius Bb Model 37 * #124xxx (circa 1975) - Schilke 15B mpc
Yamaha YFH-731 Flugelhorn #000xxx - Yamaha 14F4-GP mpc

gglassmeyer

I know that while having my old Yamaha's valves replated in 2000, I borrowed a King symphony Super 20 silversonic (it was dual bore from .458 - .468). The Yamaha was a .460 ml bore. All I can say is that the King was exhausting to play at first. After a week or so I could deal with it fairly well.

Conversely, I lent My Yamaha to a guy that played in a horn section with my older brother. This guy was used to playing a large bore horn, and he had a tough time dealing with too much resistance.

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Greg Glassmeyer

JDay

Thanks for the great responses.

It's interesting to me that there are so many variables in how a horn is made, from bore size to bell taper, and from the shape of the tuning slide and if the slide is standard or reversed. I would not likely even suspect that my horn had a large bore if I did not know that it did. That is one reason I was curious if there were any differences between older versions of a large bore horn (mine is from ~1959) and large bore horns of today. The only real bummer is that my B4S Prana does not much like the horn. It seems very stuffy and I much prefer the Curry 3C in that horn. Likely an issue with the gap / receiver.

Anyhow thanks for the replies & Merry Christmas

Jack

rowuk

If we examine the concept of bore size, we find out that the small difference (.460 to .470 is the bore at the valve casing and says nothing about the leadpipe or bell shape) we increase the total volume of air in the horn only by a microscopic amount. A large bore horn does not necessarily have a wide open leadpipe or bell. The bore does "change" the way the horn plays, there just is no correlation between bore size and resistance. Looking at the physics side, cylindrical tubes have a resonant frequency based on the length of the tube. Irregular shapes have a resonant frequency based on volume (blow on the top of various shaped beer bottles - the volume determines the tone, not the length of the bottle!). The bore size CAN change the relation of volume irregular and cylindrical which could affect the intonation and location of the nodes. It just by itself has no effect on the resistance.
The reason that large bore horns may seem to be more work is that is what the buyer expects, so the manufacturers build them that way. It is generally the leadpipe/mouthpiece combination that controls the resistance. Large bore horns get free blowing leadpipes (that would also work with ML instruments!).

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Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.

djazz

I will agree with everyone who says that the bore is not a good indicator of the way a horn will play. Intuitively we tend to think that a large bore will blow dark and rich and that the small bore horn will produce a shrill tone. But if you look at flugelhorns, you find that it is the exact oppposite. So what gives?

But let me contradict myself: I get excited when I see a small bore horn such as the vintage Conn or Martin horns. The easier blow allow me to use a slower air stream and play with a darker tone. But then again, I am never in the position of a working professional commercial player who may need the volume capabilities of a large bore horn.

Adam Smith

would a large bore horn matched with a smaller leadpipe and bell be unbalanced? Or vice versa?

JDay

Hey Old Lou,

Let me know when you get your horn back, I would love to see a couple of pictures. Turns out that my friends horn is likely an Olds Ambassador, though it does have a trigger in the first slide. It will be interesting to compare the "blow" to the Silvertone/Blessing.

Cheers!

Jack

rowuk

Not necessarily,
When we talk about "resistance" in a trumpet, we actually mean "impedance" which is a frequency dependent resistance. This means when blowing air through the horn without playing, we have a different "resistance" than when playing. Depending on the design of the horn, the impedance can vary with the octave played too!
What we perceive as resistance when playing is a combination of effort to play versus how easily we can hear ourselves. That means a relatively unbraced lightweight bell will seem to have an easier blow (we can hear ourselves better but less energy gets to the audience!) - even if the absolute resistance is the same. The issue with unbraced lightweight bells is that they do not project as well.
The taper of the leadpipe actually is the most critical part of the horn, providing a match for the player, mouthpiece, the rest of the horn and the acoustical environment. It is possible to raise the efficiency of a trumpet with a smaller leadpipe - at the cost of somewhat higher "impedance". The end result is MUCH less work for the player, if they are willing to relax.
This also means that there is no set formula for building an ML or L bore horn.
My personal experience shows that the player makes a MUCH bigger deal out of bore size than is acoustically audible. Free blowing is misunderstood as "easy to play", when generally just the opposite is true. A horn with more efficiency allows us to play longer phrases with less effort, because the horn does the work. Most trumpet plalyers just are not willing to relax into the horn, or are handicapped with intonation issues and prefer to muscle their chops around instead of fixing the problem!

We can compare bore size to the number of lanes on a highway. That number does not directly correlate to how fast you can drive, unless other factors come into play. It also does not correlate to how smoothly you can get from point A to B unless some other factor becomes detrimental. Nobody ever bragged about driving to work on a 10 lane highway, I do not know why bore size on a trumpet should be such a big deal. If the artisan that built the horn did his job correctly, the horn does what it should and the "why" is secondary. Many roads lead to success!

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Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.