Soprano Martin

Always balancing to the bottom is a fantastic starting point. If you balance from the bottom, even screaming sops. become more powerful with the low end supporting them. In any band or drum corp, you always want to listen 'to the bottom' or 'to the back'. This promotes good intonation and blend. If anyone section or person outplays another, it brings the whole ensemble down.

Your best move is as a director, have a selection of brands you know and trust. Have a meeting with parents before they start picking instruments, and discuss the importance of picking a quality horn, etc and put it all in a document they can take home. Be sure and stress how a bad instrument can hinder a kid's progress and how many shops won't likely service them when things go bad. I've done this for my band kids and while they do still sometimes get the cheaper horns in class, when something goes wrong they can't say they didn't know it was total crap.

I'm impressed, I've done competitive cycling for a few years, but I don't I can pull off riding and playing without crashing pretty bad!

I lost my soprano mpc once in a horn move during a standstill performance. It landed in the lap of an audience member who was literally 2 feet from me, but I couldn't move to get it. I had a solo in the next song, but no mpc, and before the song started while my horn was at my side in a trail position, someone ran up out of my peripheral vision and threw a mpc in my horn, and to this day I don't know who that was. So the good news was I had a mpc. Bad news, it was a V cup mellophone mpc. Try getting consistent High Es and Fs with that when you aren't prepared for it! Turns out, the mpc was that of a horn player whom had lost theirs on the same move!

It wasn't with a Corps, but I played for the grand opening of a Nationwide Insurance store with my college band a few years back.

Unfortunately thats true. I rescued an old Conn trumpet off the wall of an applebees once. They just hung it up there to look nice. Plays just fine! I have another friend who also replaced the missing rotor on his soprano this way. Just reached up, grabbed the rotor and took it home!

hear hear, an absolutely fantastic show this year!! Keep it just like that, the score will come!

No, Brad is telling it like it is. Many band directors that were woodwind majors know next to nothing about brass instruments, and the quality of different brands. Most have only had at most 1 semester of class brass techniques. They will play it safe and go with a name like Yamaha, and with getting used horns that have gotten good marks with one ensemble, they know they can get good horns without worry. I majored in saxophone, but have been a brass player as well for a number of years and from as far back as high school, but I know most ww player teachers, don't have the background in brass I have, or another brass player would. That being said on not knowing how things were in the past... I've had people get in my car and not know how to open the windows, they'd never seen a window that cranked up and down!

There is also a certain amount player perception to this, that comes from where the bell is in relation to the ear, and vibrations of the whole horn, and how the body receives them due to playing position. That said, I've known Brad T for a few years, and know kind of where he is coming on this. On the contra there is a crisper attack that is easier to project, versus the sousaphone which is more spread in sound. This is a design characteristic. Sousaphones like most concert tubas are designed more to create a spread sound, balancing out the low end of the ensemble and filling out the sound palette. Contras have the ability for larger crisper attacks without being blatty, which allows for significantly increased projection that doesn't sound distorted and blatty.