cimbasso

[gary]

Has anyone found any differences in the Chinese cimbassi?

[Dents Be Gone!]

I agree, guys. This is the way to go.

[bloke]

Whether it's the original Rudolf Meinl or the Chinese copy, .728" is too large of a bore for what the thing is, and is out of balance. It causes too many intonation and response problems. I'm pretty sure I know what I'm talking about, which is why I'm not using words such as "perhaps" or "possibly".

[matt g]

I’m guessing RM made a cimbasso with that bore size because they treated making that thing as a parts bin special as opposed to being designed from the ground up.

Ironically, Conn/King could make a pretty good parts bin cimbasso with 5J or 2341 valves and a 8b bell or similar. Too bad that company seems to not care at all.

[Dents Be Gone!]

I agree, guys. This is the way to go.

[bloke]

I had a Chinese one, and - compared to the one that I built for myself after I sold it - it was like playing through three or four Christmas wrap cardboard tubes taped together end-to-end with a funnel on the end. It was very difficult to play it musically as well as in tune. I was sort of coerced into playing a couple of fourth trombone solo pieces (one of them being that Tomasi piece, and the other one being Round Midnight) with an orchestra trombone section at a chamber recital on that thing. I had to work really hard to render those solos acceptable to my own ears - to present them to audiences of a hundred or so adults who were classical music aficionados.

The one that I built for myself features a bore that is only a millimeter smaller, but the mouthpipe tube is much smaller as well, and the mouthpiece receiver is bass trombone shank. On the front end while working on the valveset, I precision fit the #1 slide and put a 3 mm female thread on an appliance attached to the slide bow - assuming I would need a #1 slide trigger, but I never built that trigger because it didn't need it. Being only a five-valve instrument, I do have a #2 slide trigger for 2-4, and the upper A and A-flat (as with a large percentage of tubas) ask for 1-2 and 2-3. Everything else is just mash paddles and blow. That treacherous low A on the Chinese ones is perfect on this one.

Because it's easy to play, it's easy to play musically, and all that defines it as being fun to play, I use it a lot... So many pops orchestral arrangements (written in the past two or three decades) are quite obviously written for four trombones, but the de facto 4th trombones part say "Tuba" at the top. Of course, anything James Bond is going to be played with this instrument, because that's the instrument that was used in London on the soundtracks. Every time the Marlboro Man/Magnificent Seven thing cycles back around, it sounds really good on this instrument. The thing is to not get carried away - unless there's a moment where getting carried away is just the thing to do (such as quite a few times in any given gig, if using it to play 4th trombone in a big band).

As to the RM instruments being made of spare parts, I would discount that theory as well. They actually make four completely different ones in F, E-flat, C, and B flat, and they are all completely different. The reason the RM cimbasso in F features a bore that's too damn big, is because the RM mentality is to build many (not all) of their instruments with bore sizes that are too damn big... and having read what I just typed, consider the source: a person whose contrabass tuba features a 21.2 mm bore size (which - somehow - isn't too damn big for the instrument on which this valveset is mounted).

[Dents Be Gone!]

I agree, guys. This is the way to go.

[matt g]

Given the update regarding the RM theory I had, were they perhaps using this bore simply because that mirrored something that numbers-driven tuba players would want to see because bigger is better?

Nonetheless, it would be cool if someone built one out of nothing but UMI bits and pieces so that we could all feel worse about the demise of those brands.

[bloke]

A cut down 5J valveset (other than the piston/casing 2023 workmanship) would probably do well.
Others build them out of King 1241 valvesets, which are 3/4 of a mm larger bore.

Mine is the same bore size as King, but rotary (so more built-in resistance than a piston instrument).
Basically, mine is fairly close to the Rudolf Meinl blueprint - other than having made the machine-portion bore sizes much smaller...
again: It solved nearly all the problems, and morphed their basic design into something which I would confidently classify as a "musical instrument".


(I designed the #3 slide with a significant pull, so that it would fit in a smaller hard case.
Since the picture was taken, I extended the main slide water key lever to roughly a foot long - so that I don't have to bend down to empty water - as seen in the video, below, and I also moved the nipple to the center of the main slide bow.)


...and I don't just use it to play pops stuff...


per early 19th c. practice (ok: depending on where...) an E-flat trombone, a B-flat trombone, and an F trombone


me leaning forward often: cataracts...squinting at the numbers of measures rest, and temporarily memorizing the passages after those rests

[Dents Be Gone!]

I agree, guys. This is the way to go.

[bloke]

Memory kicked in. I forgot one.

I also owned one made from a marching baritone and a King valve set. It was just kinda poorly executed and really couldn’t be a contender. I put a bunch of work into it and was just never satisfied. Again, no fun.

So, it’s not like I haven’t tried, right?

You're not the only one, so don't be hard on yourself.
The reason I didn't go that route is because others have brought theirs to me (to do this-or-that) and - well - they did neither this nor that particularly well.

One friend (with such a rig) started over (mostly) and found a really old Getzen B-flat marching something-or-other with a much more appropriately shaped-and-tapered bell...much more successful. That person (as I'm sure are you) is a very good craftsman.

[gary]

Bloke that's a great Idea to do the Tomasi on cimbasso!

[bloke]

Bloke that's a great Idea to do the Tomasi on cimbasso!

Yeah...I drug my feet, but finally I realized it was going to happen - so I practiced pretty hard on it, and I guess I did a good enough job. It wasn't fun with the Chinese thing, I'm just telling you... but would have been a whole bunch of fun on the one I stuck together myself.

It was originally supposed to be a orchestra's brass quintet (chamber) recital, but we are having logistical problems with the principal trumpet, so we just told the trumpets and the horn to forget it, and we did a low brass section recital.

Let me just tell you something that I discovered:
Trombone quartets are best sticking to playing music written/arranged for a trombone quartet. You'd think euphonium-tuba quartet arrangements would work just fine for trombones, but - typically - the first euphonium parts aren't written high enough, and they sound muddy on four trombones - just as they do with tubas and euphoniums.

[bone-a-phone]

Let me just tell you something that I discovered:
Trombone quartets are best sticking to playing music written/arranged for a trombone quartet. You'd think euphonium-tuba quartet arrangements would work just fine for trombones, but - typically - the first euphonium parts aren't written high enough, and they sound muddy on four trombones - just as they do with tubas and euphoniums.

Sometimes I get complaints that my trombone quartet arrangements get up into the middle of the treble staff. But I'll guarantee one thing - they never sound muddy. We've learned this the hard way. Arrangers never seem to write euph parts very high, so you can mostly transpose t-e 4tets up a 3rd or 4th for trombones without blowing a gasket. Although the bass bone players all seem to like the notoriety of playing 2nd tuba in octave. Strange breed, that.

We picked up I think Tuba Peter's Baby Elephant Walk to play in our bone quartet. I forget how much we jacked it up, but playing as written sounded like an elephant march in a minefield for sure. Bones get blatty that low, and 4 blatty bones aint a purdy thing.

[bloke]

I'm having trouble finding people who disagree with me today. I guess I'll go trolling somewhere else.

[Dents Be Gone!]

I agree, guys. This is the way to go.

[bloke]

again...
As band directors love to trash old marching baritones (as *replacing them with new for c. $2000 - rather than having them straightened out, and doing a 3/4 re-lacquer for only a few hundred bucks - doesn't involve spending their own money) the first temptation for cimbasso-building hopefuls is to try to do an eBay-gleaned marching bimbasso...but (lacking a better word) that bell shape just isn't "balanced" with the rest of the instrument (and the larger the bore and/or the less resistance, the worse the results), and - not only do they sound funny, but - they also blow funny. (Again...I'm no acoustician, but learned this from playing those that others had put together.)

________________________________________
*whereby the taxpayer-bought $2K ones are also trashed within a few years...oh yeah...and they're SILVER - so forget doing partial refinish jobs on those...

[Yorkboy]

Ironically, Conn/King could make a pretty good parts bin cimbasso with 5J or 2341 valves and a 8b bell or similar. Too bad that company seems to not care at all.

Yep. Just used mine today for the first time in a quintet rehearsal and, to my great relief, it was a hit. It works quite well on the Maurer quintet pieces (bass part was originally scored for trombone). King valves, Bell is from a Getzen baritone bugle.

IMG_3710.jpeg (115.53 KiB) Viewed 3069 times

[York-aholic]

Nicely built @Yorkboy!

[Dents Be Gone!]

I agree, guys. This is the way to go.