"monster"

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Donn
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Re: "monster"

Post by Donn »

Conical brass are the only wind instruments that don't have well defined dimensions, am I right? Exhibit A, the "baritone horn". Trumpets are somewhat constrained by the long more or less cylindrical section, woodwinds can vary only slightly without going way out of whack. Couple that with the tuba player's natural reasoning that since the tuba is big, a bigger tuba is more of tuba, and there you go.

Guitars, I don't know. There are some pretty big steel-string flat tops, don't know when that got started or what exactly the player gets out of it. But there are plenty of extra large string basses and violas, as for practical reasons those instruments tend to be under-sized. That wouldn't do a thing to intonation, I expect.
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imperialbari
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Re: "monster"

Post by imperialbari »

Were the original Martin Dreadnaught guitars more out of tune than other Martin guitars back then?

The Heckel bassoon entered the market decades before 1920, but it was the monster bassoon back then compared to the lighter French bassoon. The British orchestras combined the two types until around 1960. The French bassoons were used for the 1st bassoon parts, the Heckels for the 2nd bassoon parts.

Likewise there were, and still are, German and French clarinets, which differ not alone in keying/fingering, but also in the cylindrical bore. The German clarinets have the smaller bore.

Vincent Bach, who came out of Austria, made American style trumpets after WWI, yet with a somewhat smaller bore than common today. He also attempted making a piston trumpet sounding like the rotary trumpets he knew from Austria. I have played together with a sample of this dual bore Vindabona model here in DK. I don’t remember it sounding very German. The model is still made, but I am not sure it is in widespread usage.

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Re: "monster"

Post by ufonium2 »

My husband inherited a very old violin from a famous maker (not a copy). A violinist friend convinced us to have it appraised and repaired. At the appraisal, we learned that it was actually a viola that had been cut down to make a violin, and at some point the f-holes had been bored out to make it louder. The tech said that was done in the teens and 20s, and since it's obviously irreversible, made the violin virtually useless today. So maybe oversized disproportionate instruments were a "thing" then.
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windshieldbug
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Re: "monster"

Post by windshieldbug »

I would suspect that it had a lot to do with lack of amplification at the turn of the century.
They couldn't make vocalists bigger, so they used megaphones for large jobs...
Instead of talking to your plants, if you yelled at them would they still grow, but only to be troubled and insecure?
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