Dear Friends,
Maybe some of the people who buy those horns do so while ignore the advice of the experts, but I think many of the people buying them don't even bother getting any advice. They just plunge ahead on their own.
The peer pressure working on kids (and onto the parents through the kids) is to have great looking, shiny new instruments to take to school band.
The much smarter reverse-psychology idea of having the worst-looking instrument but being the best player (because you practice every day & take lessons) has not taken hold among so many of the younger generation.
There are 2 reasons for that, to wit:
(1) Kids & parents can visualize a brand new horn right now -- the actual phtographs are right there on eBay -- but as beginners they cannot readily conceive of ever being any good at playing their instruments. (Shucks, some of them have no idea what their instruments are even supposed to sound like.)
(2) Delayed gratification is an even rarer phenomenon today than it was 50 years ago when I was a know-it-all adolescent. (I can get after the folks to buy me a brand new eBay el-cheapo right now, & chances are they'll do it if only to get me to shut me up. But I can't be bothered to take the horn out every day & spend some serious time working up Pottag-Hovey exercises & Kopprasch etudes every day.)
A couple of years ago the devil made me buy a bunch of cornets & trumpets for next to nothing at the Air Rights Flea Market locally. I got them cleaned up, got the dents taken out, got the slides unstuck, got the water keys recorked, & even bought a nice new (eBay) case for a trumpet that didn't have 1, & put ads up on the supermarket bulletin boards. The nice looking instruments sold right away. (I like it when the flea market guy makes a sale, the instrument repair guy gets paid for some work, my buyers get good deals, & I make a little something to boot -- call it a win-win-win-win proposition. But that's another story.)
The instrument I had left was a totally non-shiny, no-lacquer Couesnon Lafayette Bb trumpet with a no-name generic 7C mouthpiece & a shoddy but intact case seemingly made out of something related to the grey stuff used to make non-styrofoam egg cartons. The trumpet looked bad, played good, & sounded fine. It was better all round, I suppose, than some of those great looking brand-new eBay el-cheapos.
After a while, a mother & her 12-year-old daughter showed up to see the Couesnon Lafayette. The mom didn't want to lay out much more money for instruments. That's because she had already spent hundreds on a flute for the kid, who then decided after a few months she'd rather play trumpet. The kid just wanted a playable trumpet & to her credit was not put off by the unprepossessing appearance of the humble Couesnon Lafayette. So the mom bought it. As they were heading out to the car, I suggested to the kid how cool it would be if she, with her old-looking but decent used trumpet, played rings around the other school band kids with their shiny new trumpets because she practiced every day when the other kids didn't. She smiled. Who knows if the idea took hold?
However that may be, the influx of the el-cheapos is affecting the people who make the decent quality instruments. Here's an excerpt from Leon Pascucci's 22 July 2004 letter announcing sale of Leblanc to Steinway's Conn-Selmer: "First, as a company, we need to keep pace with the rapid changes in the U.S. band instrument industry. As you may know, during the past few years, the industry has experienced increased competition due to an influx of low-priced instruments. Coupled with large reductions in school music budgets across the U.S., this shift has left many domestic manufacturers with excess capacity and higher production costs." (The surprising thing about that statement is the phrase "many domestic manufacturers." Shucks, there never were "many" of them -- only a few, plus several high-quality speciality workshops. So it goes.)
-- Alan Cole, rank amateur
McLean (Fairfax County), Virginia, USA.
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Now, a question to everyone: Why do people believe, automatically, that if an item is priced ridiculously low that they are being smart in buying it, rather than taking the advice of experts? (Conversely, they seem to believe that someone selling something more expensive thinks that they are stupid.)
I have seen this over and over, and I cannot understand it. I can understand that someone might believe that I, as a retailer, have a vested interest in selling whatever it is that I have to sell. They might believe (maybe even rightly so) that my opinion is biased. But when a teacher, who has no financial interest whatsoever warns against such a purchase and people do it anyway - that I can't understand. Why do they do this?
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