Some more building an research

Having realized that there was no method to my destruction i had a bit of a rethink about how to construct these instruments. The tuba with the slide and trumpet looks intriguing but it actually sounds awful and is not exactly a useful teaching tool. With this in mind I began to take apart the french horn and reassemble it without the valves and stretched out.









The new design of the horn creates one basic note but it works and sounds much better than the tuba did. Few problems have arisen from building this specific horn, I destroyed the original mouthpipe so it is missing about a foot of tubing and although played with a trumpet mouthpiece it could have sounded a lot better with the original mouthpipe and french horn mouthpiece. I did a little more reconstructing to make the horn a little more user friendly as in its currents state at bout 2m's long isn't exactly compact.




All the components have been reshuffled and welded to make the overall instrument smaller. The sound of the horn has not changed because all the same parts have been used. I discovered that as long as the length of tubing is kept the same you can bend and twist the pipe as much as you like as it will not effect the sound.

Moving on from this I decided to have a look at the trumpet. The one I obtained had damaged valves so I decided to remove them to make a basic bugle.



I found from this that there was a crack on part of the pipe that was drastically affecting the pitch, so having covered that and placed the correct trumpet mouthpiece managed to produce a rather effective sound.




The next will be creating more simple bugles out of the tuba and trombone and a possibly a french horn if I can obtain another one. From a teaching point of view and ease of use. Creating simple instruments like a bugle is probably the best option with a class of students. It quick and rather easy to assemble and simple to play.

Having discussed this with my father, he was quite excited as he thought the idea of constructing bugles would be perfect for learning the basic notes for brass. Keeping them compact and simple allows the children to take them home a practice as well.

I myself wondered while he couldn't just get kids to learn on standard bugles and he said that they all sound the same and for a child to build one them self, they could not resist trying to make a sound from it. Building bugles from different types of brass instruments will also create different sounds which in the end could help make an interesting piece of music.