Bach to the Future

What started as a fun hashtag, proved to be a guiding light.

When I started at Conn Selmer in February 2021, I was given a very clear goal: deliver the best playing Bach trumpets in the company’s history. I felt like my job was equal parts archaeologist and museum curator. How could we uncover the mysteries of the Mt. Vernon and New York era Bach trumpets and then curate these discoveries into instruments for the modern player? Not an easy task.

One of our key initiatives for the project was that we believed in Vincent Bach’s designs AND Vincent Bach’s methods. He was always collaborating with the top artists of his day to improve his designs and we wanted to do the same. Instead of trying to remake our vintage horns, we wanted to make new Bach trumpets inspired by our favorite elements of the New York, Mt. Vernon and Elkhart eras to create a Bach like the world has never experienced! We had some goals that we sat for ourselves at the beginning:

• NO Artist Model Trumpets

• NO Trumpets named after cities

• NO Trumpet models that confine the instrument to a single genre

• Reclaiming our history and historical models

What Would Vincent Do?

I have often laughed watching videos of other trumpet and mouthpieces makers bash a Bach trumpet or mouthpiece only to respond to a customer’s question moments later with: “It’s like a Bach 3C” or “It’s closest to a Bach 72.” When the whole trumpet world understands instruments based on your models, there’s no reason to go any other direction. The other key aspect of this approach was Vincent Bach’s methods: collaboration with the best trumpet players of his day to make the best possible product!

I was very excited that we enlisted the help of Steve Winans in pursuit of this goal! In addition to his work with members of the Chicago Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra (and basically every other orchestra) Steve and I had worked together for 7 years on my personal Bach trumpet projects with various Mt. Vernon trumpets. We knew immediately that the new 190 trumpets were going to need a few key features: nickel Z braces from the NY era, 1st slide brace from the Chicago Symphony Mt. Vernon era trumpets (for some models), and a real French bead!

In addition to those features, we wanted, we decided the best course of action would be re-starting the 190 line and adding 2 new series: the X-Series and the V-Series.

The X-Series

With this series of instruments, we wanted to capture some of the special traits of Bach’s early New York era instruments, like the single brace in the tuning slide and a true French bead bell. A piece of early Bach historical trivia eventually landed us on the ‘X’ name. When instruments would come back to the shop and be resold, he would occasionally add an X to them. This practice seemed mostly limited to the NY era and occasional Mt. Vernon trumpet and plus, it sounded cool! Here are some of Bach’s first trumpet’s that were bought, returned and then re-sold as you can see by the names being scratched out and replaced.

From the start, we loosely planned six new 190 models, two for each series: 19037, 19043, 19072V, 19065V, 19037X, 19072X. We knew we would be discovering lots of things along the way and while no model was exactly the way the initial draft projected, the end result was extremely close! With this plan in place, it was time to begin the real product development…

 A roll stamp by any other name…

Like any true Bach aficionado, my first request was to bring back the roll stamp! What happened to it? Can we make a new one? Why did we throw it out? Well, I’m here to tell you definitively that it is never coming back. I meant with Steve Zapf, the CEO, to show the importance of the engraving back to back with one of my Mt. Vernon’s (pictured blow) and a modern 180S37. The difference is stark of course. Steve was totally behind the need to fix this and promised that if we could find a modern machine that could accomplish it, we would make it work.

We tried quite a few different ways to accomplish something similar to the roll stamp but ultimately, no existing tech we had in the factory was going to allow us to be successful. To be honest, this was the project I was dreading the most! My number one received piece of un-solicited piece of advice from trumpet players online was “have you thought about bringing the roll stamp back?” Of course! It wasn’t until we consulted with a laser company that we got our first promising result.

Eureka! Something that was giving us the depth of the roll stamp with even more precision. Ultimately, we decided a more accurate representation of Vincent Bach’s signature should adorn the bell and we are very happy with the results.

 Finger Lookin’ Good

The second most iconic feature of vintage Bach trumpets is the fingerhook. Most collectors have a favorite and can tell you approximate years just by looking at them. As much as I loved the 1950’s Bach fingerhook like from my Mt. Vernon 229 below, I didn’t want to just re-make it. We wanted to combine this fingerhook and the Elkhart era fingerhook into something new.

And of course, returning the serial number and bore size to my preferred spot aka the correct location. New production was around 780,000 and we jumped up to 800,000 for the new models as a reference from ??????.

 The Shoulders of Giants

I’ve worked on this project for over two years now but that is a drop in the bucket compared to two people. Since 2009, Michael Sachs, Principal Trumpet of the Cleveland Orchestra and Jim Scott, Bach Master Craftsmen for over 40 years, have been hard at work on prototyping new instruments. It is no exaggeration to say that none of this would have been possible without the ground work they lay for us with the help of my predecessors Jeff Christiana and Lonnie Waggoner. Of course, even before that, if Tedd Waggoner had not been there to save the shop cards and so much more, none of this would have been possible either! You can see Michael and Jim reunited on Michael’s first trip to the factory post-Covid.

Michael Sachs working with two of our engineers, Juan Carrillo (trumpet player) and Allie (trombone player) to make sure they could hear the difference even the smallest changes can make!

It’s Alive! It’s Alive!

It was time to assemble our first prototypes with lot a lot of updates. If you are wondering about the timeframe, we started with the 72V and 72X and just had the factory make them as they would any other trumpet so we could get a baseline. We already had plenty of 19037 and 19043’s to test so we didn’t need to do that. The first prototypes we assembled with many of our updates including the new nickel Z braces (and some internal changes to be discussed later maybe…) were put together by Jim Scott and Steve Winans! Michael Sachs and I play tested the horns and thought they were already big improvements to existing horns so we sent them off for some more play testing by Caleb Hudson and David Krauss. You can see some of their Instagram clips here with them playing their raw brass 19037’s. Caleb using it on some serious pyrotechnics and beautiful recital prep and David Krauss using it for the Saint Saens Septet and Shostakovich Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and String!

The First 19043s

The first 19043s ended up with Rashawn Ross and Melvin Jones. It was great to have Steve Winans shop available for us to try work on things and we had a great visit with Rashawn as Steve helped us try multiple leadpipes in between Rashawn’s gigs.