¡ã Brass instruments Maintenance ¡ä
For brass instruments, pay attention to dents, piston (slide for trombone) movement, cork and spring of a water key.
Water also accumulates in each tuning slide, so instruct students to remove all tuning slide during and after practice to let the water out. If they do not move for a long time, the tuning slide will harden and not move.
There are many students who do not know which tubes can be removed. At first, you need to actually remove all the tuning slide that can be removed and explain.
For tubas and French horns, students cannot remove all the water from the tubes just by using a water key and tuning slides. Students need to rotate the entire instrument several times to remove all the water from the instrument.
Please refrain from handing out sweets during breaks between practices. There is a school where the tuning slides of instruments that were purchased less than a year ago are hardening one after another, and at first I didn't understand why, but when I saw the students handing out sweets during breaks, I realized that this was the cause. The sugar in the sweets had hardened and the tuning slide had stopped working.
¡¡I often see cases where the mouthpiece has been dropped and the shank (the part that goes into the instrument) has become deformed. The instructor repaired the item and repeatedly warned the students not to drop it.
If you mention the price of the mouthpiece when giving them a warning, students may be a little more careful when handling it.
¡¡Be sure to oil the pistons before practicing. It will be quicker if you oil all three (four) pistons together with about half of them removed.
4th piston
If students remove all the pistons at once, they may end up putting them back in the wrong place. Each piston has a number stamped on it, but if you put them in the wrong place, air won't pass through and the instrument won't make any sound. I have seen many unfortunate students who did not realize this and practiced for a long time on an instrument that should not sound. If students know an instrument that they can play properly and something goes wrong along the way, they'll notice it. But it is natural that they would not notice if the instrument they were given at first did not sound. I think this is also the responsibility of the instructor.
The inside of the tube (mouth pipe) close to the mouthpiece often gets dirty, so clean it from time to time (about once every 1-2 weeks to once a term depending on how often they practice). For trumpets and trombones, wrap gauze around a cleaning stick, and for cornets, horns, euphoniums, tubas, etc., use a flexible cleaner.
There are also trombone swabs (cleaning cloth with a long string with a weight attached at the end), which can be used to clean the inside of the slide all at once. It is easy to clean bent mouth pipes such as euphoniums and tubas, but please be careful, as trying to force something that doesn't fit through the tube may cause it to become clogged.