Stay-In day

 341st day sober. I spent some hours last night taking another instrument apart, then after some dinner I got around to doing some practice. In spite of everything, my abilities are slowly increasing. I read somewhere that Louis Armstrong added something like one whole note per year in range and of course he practiced and played a ton so maybe that's just how it goes. I worked on long tones a lot more than usual.

We got some rain last night too. Somehow that made practice more pleasant. It's always nice to be in here, snug and dry, when it's raining outside. 

I'm also getting interested in an experiment, that of making trumpet spit valve pads out of leather. That would make pads as good or better then the really good Yamaha ones. There area ton of cheapo cork ones out there and as I've noted they don't last long. It's OK if you don't mind popping in new ones every few months. But say you don't want to do that or you're a band director with a lot of brass instruments to ride herd over. You might want something you can pop in and forget about for a while. 

My push-through pull-through is working well too. Amazingly, in my searching around last night, I found an explanation on Trumpet Herald of the mystery of "red rot". It's the de-zincification of the brass caused by little electrolytic cells forming and those cells form when the player eats sugary, acidic, etc foods that provide the electrolyte, and then play their horn. So you have to have your mouth super clean before you play, and it really helps to swab out your lead pipe and tuning slide after playing. 

I mention this last because there's a place on the tuning slide of the trumpet that I can't decide is the very beginning of red rot or not. The lead pipe is fine. And, it turns out I can buy a new tuning slide and there are even companies that swear theirs are better than the stock Yamaha one. 

It's nice to take a break after all the activity yesterday. I put $100 more into savings, got some new fake-Ugg boots I have all ready for next winter, so when I'm over the warm/hot part of the year and it gets cold again, I'll pull out my new ones and put them on and they'll feel wonderful. I'm stocked up on stuff so I can hole up until Thursday when it's time to go downtown to deposit my check, and get some busking in.