Oh, it's nice to be reunited with my trombone

It's only an ex-rental Jupiter gas-pipe trombone that I bought on eBay ! A long way down the pecking order of trombones, but Ronaud my teacher gave it a going-over and pronounced it good, and it does me good to blast.

I have a study where I am trying to get back the "bomp, bomp" staccato sound I remember making in the brass banding days of my youth. Think of the round "boing" of a kettle drum and you aren't far away from what I imagine.

Then the "paawww" bell-effect accents that I remember doing. Why don't they come easily now? It's only thirty years ago, after all.

Anyway, it's doing my lungs a power of good and the kids' ears a world of harm !

Of course, in the summer when we come to Britain in the car I'll be able to bring the trombone with me. Look out ! "Watchwch clustiau", as I remember someone once saying...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A bit about music exams in UK and France

They're really different. I think I have already mentioned that while in the UK people generally find a private teacher for their instrument, or do it through a school scheme, here there are municipal music school, conservatoires and so on. The situation is a little more complex than I had first understood, because the schools vary in the rigidity of their organisation: the most, the conservatoires, next the municipals, then the associations. Our music school is an association, but it tends to apply the standards of the municipal schools with its programme of cycles, etc. Britain - grade 1 to 8, grade 8 being roughly equivalent to A-level, pre university/conservatoire. France - 3 cycles, each taking about 4 years, with 3ème cycle being roughly equivalent to grade 8. Theory of music - UK to take grade 8 you need theory grade 5. In France you study theory alongside your instrumental studies, very slowly. Catrin's flute music is MUCH more difficult than the stuff she does in theor
Read more

A brief sortie to North Wales

 Following the Great Keswick Debacle, when our volunteering at the Keswick café was sabotaged by our assorted indispositions, we had airline tickets to use up. Yes, we had not taken travel insurance, so we paid even more money to change our tickets to fly for a short visit to North Wales. This time we were able to go. We passed extremely slowly through a very crowded Bordeaux airport but in good time to get our plane. All seats in the terminal were taken so we leaned against whatever we could find while waiting to board. Hey, bags need seats, too! though sometimes pointing out to Pat, "No, that's a bag seat", makes the bag find a new refuge on the lap of the person sitting next to it... Once on the plane we quickly found our allocated seats - right at the back on the left hand side - stowed our bags and the flight was smooth and uneventful.  We had 30 minutes in Manchester to disembark, get through immigration , hustle off to the station and board our train for Shotton. I
Read more