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I have the same or a similar model, but yours looks a lot better because the silver is so good. Fun little horns--enjoy!

Looks great. Nice that it came with that mouthpiece, too.

D

She's a beauty!
Mark

How's it working out for you?

I love the engraving... gorgeous!

KiltieTuba wrote:... I need to lip everything up and pull slides to play it in-tune (that's with it in Low Pitch - in High Pitch it's impossible to play in-tune).

If you're having that trouble with it in low pitch mode, it might be that it's pitched substantially below A=440. My Buescher was pitched to 435. If that's true and you want to make it playable, you might be able to cut it so you get decent intonation out of it. My Eb Buescher now plays quite nicely to 440 with just a couple of intonation oddities.

Put it in low pitch and then play scales with your tuner set at different pitches. See if a decent scale emerges at somewhere between 435 and 440.

Acoustic phenomena are weird. In cutting my horn (which I did in three stages), I discovered that a cut I thought would affect mostly the open horn, suddenly put some of the valved notes in tune in a way I didn't expect. This is particularly true when valve combinations are in play.

And that horn looks surprisingly like my Buescher -- but yours is in better cosmetic shape.

Is this the place to bring up the A=435 question? Lots of recent internet/Facebook chatter about the whole controversy, but in the last day I have heard about several old horns that tune around that point, one with after-market extensions from an originally A=440 and now this one from "High Pitch? (A=452)" if I am reading the comments correctly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of ... tern_music

My Martin had the low/high pitch slides. With the slide in, it was a little flat and out a little sharp. During restoration, Lee Stofer shortened the slide 1" to 2" and now it plays 440 very nicely. The valve slides had enough range to allow 440 in tune playing. He did a similar thing with my Helicon. If you have the slides for low/high pitch, you have the materials you need to make it play in modern pitch. All you need now is the expertise to do it right. It took Lee about an hour to do both horns.

KiltieTuba wrote: Check the first post:

I did read the first post and believe that I understood it.

Besides, I play about between 20-30 cents sharp all the time, so for me it plays almost in-tune with it set at Low Pitch (the tuner and real world tuning is slightly different, I can play it in-tune by itself, but I need to lip notes and pull slides with the band).

Yes, I could (with significant effort and choice of mouthpiece) also play the Buescher "almost in-tune" like this with a lot of slide pulling. But I don't look at this as playing "almost in-tune" and it isn't what I'd be happy with at all. Too fatiguing, if nothing else. And I don't find pulling slides on a top-action horn to be very amusing at all. I did add a 3rd valve kicker which solved a couple of problems and is easy to use.

My point really is that these things are often (usually?) not a matter of just swapping out one main tuning slide for another -- even if the instrument was originally built for one or another "high pitch" or one or another "low pitch" (or both by using alternative slides). And I really wonder how well a lot of these horns (especially the "dual pitch" ones) ever played in tune.

I understand what you want to do and also wrung my hands about cutting a period instrument. But at least in my case I don't believe the instrument was ever particularly valuable or remarkable, and I wanted to make it as playable as I could. I thought about what it would mean and what advantage it would have to be able to "restore" it to original condition just by swapping slides, and decided that that scenario was rather fanciful. You may feel differently about that particular instrument. But don't be at all surprised if you get what you think is just the right main tuning slide and it still takes significant effort to play it in tune across its range. I resisted for months shortening my second valve circuit because everything else was "so close". Finally I did, and it made the horn much more easily playable. There's a bunch of odd trade-offs and some odd physics here. Very difficult to predict final results.