FAQ

Doesn’t the Trombone Buddy get in the way when playing the horn?
Trombone Buddy was specifically designed to be as operationally “transparent” as possible by a trombonist with over 40 years playing experience. It doesn’t make playing the instrument more difficult.
It’s hard to imagine that hanging this on the instrument doesn’t make playing the trombone more clumsy, like it would make the slide a lot heavier and slower. Honestly, isn’t this the case?
NO! Trombone buddy is EXTREMELY light weight; made from carbon fiber, mounts on the horn opposite from where hands are positioned. Over two years of intense work and hundreds of iterations and prototypes were involved. Getting the device to mount accurately and consistently, and to prevent the slide from binding was extremely difficult. In the end, it required tiny ball bearings, ultra precise manufacturing, and a very innovative approach to assure no appreciable added resistance.
Kids are hard on delicate stuff, won’t this just get broken right away?
While anything can be broken, Trombone Buddy is extremely durable and in testing, easily survived dropping on a concrete floor from high in a stairwell.
How do I know the positions as marked by the Trombone Buddy are right/accurate?

The device ships with the positions marked using mathematical calculations of known sound column length/frequency relationships. Provisions for custom adjustments to accommodate different trombones are provided.

As experienced players know, the pitch of any brass instrument is affected by embouchure, breath support, and with the trombone the accuracy of positioning the slide. Beginning students need to gain a fair bit of experience with careful attention to “blow” the horn consistently and the Trombone Buddy adjusted to the default position locations provides a much more stable learning platform allowing the student to learn to blow consistently more quickly.

Isn’t the traditional “tried and true” method to learn the positions better? Won’t kids learn to use their ears more effectively by learning positions the traditional way?

Learning the positions initially involves visual references which are fine tuned as the student develops the ability to hear the pitch relationships. Finally, “muscle memory” becomes programmed and becomes a part of the trombone performance neural network. This is an iterative process which is very much affected by how consistent the embouchure and breath support is.

Brass instruments other than the trombone employ valves to add fixed lengths of tubing based on mathematical sound column length/frequency relationships. Accordingly, valved brass instruments typically have a shorter learning curve to play “in tune.” With the Trombone Buddy, these fixed lengths can be easily seen and felt.