My friend has a pBone, because she plays in similar situations to you (eg). The sound is the same as her brass 'bone (well, as far as I can tell, which isn’t far), but she does use her brass mouthpiece in the plastic trombone. Better ‘feel’ apparently.
They seem to be a bit more hard wearing than brass, a knock that would dent brass will bounce off the plastic, and because it’s cheaper, she doesn’t have to worry about it as much. Plus it’s quite a bit lighter.
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I have to say, the sound in the video of the story is really good. Surprised me. I’ve watched a number of other videos now, and this is really a solid sounding instrument, great tonal qualities, and it’s pretty robust (and obviously inexpensive… cost less than the used one I bought my son back when he was interested in band). I played trumpet from 3rd grade until I graduated high school and definitely would have loved this instrument.
But as others said, I have concerns about this continual move to make everything out of plastic, as if we don’t have enough environmental issues from its overuse.
EDIT: and now I’m thinking of getting one and reconnecting with a childhood skill.
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This is an urban legend, told by people that don’t want to recycle, and was said 20 years ago.
Some material are more difficult to recycle than others. Especially e-waste is a problem.
Paper is easily recycled, so glassware.
Organic? At my parents house we have compost makers, so in a sense it’s landfilled.
The main problem is plastic and artificial fibers. Plastic is cheap: it’s because almost all containers are plastic and glass bottles for milk are a curiosity now, and the same milk is sold in plastic or tetrapack
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It’s hard to tell what’s happening.
But forty years ago our “neighborhood” had door to door newspaper pickup. Even before that, a neighbor made the effort to take newspaper to a company tgat bought it, so she let it collect to make the trip reasonable. We’d send our newspaper wity her. It had to be tied in bundles, and it was just newsprint.
So some people with environmental interest rented a truck each week and collected newspaper only. I knew one of the peoole involved, it was based on a project done in another area of town. I recall it had municipal approval, but done as a third party non-profit.
I can’t remember details, but I don’t think it ever stopped, but after a few years morphed into a municipal project. I can’t remember when glossy paper was added, but it too needed to be bundled for years. And glass and plastic was added, again I can’t remember when. It improved when it became more widespread.
Over time it became simpler, and more items permissable, but shut me things always seemed borderline, coming and going.And a second use was always important. I remember some work on using glass to redo streets, obviously tge glass was a small part but tgerecwas some value to it. But that faded.
Contaminatiin becomes an issue. What was picked up.used to be quite rigid, and you were supposed to rinse food items. But they simplified the rules, I assume to get more people to participate. No more bundling either, and no more keeping glass and plastic separate from paper. But it seems to make people careless, tossing in things that don’t belong. They are also complaining abkut broken glass, too difficult to separate, though I’m not sure they explained the process well in the old days, so now there is decades of sloppiness. Tyat makes recycling harder, at tge tail end.
I seem to recall that ine thing that made shiooing recyclables viable was ships returning to China and elsewhere fairly empty. They were exporting, but imoirting little. So the recyclables had space, and provided raw material at their end. Once there was more of a balance of import/export, it became less viable. I’m nkt even sure how the latest shift follows that or is entitled environmental based.
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100% agree. The change has to be mainly institutional. Governments need to act. No amount of individuals being fussy about which paper cups they buy is going to put a dent in the problem.
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Looks like @anon61221983 already did your googling, so luckily I don’t have to. But seriously, dude, this has been written about at length by dozens of reputable mainstream sources. Planet Money did two entire podcasts about it. Maybe there was some previous version of this story that was similar and false 20 years ago, but this is recent and it’s real. China passed a law banning importation of garbage, and it torpedoed the entire western recycling industry.
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So, I should probably look it up to see if there are some books on the history of recycling, but it’s not like recycling is technologically impossible, it just looks like we’ve outsourced much of it to China (like many, many other sectors of our economy). So… in the short term, getting domestic recycling up and running seems like a doable proposition. As we said earlier, larger systemic changes have to happen (and of course the current administration is hell bent of rolling back any and all regulation, especially those that offer the public protections against environmental pollution)… but we have to start somewhere I suppose.
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A good perspective that I read somewhere is that it’s fundamentally a negative externality problem. Domestic recycling of most things is not economical, but that’s because we don’t put a price on the environmental damage caused by virgin resource extraction and manufacturing. This is where carbon taxes come in, and why it seems like most economists and scientists agree they are a good idea. Once you stop letting plastics companies and mines socialize the costs of the damage they do, recycling starts looking a whole lot better. Besides, we should incentivize the world we want and disincentivize the one we don’t, regardless. That’s supposed to be what taxation policy is for.
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Yep, that’s spot on. We just have to convince the people who are benefiting from the current system and force change upon them if we must.
My daughter said something funny the other day about the class opposing strong environmental regulation… “if the world burns, your money will burn…” I think some might be waking up to the depth of this emergency, but too many are deeply isolated from it and think that they’ll be protected from the worst of it. They will not.
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In fifty years what goes to “recycling” has broadened, but so have the packaging.
Newspaper had, and still has value. Metal has value, but decades ago it was mostly cans. Now recycling wants to keep all metal out of the dump, so there"s more variety, but also it isn’t just a metal.box, but the electronics nside, which is much more complicated to recycle.
Glass bottles dominated decades ago, now replaced by plastic in many cases. Plastic comes in varying shades, some better set to recycle. A story a whike back said something about black plastic in frozen meals, the plastic can be recycled but because it’s black the sorters can’t see the mark indicating type of plastic, so it usually gets tossed.
Plastic bags weren’t allowed here, then they were. Maybe a change of policy/technology, but maybe just that feelgood stuff the public often claims. But tyen a shift to biodegradeable plastic bags, they don’t want those, they can contaminate regular plasdtic (assuming there’s a use for plastic bags). Yet other circles want biodegradeable bags, because they don’t want bags in the wilderness (which may or not be a significant issue).
Tetrapaks seem varied, they weren’t recyclable, then some process, but it seems unclear.
Contamination is an issue, but someone’s making decisions to balance making it easy for people at home versus easy to process later on, and the former seems to win. Yet not useful if a lot just goes to the dump.
I think this is probably driven by desires to keep costs down on the production side, and the value to the consumer is of secondary consideration… Take those damnable blister pack clam shells that so much stuff is packed in now a days. I do NOT find them in the least bit more convenient or helpful. I despise them with a white hot passion, truth be told… But yes, at the bottom of the list are environmental considerations.
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As a lifelong horn player, I can hear a difference in tone that sounds closer to PVC trombones i’ve made than the warm brass sound. It’s possible it’s the recording quality and not the instrument. However, if they make more low brass than trombone, I’m in, because the cornet I have just doesn’t do it for me, and low brass instruments are ridiculously expensive.
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I’m a euphonium player and owned one of these once. Sold it it years and years ago because I was young and poor, and have always regretted it.
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Plastic degrades, via UV exposure, chemically, and biochemically, in ways that metal does not.
Metal is vulnerable to redox and electrochemical issues that don’t affect plastics, and it’s ductile and heavy and conductive, and so on. In broad terms, heavy exposure to sweat and drool is actually more of a problem for metals than for modern plastics. But the real point is that every material has its strengths and weaknesses, and has to be designed for differently.
Like, you can imagine mason jar manufacturers scoffing at the idea of plastic food storage, because if you make the wire clasp out of plastic it’ll break in no time. And if that had been the limit of Cornelius von Tupperware’s imagination, we’d still be keeping everything in mason jars. The trick was using plastic in ways that worked, instead of ways that didn’t.
Of course, if you spend a month making an exquisite violin from wood, you’re securing your employment for the next hundred months, whereas if you spent two years working out how to make an exquisite violin from plastic, you could put your entire industry out of business for good, so that’s a substantial can of worms. Most industries hit this iceberg centuries ago, but musical instruments are a special case, because the consumer is not “people who want to make music”, it’s “people who want to make music with this very specific object”. Reinvent an instrument too much and it just becomes something people don’t want, sort of by definition.
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Plastikman did get banned from entering the US after the Oklahoma city bombing, partly because he had a shaved head, partly because he was working in the US without permission (he lived in LaSalle, Ontario)
It didn’t do his career much harm, he focused on working in Europe and eventually got an honorary degree from Patrick Stewart.
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To a surprising degree, as anyone involved with attempting to bring to market novel attempts at improving or - (probably exponentially more unwisely) attempting to revolutionize a musical instrument category knows all too well.
There have been violins built with carbon fiber with acoustic qualities that have been shown to rival some of the most coveted hundred’s-of-years old wooden specimens - but that particular market is so staunchly conservatively rooted in its particular aesthetic mode that they haven’t caught on to the degree one might expect.
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carbon fibre, and in the case of the first violin, flax.
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