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My big idea project over winter break was to build the natural horn seen below, using a 1930 Conn mellophone bell I had found on eBay.
It was my second horn build of this type. My original mellophone conversion was done using a Cuesnon bell when I was a Doctoral student, working under Richard Seraphinoff. (Photos introducing all five of my previous horn conversion projects may be seen here).
Backing up a few steps, why exactly use a vintage mellophone bell? For a natural horn? The reason is the throat is small, similar to that a typical natural horn of the era when they were in use. In my book Playing Natural Horn Today (more here) I suggest a mellophone bell conversion horn is a better tactic than to convert a modern single F horn, as on those the bell (and bore overall) is much too large, making them not very ideal for natural horn playing.
Stated another way, the smallest modern horn bell is still too large to be a good natural horn bell. A vintage concert mellophone, in contrast, is right in the range of many natural horns of the late 18th century.
My original conversion horn came out well, too well really, as it is the natural horn that I’m the most likely to play of the several options I have access to. The bell is quite nice. I thought about making another when I was on sabbatical last year, and actually purchased off eBay a second Cuesnon mellophone – but the seller was a bottom feeder, they had already sold the Cuesnon (!!), and wondered if the York they sent me (!!) would be OK? It would not! They did not take returns, but had to take it back after I appealed to Amazon, they had shipped me something different than what I purchased. And the York was a tank! Heavy, hard bell, not good.
With that I let the idea sit through the long hot summer. Then in the fall I found on eBay a Conn mellophone that had been converted to a lamp. What I could tell from the photos was it had a good bell, “hand hammered” with a seam to the edge. And also it was quite inexpensive.
It required some dent repair and 8 (!) patches to correct the issues it had. The diamond shaped patches were part of the solution, some of the holes were at very visible locations, those patches needed to look artistic and intentional.
After those repairs I was on to using mostly left-over parts from my sabbatical projects. Working forward from the bell, the bore of the mellophone at the end of the first branch was large, .500 inch. To get that down to modern horn bore I used the end portion of a spare Yamaha single F horn first branch. The main slide is made from a combination of Yamaha and Mirafone parts. On the other side of the slide the tube is the end of a King (I think) leadpipe, cut to take the bore down to the .440 bore of the remaining tubes, salvaged from a Chinese natural horn crook. Those final three parts required some bending, using Cerrobend as filler. I would have liked one of the bends to be a little better. It is a learning process, and I know what my mistake was — I should have annealed that tube before the final bending. I did not need to move it far and have been able to skip that step a number of times, but should not have this time, I needed to move the tube a bit further than I could get it to go. Still, it is close, and of course fully functional as it is.
One goal was to get it playable by New Years, and I managed to hit that goal! And it plays nicely. In the photo the horn is seen with the F crook and a coupler from prior horn projects, which luckily worked perfectly with the horn body. The remaining steps are I am making new F and E crooks, and a full step coupler to achieve Eb and D. A specific goal was for the horn to be the most comfortable in the hands with a crook and one coupler, as I find students will spend much or most of their time in Eb and D working on solos (such as Mozart!). The crooks, still in progress as of this writing, utilize a few key new parts from Richard Seraphinoff and will be compatible with his instruments. There were several steps to do that I had not done since when I built the horn as a Doctoral student, happy to report that I’ve worked through those steps and should be able to finish the crooks and coupler before classes next week.
My overall goals were to relatively quickly make a good, workable instrument that a student could use and to work on my skills. Success on both counts! Plus, I’m feeling more enthusiastic about practicing on the natural horn than I have in some years.
As to future projects, I think the next horn build will be a new natural horn made to an historically accurate design from fresh parts. I probably won’t start that before the beginning of the summer, and there will be some tooling up to do and some challenges, but maybe by this time next year that one will be done as well.
