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The music hombre has been gone for many a year. As have most of us, it seems. Running on the occasional puff of nostalgia for the heady long-lost days of 2004...

We must be using entirely different constructions of cover, as I haven't been able to tell a difference with either my face or my ears. Perhaps placebo is also playing a part?

Bell covers don't affect the sound - they're just an elasticated circle of thin material. We held several rehearsals with all players using them before we shut down again this week; you can't tell the sound or blowing difference. It's nothing like a mute, much less a practice mute such as a...

So a 1G/0G inner size with a small shank and a very narrow rim? Sounds a pretty unique design - what trombone is it designed for?

Both Wessex and JP are Chinese imports, and they likely ultimately come from the same factory! The added value is in the QA on this side. Both companies have a reputation for doing that quite well. I must confess that when I play G trom, I mentally move the music down a line on the staff, add a...

I log onto TMP for the first time in a week or so, and find that someone mentioned my name five minutes before :) Chopping up a baritone at home (unless you have significant instrument tech skills) would be a great way to end up with a terrible baritone that doesn't even do the job you want...

We have our own bandroom, with a good sized floor area - 12m x 7m. We're going to start back with very small groups (6) and work up to small groups (15). Windows wide open for ventilation, using bell covers, hard plastic seats to be wiped down before and after, etc, to mitigate risk. It'll be a...

Dennis, I share some of your concerns, but not all of them. Large corporations (I assume that's what you meant) replacing the nation state as brokers of global power concern me a great deal - not because the nation state has achieved perfection, but because the nation state usually has some...

I agree. The crisis continues to be badly mismanaged by the UK government, sad to say, whose rules often seem questionable and whose communication strategy seems designed not to create clarity. Most of the rest of the world looks on in bafflement at our approach. Against that, in all fairness...

There is still an ecological niche for forums - other forums continue to, if not thrive by the standards of 15 years ago, then at least to fruitfully exist even in the shadow of the conversation-sucking monolith that is Facebook. What advantages do forums have? Well, their filing and archiving...

I really can't condemn the organisers. We were alternately being encouraged to stop doing things and not stop doing ways, in a very confusing yes-no way that seemed designed to create puzzlement and inconsistency between different organisers. When it's life-or-death and limiting the spread of...

The area committees (and Kapitol) were left in a completely unfair position by a lack of guidance from above. Leaving brass band organisations (and football clubs, etc.) in charge of potentially life-or-death decisions? Madness. Suffice to say that my sympathies are with the committees that had...

Some of the earlier comments in this thread have really not aged well, a mere one month on. I hope that everyone here is keeping safe and well. The thread title question is perhaps a more relevant one now even than it was a month ago - under what conditions might gatherings of 25+ people...

So one signs up with them, then can arrange any of them? That's amazing.

Just curious - how have the copyright permissions worked out for this? I never consider trying to arrange anything recent, figuring that the permissions will be just too painful to obtain, but perhaps I am limiting myself unnecessarily.

If one gets into vintage instruments, it becomes natural to think of one's ownership of them as transient. My regular bass trombone was originally built in 1962, 17 years before I was born. It's mine, but also I hope that it will last enough that somebody else will be able to enjoy the use of it...

Interesting question. Female mass membership of brass bands is not something that long established - as we've covered in (occasionally bafflingly contentious) threads here in the past, gender balance in banding is even today, still 'working its way through the system' - it's rare to find a band...

I rather thought you'd be the first on that list to confirm, John! Glad to hear all is well up in the Forest of Bowland.

It was drawn to my attention on Facebook the other day that Tom Street of Heage band in Cornwall has been wagging them since 1970 - 50 years so far, and still in post at age 93, most impressive. Given that Haydn Griffiths sadly passed away in 2018 after completing 54 years in front of Armthorpe...

Swing playing is all about a solid beat. It just relates to that beat in different ways to the way that a classical music training teaches you to - there's loads of little subtleties that define the differences between genres - or even between bands.