ngrinder wrote: ↑Sun Jul 14, 2019 12:44 am
I think I’m in the minority here, but I tend to believe almost anything you do to an instrument will change how it plays. Annealing, lead tape, plumbers tape, spit valve screws.... All this stuff actually does matter (just set up an appointment with Wayne Tanabe!)
I was in a lesson with a very prominent bass trombonist whom you all know (who has tons and tons of equipment -can you guess who it is?), and he handed me two mouthpieces to play. I played them, and they felt quite different! I asked what the difference was and he said one thousandth of a click more open in the throat! How many folks on here would dismiss the difference between a .312 throat and .313 throat? I might have before I tried it....
I'm not sure if you're in the minority, particularly here, but there certainly is a large contingent of "you are an easily duped, coddled millenial if you don't play the first random 5G that you pulled off the shelf until the plating wears off" in the broader trombone community. But in their defence, they can point to me, an easily duped, coddled millennial who has at times majorly gone down the equipment rabbit hole for better or for worse.
I'm in jest of course to a large degree but if you can cut through any hyperbole that you might hear on either side of that particular dichotomy, I think that the general rule boils down to this: Yes, just about anything can have an influence on your sound but with two caveats:
1) Is the difference actually perceivable and consistently identifiable?
2) If there are consistently identifiable differences, are they overshadowed by something that is oft ignored?
The latter is interesting and pointed out to me by Matt Walker a few years ago. I don't remember what my contention was but he basically asked if I kept up with shaving to the same degree as whatever it was I was interested in at the time. I'm admittedly quite lazy about facial hair; I hate shaving. Yet the difference between smooth, a little stubble, and a weeks worth of growth is going to far overshadow .001" difference in the throat. You have to bear in mind too that such a difference is so minute that in the regular course of playing, you are going to fill that gap in with crud from your sinuses. Do you regularly clean out that particular point? Or for that matter, the rest of the horn? If so, sure very subtle changes might be noticeable because you have a very consistent baseline. If not, it's really hard to say if that .001" throat size makes a difference or if its that you're normally playing something that's constricted because of accumulation such that either an actual .312 or a .313 bore would be preferable to a .312 that is actually a much smaller bore for most of the year.
I have read so many posts poo-poo-ing certain equipment changes, and these posts usually come from folks who know quite a bit about chemistry, science, etc. All of course have valuable insights. But, the very fact that good musicians have said there is a change means to me that there probably is something to all this stuff. ...
If you play it and it feels different, it probably is! I feel it shouldn’t be more complicated than that. Though of course, I know it is, especially for some people.
This is what people were talking about when they were mentioning the placebo effect earlier. It is really, really powerful stuff. It might be more accurate to say, "If you play it and it feels different, it probably isn't, but you probably think it is!" The placebo effect is so strong that it can produce pharmacological effects
even when people know it is a placebo.
A 2014 study led by Kaptchuk and published in Science Translational Medicine explored this by testing how people reacted to migraine pain medication. One group took a migraine drug labeled with the drug's name, another took a placebo labeled "placebo," and a third group took nothing. The researchers discovered that the placebo was 50% as effective as the real drug to reduce pain after a migraine attack.
If you can take a placebo and have it be 50% as an actual pain killer, just imagine what your brain can do to your perception of your current sound vs the memory of your previous sound, especially days removed from the old sound. (As would be the case of a cryo treatment which is done over the course of several days).
Note that I am not saying that cryo treatments aren't effective or even that minor equipment differences aren't important. On the contrary, I generally contend that such differences are important even if they don't have a perceivable influence on sound because the net result either way is you like your playing better even if it's a placebo. However, it would make more sense to me to emphasize things that people can do that actually have a proven, direct influence on their sound like regularly maintaining their horn
first. And if you have facial hair, shaving daily. So on an so forth. If you can get to that stage, have at it with changes of decreasing perceptibility. Gold/Yellow brass; bass/wide/narrow slide crook; nickel/brass/etc crook; lightweight/regular weight slides; bell weights; counterweight/no counterweight; bell dampers (duct tape or otherwie); rubber bumper/no rubber bumper; felt bumpers/nobumpers, etc. etc. etc.
