317th day sober. The guy who'd sent his daughter-in-law who sent her guy, to buy the ukulele, called last night. I thought there might be a problem but I think he was trying to see if he had a new friend. I talked about that uke (it's a good one, stays in tune etc.) and the how there are tons of uke clubs around, and he mentioned he was in fact a member of the big one around here, and I finally just had to say, "OK so there are no problems then?" and he said there are none, and that was that. Sorry I might want an old trumpet buddy, or an old flute buddy, but don't need an old uke buddy.
I put in something between 1/2 and 3/4 of an hour on the flute headjoint doing the octave exercise, and I'm moving more toward it being easy and controllable. What I should really do is find a spectrum analyzer program and see if that helps me know when I'm really onto a pure(er) tone. At times the tone just jumps out and it's easy, and that's the goal I'm sure.
It's that way on the trumpet too. I'm finding that the flute playing is making me more aware of how my lips are placed on the mouthpiece. It's almost like the two instruments are helpful rather than harmful to each other. At least at the level of playing I'm able to attain.
I wonder if it's my being originally middle-class when I was little, that made me so keen on developing some skill at something. I was considered destined to be an artist but as I got older I saw how few people who called themselves artists were making an actual living and that made me choose electronics instead. I was really big on music but kept very quiet about it. I must not have kept perfectly quiet, though, because one year I was given a big book by some relative, "A Young Person's Guide To Music" or something by Leonard Bernstein.
My parents must have straightened them out, though, because later I got a big book by Jules Feiffer with the origins of the classic comic superheroes. The stories were neat but all I got out of it was, reading Feiffer's introduction with his own story, that here was a guy who as a little kid was drawing better than me and how would I ever catch up?
If I'd been as pushed to learn an instrument like piano or flute or something I might have liked it. I guess you have to have a parent or parents who like playing music themselves, and not just listening to it on records but playing it.
But it's very much a middle-class thing to develop some skill at something, growing up. Maybe it's track and field or sailing or tennis, or you're writing and contributing to the school paper, or just any old thing. But you're considered a pretty dull child if you're not good at *something*.
And this is a problem I see with the working class/underclass who are out on the street. No special skills and no interest in developing them. And I mean even getting good at detailing cars or something really basic like that.
I guess it gets "trained out" of the lower classes. "What're you think you are, better'n us?" and here comes a "sock" IE a punch.
My older sister turns out to have become the artist, and I'm happy it turned out that way - she wasn't pushed at it, and she likes it. But she worked really hard to become a jeweler, and got GIA certified and everything.
My point is, today's middle-class may well be tomorrow's homeless, living in a shanty town. A person should really find something they at least like fairly well and can get good at. Maybe the homeless and down-and-out I've observed are a group missing the go-getters and skill-developers, who have done so and gotten some "situation" for themselves, like the one I'm in now.
Well, back to brass tacks. I ordered a ProTec Pro-Pac gig bag / case for the new horn. I can't carry the big box type case it came with around. I thought it'd be neat to have it in time to take the trumpet out and play "Danny Boy" for St. Patrick's Day this Thursday. But I won't have it until the weekend, it seems.
At a bit after 11 I called Park Avenue Music and they were open, and although the tech was not in, they'd sell me some spit valve corks if I brought the trumpet in. I said I can't because the case is really big but all Yamaha use the same size, and the guy suggested I take the tuning slide in so he can measure off the spit valve on that, which is a genius idea. "See you soon! I said.
I rode over there and first took care of the corks. The guy insisted on selling me some black neoprene ones "These are neoprene, they're really good!" so I got four of them. Then I looked around on their sale table of mouthpieces for a long time, but they seemed to have either very large, very small, or very shallow ones. The guy explained they sell a lot of mouthpieces on Ebay and Reverb, and when people return them, they can't sell them again as new, so they end up on the table. This tells me it's a good place to check and keep checking.
Since the table was such a jumble, I found other things like a set of "Custom" Jupiter valve buttons and springs and caps, not anything I wanted, but interesting. And I found some interesting trumpet leadpipe swabs, essentially the swab set and 3 packs of refills for $4 each. They use swatches of chamois, just like the design I have in mind, but that was all they had in common. Still, they were cheap so hell yeah I grabbed them all.
Then I asked about trumpet cases just in case they had the one I'd ordered on Amazon. If they had it, I'd get it and cancel the Amazon order. But they didn't, they thought they'd have some in a week or two. The guy tried to interest me in a hard case that's silver and obviously holds a trumpet and only $99 but I said I carry everything on my bike and I'm afraid that one would be uncomfortable to carry. (Also, the case I use looks like it holds something cheap like a student violin or uke and I like it fine that way).
So I paid for my goodies and started looking at the horns on the shelf. I looked at a cornet. with elaborate engraving on the bell and said, "Hey, it's a King Master".
A few years ago, maybe 4 or 5 now, I'd sold my whole batch of trumpet stuff to a guy who was in the Buddhism class with me at the temple, who had a sax background and wanted to take up the trumpet. The only piece in the collection I regret letting go was a 1937 King Master cornet. I believe I'd paid a guy in Sunnyvale $400 for the thing, and it was just neat, with fantastic build quality.
Well here was a King Master, with all the lacquer there, fancy-schmancy chrome plated valves, actually a little fancier than the 1937 horn, and I thought I'd never see one again. So I play-tested it and it doesn't play *quite* as well as the Bergeron, but it plays fine. "It doesn't play *quite* as well as the Bergeron but .....!" I said to the guy.
So $436 got me the cornet, a new/newish Bach 3B mouthpiece, and the old case to keep it in, that's falling apart outside but still fine inside. I've sprayed the inside down with Febreze and have it airing out now. It wasn't too hard to carry home at all, in doubled-up Whole Foods cloth bags, hanging off the handlebar on my bike.
I suppose there are better cornets than the King Master, but as far as I know it's first-rate, just like the Bergeron trumpet is. I checked the serial number and it was made in 1954 or 1955.
I don't know why I wanted another King Master but I've felt awfully nostalgic about that horn. And now I can mess around with playing with a plunger mute if I feel like it.
And although the King has metal valve guides, they don't go clickity-clack like they do in the Yamaha Eric Miyashiro trumpet so what's up with that?
After the music store I went to Whole Foods of course, and had two hard-boiled eggs with Kalamata olives, bacon crumbles, bleu cheese, in a sort of breakfasty thing. They don't have salt and pepper packets any more and interestingly, they were out of the little waxed paper boxes they used to have stacks of, for putting buffet food into. Instead they had these little plastic things with lids. I ate upstairs where it was not busy at all. I asked the bartender if they expected to be busy on St. Pat's Day and he said, "Nah". They never are.
I have an evil little plan to play Danny Boy somewhere, and I'm thinking down by O'Flaherty's might be the thing. Thursday's the day I usually go to the bank, so I might set up and play for an hour, then go to the bank and maybe relax a bit at Whole Foods, then go play another hour. With my "new" cornet, I guess, because I won't have the trumpet gig bag in soon enough.
Supply lines are getting very weird. This is a large factor behind my recent buying of so many instruments.
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