“Real” Bass Trombones
If you’ve gone down the trombone history rabbit hole at all, you’ve probably run across old bass trombones in keys lower than B-flat. While there is a lot of information scattered across the Web about these instruments, this is my attempt at summarizing the historical points and showing off some of the different kinds of long bass trombones that are out there, with my firsthand experience with a few of them thrown in.
The history is pretty simple. The trombone was invented in the mid-15th century, but brass instrument valves didn’t come around until the early 19th century. So for almost than 400 years, the only way to get lower notes was to build a physically longer instrument. Below the tenor trombone in B-flat, you had bass trombones, in G, F, E-flat, and other keys.
By the Classical period, the instrument had mostly settled on G or F. The G bass trombone was used briefly in France (along with C tenors and F altos), and at some point some of these instruments were imported into Britain. In France the G bass trombone (and indeed, the bass trombone in ANY key) did not last, but in Britain the G bass trombone flourished. In fact, the British G bass trombone tradition in brass band and orchestra lasted longer than anywhere else in the world, with G basses being regularly used all the way up to the 1960s. In continental Europe, the F bass trombone was the standard instrument for orchestras and military bands, though it was replaced by the Bb/F bass trombone much sooner than in Britain. Once the Bb/F bass trombone was invented, it spread like wildfire and (apart from in Britain) long bass trombones didn’t last very long.
Why is that?
Well, simply put, the Bb/F instrument was much easier to play. Trombones lower than B-flat are cumbersome instruments. The slides are too long to be able to reach all of the positions with just your arm, so they are equipped with long handles that allow you to reach the outer positions. But these handles are harder to use than just holding the slide brace directly, especially in fast passages. And on top of that, because the instrument is pitched lower, it is harder to play high and just more laborious in general. So when the Bb/F bass trombone came around, the long bass trombone’s days were numbered.
This isn’t to say that long bass trombones are impossible to play, or even difficult if you know how to play them. I personally love playing on the longer instruments, as they get cool sounds you just don’t get with a B-flat instrument, and I find the handle and lower pitches to be fun and rewarding challenges to overcome. Bass sackbut is one of my favorite instruments to play, and it is immensely satisfying to get right like all sackbuts.
The above image shows my G bass trombone - a 1939 Boosey & Hawkes Artist’s Perfected. This is a British small-bore G bass trombone, and is a fairly typical example of the breed. The majority of British G bass trombones had very small bores (usually smaller than .490”), which matched the tenor trombones commonly in use in brass bands at the time. Because of the very small bore, these G bass trombones got a notoriously bright sound when played loudly, with people coming up with colorful things to say about it, such as it sounds like tearing paper, or that the G bass trombone is really a percussion instrument. In addition, because of the extra-long slide and the trombones’ position in the front row of parades (where the slides could be bad news for errant children running in front of the band), the G bass trombone earned the nickname “Kidshifter” in Britain.
A few larger bore instruments were built for orchestral use, the most famous of which being the Boosey & Hawkes “Betty” model.
1939 Boosey & Hawkes “Betty” bass trombone in G, with attachment in D or C
This instrument had a relatively huge .5265” bore, and was much better suited for the modern orchestra than the narrow-bore brass band instruments, especially once large bore Conn trombones imported from the United States began to take over. The Betty models are rare and desirable today, and play nicely even with modern large bore tenor trombones. The attachment was pitched in D, but it came with an alternate slide to put the valve in C if you so desired.
(While the British G bass trombone tradition has long since evaporated, the general musical instrument maker Hakam Dim does claim to still offer a G bass trombone which appears to be based on an old small bore British design. However, I have not seen evidence of one apart from the single picture on their website.)
Meanwhile, in continental Europe, the long bass trombones (usually in F, but sometimes in E-flat) tended to be big and dark. An excellent example is this German F bass trombone I used to own, a Julius Rudolph from 1937.
This instrument was just about the polar opposite from my small-bore British G bass trombone. It was all nickel silver, extremely heavy, and with the most drastic dual bore in the slide that I’ve ever seen: .510-.590”! It had a massive bell throat and sounded so huge that it sounded much closer to a modern F contrabass trombone than an F bass trombone. (This is also why I sold it…I wanted a real bass voice, and this instrument didn’t really give that to me.) It was made in 1937, which is very late for an F bass in Europe, but the manufacture of long basses did soldier on for a few decades after they fell out of favor in the orchestra, as they were still used in military bands and church trombone choirs (Posaunenchor).
Modern G or F bass trombones are a rare thing, but a few do exist. Here is a brief overview of the ones I know of.
This first one is possibly the most well-known modern F bass trombone. It was made in 2004 by Yamaha as a surprise gift to Doug Yeo, who was the bass trombonist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the time. It has a full-length slide with seven positions.
This one is a modern instrument in F built by Gronitz, and while it originally had two valves (as seen on the picture on the right) it was later converted to a single valve. It has been for sale at the BrassArk for a long time now.
While there are no full-body pictures of this trombone, this gives you an idea. This is a modern bass trombone in F built by Josef Lidl, and later outfitted with independent Hagmann valves in C and D. It has a full-length slide with handle, and a .525” slide bore. It has been for sale at Swisstbone for years now, and is listed as a contrabass there.
This is a one-off bass trombone in F made by Matthew Walker of the world-class custom trombone maker M&W. It uses a lengthened 10.5” Bach 50BGL bell, a long .562” slide, and bass trombone rotors.
S.E. Shires, the popular modular trombone maker, used to offer the pictured conversion kit for their B-flat bass trombones that turned them into F bass trombones, complete with a long slide.
Likely the oldest instrument here (but still very much a modern instrument), this is a Holton bass trombone in E-flat with double slide. A few E-flat instruments with double slides were made in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by a few makers, including Conn, Rudall & Carte, and the Salvation Army. Most were marketed as contrabasses, but some (like the Holton pictured here) were 100% bass trombones.
This is the only modern, non-British bass trombone in G that I have found pictoral evidence of - an East German G bass trombone made by VEB. The “Great Bass” trombones in G made for Jeff Reynolds by Larry Minick are also worth mentioning, but those are really G contrabasses, rather than G basses.
Minick G “Great Bass” trombone
Personally, I think that modern long bass trombones have a lot more potential. It’s been a dream of mine for many years to have modern, double-valve bass trombones in both G and F, and to actually use them on appropriate repertoire. But they are a very niche interest, as even most bass trombonists have no interest in a lower bass trombone. With modern trombone-making techniques and the many stellar makers out there, I have no doubt that a modern G or F instrument could be a wonderful player with an incredible sound. (I also think that contrabass trombones in G, like the Minick above, deserve more experimentation as well.)
Bass Valve Trombones
While long bass slide trombones are much rarer than their B-flat counterparts, bass valve trombones in F (while still rare today) are much more common than bass valve trombones in B-flat. To my knowledge, B-flat bass valve trombones have only been offered by Thein and Jürgen Voigt (in cimbasso form), with the rest that exist being cobbled together from parts (such as the Robb Stewart “cimbassina”). Meanwhile, F bass valve trombone was the standard bass trombone in a few parts of Europe around the turn of the 20th century. The trombone section Antonín Dvořák had access to and wrote for used valve trombones, with an F bass on the lowest part. The one time Gustav Mahler wrote for bass trombone (his sixth symphony), he wrote for a valved F bass as that’s what was available in Vienna at the time. Bass valve trombones were also manufactured in E-flat, and while I haven’t heard of any made in G it is certainly possible. Drum corps trombonium bugles and cellophones, while not really bass instruments, are the closest thing I know of.
An important clarification is that the modern cimbasso is a contrabass valve trombone, not a bass valve trombone. Much like F bass and contrabass slide trombones, or B-flat tenor and bass trombones, both bass and contrabass valve trombones can be in F. Cimbassi have also been built in “straight” (valve trombone) form, but they are still contrabass instruments.
The Bartók Gliss
While the modern slide F bass trombones shown earlier in this article were constructed to utilize the full capability of a modern F bass trombone, quite a few modern F basses have been built specifically to play one famous glissando in the orchestral repertoire. This glissando occurs in Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, and is completely exposed with nobody else in the orchestra playing. It is a simple passage, glissing from B1 to F2 before the 2nd trombone continues the passage with another gliss. The reason why people have constructed new instruments for one glissando is because low B to F is not technically possible on a modern B-flat bass trombone. Bartok wrote the part for a bass trombone in F, and on that instrument the glissando is trivial - a simple 7th to 1st affair. But on a B-flat bass trombone, you have to come up with creative solutions to accomplish the gliss. As a fun aside, here are all the Bartok gliss solutions that I know of.
The easiest solution is to lip down from C to B, then gliss up as normal. This is what I did when I performed the piece, but that low B definitely doesn’t sound very strong when lipped down that far.
The most common choice is to start the gliss from low B with both valves, then at some point switch to just the F valve to complete the gliss. In my opinion this is the worst option and not even a real solution, as it produces a break in the gliss and does not achieve the composer’s desired effect.
A fun and effective solution is to pull the F valve tuning slide as far out as it will go, and then have the tuba player push the slide in as you ascend through the gliss. While the low B is sharp as most modern bass trombones do not have a long enough F pull to get an in-tune low B at the end of the slide, it is close enough for this excerpt, which is supposed to musically depict the composer vomiting (seriously!). Here’s a video demonstration of this solution:
Another fun and clever solution is to pull the F valve tuning slide as far out as it will go, and have a long string tied to the end of the valve slide with a ring at the other end. Wrap the other end of the string around your foot and use your foot to pull the slide back down as you ascend through the gliss. This might be my favorite solution that does not involve using a real F bass. Here’s a video demonstration:
The most expensive solution is to use a specially-built instrument designed to play that glissando in particular. There are two ways to go about this: either a B-flat bass with a special trigger mechanism allowing you to manipulate the valve slide while playing, or a real instrument in F. The B-flat method is less common, as this requires you buy or modify a B-flat bass trombone specifically for this purpose. Thein makes a dedicated Bartok model for this, and it has also been done as a modification to existing single-valve bass trombones.
As for real F bass trombones, several have been made for the Bartok gliss specifically. They are all double-slide affairs, sometimes with a matching bell sections and other times designed to mate up to a standard B-flat bell section. The most well-known example was made by Edwards, who rents it out for performances of the piece.
Doug Yeo holding a Bartok F bass
Of course, you could also use an existing F instrument to do the job, though most low F trombones are not F basses and thus don’t really get the right sound. Even so, because they are more widely available, players have used F contrabass trombones, B-flat contrabass trombones, and even F bass sackbuts to play the gliss. Regardless of what instrument is used, bass trombonists will usually only use the instrument for the glissando (along with the four staccato notes immediately preceding it), and then switch back to their normal instrument after.
I find it funny that bass trombonists have all sorts of solutions for “the Bartók gliss”, when in fact that single gliss in the Concerto for Orchestra is not the only low B to F glissando that Bartók wrote - there are many of them in The Miraculous Mandarin!
