Remember any of Doc's hints that aren't in print?

BeboppinFool · Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2002 7:56 am Post subject:

I remember Doc telling me that if I wanted to improve my technique to do the following:

Take my valve springs out and save them in an envelope somewhere.
Take a new set of valve springs and stretch the hell out of them and put them in my trumpet.
Practice with the stretched springs for a month or so.
Get my "original" valve springs out of storage and put them back in the horn and my technique ought to be a whole lot better.

When I first did that, I had a separate horn that I used for practicing, and that's the one I played with stretched springs. I wasn't playing many gigs at the time, so it was almost all just practicing on the stretched springs. I got to where I liked the way that felt and ended up taking my "practice" horn to gigs!

Any fellow Reinhardt students remember other stuff like this that Doc told us about that you don't recall seeing anywhere in print?

Rich
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BeboppinFool · Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2002 9:39 am Post subject:

I also remember Doc talking about using cigar ashes to help break in stubborn valves.

He told me that cigar ash contains one of the mildest forms of pumice known. At the time I had a Benge with a couple valves that just didn't want to loosen up and I tried it.

Man, I don't like cigars, and it smelled bad, and made the grossest mess inside my horn. I don't remember the exact procedure, though.

But I do recall that those valves didn't give me anymore problems after that. Whew, talk about paying some dues for the trumpet!

Rich
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bgibson · Veteran Member Joined: 04 Sep 2002 Posts: 211

Doc also suggested using cigar ashes on trombone slides that were rough.
WEG

BeboppinFool · Posted: Sat Sep 21, 2002 10:22 pm Post subject:

Popeye Chin! That's something Doc told me that he couldn't legally print . . . the International Jawhoppers Convention . . . put enough rouge on Phyllis Diller and she's still an ugly b*tch . . . that guy had so many one-liners, I'm suprised he didn't hang out with Henny Youngman!

What was it he would always say about June Christy's voice?

What a character! I miss that guy!

Rich
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DSR · Posted: Sun Sep 22, 2002 3:45 pm Post subject:

Haha! I remember my dad mentioning the popeye chin thing.

BeboppinFool · Posted: Sun Sep 22, 2002 5:10 pm Post subject:

I remembered today about the Phyllis Diller thing. He was talking about vibrato and how nowadays (20 years ago) voice teachers don't teach voice control anymore, they just teach vibrato control. He said it didn't matter how much vibrato you put on a bad-sounding voice, you couldn't hide the central fact that the voice itself was ugly.

Somehow he worked that into what he was teaching me at the time . . . he always discouraged jaw vibrato, or "lip and chin" vibrato and always encouraged using a hand vibrato. And he also told me not to practice with a vibrato . . . only use vibrato on the gig.

For years I used no vibrato, period, but in the past 5 or 6 years I have been trying to develop a decent sounding hand vibrato, and find that I do need to spend a little of my practice time working on that.

Hopefully those 25+ years of playing without vibrato got all the Phyllis Diller out of my sound!

Rich
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