Nearly all children who play music are students.

[bloke]

Therefore, nearly all children are best paired up with student instruments...

...and this includes "all-state" children...

...which is why $4000 trumpets are probably not appropriate for nearly all student trumpet players who are children.

"...but my child is really mature and stuff..."

[Jperry1466]

[bloke]

It's repairable, but wasn't necessary, and would have been more suitable thing to do to a $120 bucks Walmart trumpet that plays 97% as well.

[2nd tenor]

The UK mostly has State (funded) Schools and a relatively small percentage of Private (parental fee paying) Schools; one of my friends teaches Brass at a private school. Said friend was asked by a parent to go with their child to buy an instrument, despite the advice of said friend the child and parents insisted that the most expensive instrument was bought because the child must not be held back by anything less than the ‘best’. Of course the instrument got broken fairly quickly and the child was decades short of having the skill to be able to extract the best from the instrument; the child would have been much better served with a good quality model that designed - and built - with able students in mind. Ya’ just can’t tell some people …

I’ve come to believe that ‘it ain’t what you’ve got that matters so much as what you do with it’.

[windshieldbug]

[bloke]

There is a tendency in some people to live vicariously through their children.

My granddaughter is 12, and I possess a straight through recording of her performing Mozart's first horn concerto with no tricky editing and only about four or five very minor bubbles. Her other grandfather also repairs instruments, and the instrument she's currently playing on is a Holton double horn that she got about a year ago which was pulled out of the junk pile and had its rotors rebuilt. Rebuilt rotors are never as tight as new, but that instrument is deemed suitable for her now. This will be her second summer at Interlochen.
Her dad plays horn in the Pittsburgh symphony, and they have a family business whereby they sell horns. They could have easily handed her a much nicer horn, but it's not time.

My own daughter played the complete Haydn oboe concerto in front of a per service orchestra when she was 14 on a German-made Miraphone/Hans Kreul oboe. We didn't purchase a name brand oboe for her until she was going off to Interlochen Arts Academy in the 12th grade, even though she would had already played in the WYSO for a couple of summers. Broadcast over the radio up there, she played that huge English horn solo from that later Shostakovich symphony on a camp-owned English horn (as her own English horn was also a Miraphone). I saw a video that someone made of it with one of those old VHS cameras, and her ovation lasted about a minute prior to anyone else in the orchestra standing up. It's best to be conservative with the money spent on children (because they are children).

[bloke]

There is a tendency in some people to live vicariously through their children.

My granddaughter is 12, and I possess a straight through recording of her performing Mozart's first horn concerto with no tricky editing and only about four or five very minor bobbles. Her other grandfather also repairs instruments, and the instrument she's currently playing on is a Holton double horn that she got about a year ago which was pulled out of the junk pile and had its rotors rebuilt. Rebuilt rotors are never as tight as new, but that instrument is deemed suitable for her now. This will be her second summer at Interlochen.
Her dad plays horn in the Pittsburgh symphony, and they have a family business whereby they sell horns. They could have easily handed her a much nicer horn, but it's not time.

My own daughter (her mother) played the complete Haydn oboe concerto in front of a per service orchestra when she was 14 on a German-made Miraphone/Hans Kreul oboe. We didn't purchase a name brand oboe for her until she was going off to Interlochen Arts Academy in the 12th grade, even though she had already played in the WYSO for a couple of summers. Broadcast over the radio live, she played that huge English horn solo from that later Shostakovich symphony (8 ?) on a camp-owned English horn (as her own English horn was also a Miraphone). I saw a video that someone made of it with one of those old VHS cameras, and her ovation lasted about a minute prior to anyone else in the orchestra standing up. It's best to be conservative with the money spent on children (because they are children).

Anyone can claim that my motivation for using my daughter and her daughter as examples are simply to brag on them, but the point is that "my son made the honor band" is not a reason to buy them a $12,000 euphonium.

Also, $4,000 trumpets, trombones, clarinets, flutes, and saxophones are not to be taken outside and marched with, in the same way that we don't take our wedding China off to picnics.

There are actually top-level professional oboists who play oboes with plastic top joints and rubber lined top joints. Just because a plastic clarinet that's a good make can be purchased in a pawn shop for 60 bucks and repadded for 300 bucks doesn't mean that it's "inappropriate" for my daughter who made all-state.