#bombardon

Oops, I got another ask about this a while ago from @froglordt, but I admit I don't doodle as many terrible brass instruments as I used to, so I dug out some photos of old ideas. Apologies if the brass instrument designs are hard to understand, I generally just draw lines to represent tubing except for in bits like the bell flare

Compilation of terrible ideas:

-Trumpet converted into a bell-up soprano saxhorn-ish thing with half-step and whole-step trill keys and a main slide trigger (to fix the inevitable terrible intonation) in this drawing

-Wagner bombardon (a horn-length instrument attempting to look kinda like a paperclip contra clarinet, inspired by ophicleides and bombardons from the early 1800s, with Vienna valves and an opera-glass style main slide tuner on it, like a Conn 80A uses)

-a double Vienna horn, I spent a while trying to figure out the best wrap and everything, but fundamentally I think it's a terrible idea

This was a first iteration, it's a mess and the change valve is actually split in two, which would make alignment suck

This is probably the most elegant type of wrap I figured out, here I was planning a funky Vienna-esque change valve but I think a rotary valve would make more sense honestly.

-Experiments with new versions of kastenventil (https://brassandpipes.wordpress.com/2016/02/28/1913-jacob-lowmunster-kastenventil-tuba-in-b/), probably on a natural trumpet first because they're not soldered together so it's easy to replace bits. I'm really curious what a kastenventil horn is like, but that's a more complicated project.

-Oh yeah, I was working on this at one point before giving up for the moment, but funky keywork for horns that were inspired by a dream Jeremy had (tbh tests around when I took this photo showed that it's way too easy to pinch your fingers between the keys lmao)

I haven't been doing as many brass instrument designs recently because I've been more focused on electronic instruments, mostly just modifying vintage stuff

-Simmons SDS7 drum synthesizer but replacing the original memory with a microcontroller to let you edit parameters with MIDI, and replacing the EPROM samples with more microcontrollers so you can load up whatever sample you want without having to yank out the EPROM (I've managed to emulate the SDS7 memory, but not while also handling MIDI messages, which might not be possible without missing clock cycles)

-Hammond S6 chord organ but add custom filter modules and make the whole thing controlled by MIDI and also replace the god-awful chord button array it uses with an expanded Stradella system like accordions use

-Rodgers 321 electric theater organ but also make it controlled by MIDI and give it velocity and aftertouch and ribbon strips and lots of faders and 3 more swell pedals and tap into the unfiltered oscillator signals to make it into a paraphonic synthesizer using filter modules cross-compatible with the S6 (this is my most feral idea but also the most likely to happen, I just need to finish these Simmons boards and then I can think about that project)