Hi Paul, I'm not sure you're gonna love my answer to your question, but as far as I can tell you've just got to do a lot of reading. Your best bet is to get a collection of pieces you can play, perhaps the "Art of Phrasing" chapter from the Arban's book, the Concone Lyrical Studies book, or any book of etudes, and practice sight-reading them using a metronome on a tempo that's just fast enough to keep you on your toes, but not so fast as to make the challenge impossible. Try to read just a little ahead of where you're playing, and practice reading through a piece without stopping until you get to the end for the practice. Then, review any tricky rhythms you run into. Over time you will start to hear the rhythms and melodies in your head before you play them. It's much the same as learning to read language, in which you start off sounding out complicated words until you intuitively know the meaning of combinations of letters. As somebody who mostly learned music by ear until grad school, sight-reading hasn't always come easy to me, but despite my efforts to come up with some effective methods and short-cuts, the only way I got better at it was to do a lot of reading. Good luck!

@@RidgewoodSchoolofMusic Bobby thank you for your reply. It shows you really care. My teacher sings every piece but my singing voice has been pretty bad all my life so that comes with difficulty.

Nice! 2 questions (i'm soo impatient): could you not also see the lydian scale as composed of 2 groups of notes: one resolving to C and the other to G other? Your explanation of stacked fifths, C G D A E B F# Is a little puzzeling. G is the first overtone of C (when leaving out the octave C), the first overtone of this G overtone is D etc. Very nice theoretically, but what about the pretty clearly audible Bb overtone when hitting a C? The blues baby wants attention... but yesyes the F# is also a baby. I love babies...

And also funny that there's always an E in the (lower part of) overtone series of the C, even if one plays an Cminorchord. The dissonance between E and Eb adds to the flavour of the minor stew?

We’re gonna have some fun!

You can check out www.youtube.com/@sousastep for more of that sousaphone!

That sounds awesome!

Bass trumpets are much more common and are in the trombone range an octave below the standard Bb trumpet. I remember seeing Ron Miles play a low trumpet in F, but I don't know what he called it. I suppose alto is the most logical name for an instrument in that range.

​@@RidgewoodSchoolofMusic It would be nice if "bass" were reserved for instruments an octave below the common Bb or C trumpet, but I've definitely seen it applied to Eb instruments. More often than I've seen them called "alto," even. Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder has an Eb bass trumpet part. The "bass trumpet" part of the Ring Cycle has passages in several transpositions, one of which is Eb (though I've heard of the idea that Wagner didn't actually expect all his different brass transpositions to be played on different instruments, so maybe that applies here). The Sibelius music notation program has both "Bass Trumpet in Bb" and "Bass Trumpet in Eb" presets, and a "Tenor Trumpet in Eb" one (which is a terminology I've never seen anywhere else), but no "Alto Trumpet in Eb" one. The F instrument, though, I've only ever seen referred to as "alto." In fact, I'd only ever seen it in one context, which is the scores of Rimsky-Korsakov and other Russian composers of that era.

The "bass trumpet in B-flat" is not a bass instrument at all. It is in tenor pitch. Simply a coiled-up tenor valve trombone.

@@RidgewoodSchoolofMusicRon Miles (RIP) was also famous for playing a Monette cornet in G!

Can you say which Rimsky Korsakov piece(s) use F alto trumpet?

It has a regular trumpet bell which fits all of my regular mutes, and it takes an alto horn mouthpiece. It does sound more like a trombone, but it's all trumpet parts.

The internet, though I don't think I've come across another one since I found this one.

Yes, exactly!

It is an alto valve trombone. Mechanically it is the same, the only difference is how the tubing is coiled. A tenor trombone is a tenor trumpet. In Italian, "trombone" means "large trumpet." Trumpet is "tromba."

Nice find! Thanks for sharing, James!

It doesn't really matter, but a few points for clarity: 1. Steven also calls my instrument a slide trumpet. 2. The reason the bell extends farther forward on some slide trumpets (including Steven's custom horns) is generally because on those horns the width of the slide is half of the width of a standard trombone slide, and for that reason if the bells were built with the same shape of a conventional tenor trombone bell, the back of the bell would hit you in the face and make it impossible to play. Kanstul accounted for this problem by making their slides the same width as a tenor trombone slide so the bell doesn't hit you in the face and the slide positions are the same in relation to the bell. The disadvantage to this is that the slide is slightly more cumbersome compared to a slide with a smaller width. Old Getzen slide trumpets have a slide that is so narrow as to require a handle, and for that reason the bell extends farther forward, but it wouldn't change the nature of the instrument if they could have made them with a more conventional bell shape. 3. A point you didn't make is that Kanstul made a distinction between their slide trumpets and soprano trombones based on the diameter of the bell, but otherwise they were identical instruments. You could make an argument for a definitional distinction between a slide trumpet and a soprano trombone, but the better argument would address the nature of the slide, not the spacial relationship between the slide and the bell. Plus we make the rules.

Be careful, Jon!

Trumpet and soprano trombone are rather similar, but the rest of what you said makes little sense. You wouldn't use bass trombone, tenor trombone, or euphonium interchangeably just because they're pitched the exact same

@@harleyzeth By "I'd be satisfied with just specifying the pitch of the instrument I want, and whether it should have a slide or valves" I meant specifically with respect to trumpets and trombones. You're right that I wouldn't use euphonium interchangeably with trombone. I see bass trombone versus tenor trombone (two instruments that, if you're talking about the most common kind of modern trombone, do indeed have the same fundamentals, but are specifically designed to have different tessituras) as something of a special case, which you are also right about. So to word what I originally meant more explicitly, between a slide trumpet and a soprano trombone, I wouldn't have a preference, and likewise between a valved tenor trombone and a bass trumpet in Bb. If it ever came up, the same would apply to the other imaginable combinations like, say, a bass trumpet in Eb and a valved alto trombone.

@@sashakindel3600 I get what you mean