Trombones With Valves? What Gives?
The modern slide trombone can also be fitted with a valve to give greater flexibility to the performer.
The slide trombone is one of the oldest brass instruments, charting its ancestry back hundreds of years to an instrument called the sackbutt found in Belgium in the mid 1400's. Since that time the trombone has evolved considerably into the modern instrument that we know today. In the 1820's the first trombones using valves were manufactured in Vienna, followed in the late 1800's by Adolf Sax, the creator of the saxophone. His first creations were large, complex monsters which looked very little like the trombone we know today.
But just as necessity is the mother of invention, instrument manufacturers eventually came up with a simple and elegant solution to the needs of professional trombonists. Around the same time that Sax was working on his six valved trombone, other companies were adding a single rotary valve and additional tubing to the bell portion of the trombone. This simple addition helped the player overcome two of the greatest difficulties of the instrument. The first benefit was fast and accurate movement from first position (slide closed) to sixth or seventh position (slide fully extended). The new addition of the rotary valve and an additional connected length of tubing (known as the "F Attachement") allows the performer to instantly change from first position to sixth with no delay from having to move the slide. This new trombone valve had an additional benefit of allowing the trombonist to play lower notes, extending his lower range all the way down to the fundamental (lowest note) of the instrument. Until the "F Attachment" and valve assembly were added there were several notes at the bottom of the instrument that simply could not be played.
While the addition of the F attachment and valve were a great step forward, the most significant advance in the design of this trombone valve came when in 1976 Orla Thayer created the "Thayer Axial Flow Valve." Trombonists are a picky lot, and one of the drawbacks of the traditional rotary valve was that in order to function the valve had to divert the air stream by 90 degrees in order to add in the extra length of tubing. This sharp bend in the flow of air causes turbulence and results in a less pure sound. The Thayer valve is designed as a cone shaped valve which only has to divert the air stream by thirty degrees instead of ninety. Thus, trombones using a Thayer valve sound clearer and respond more quickly than the traditional rotary valve.
Other manufacturers have come up with other variations of valve style for the trombone with F attachment such as the Greenhoe Valve. Today however, the Thayer valve is widely accepted as the gold standard when purchasing a trombone with the F attachment. Any student looking to trade up to a professional quality instrument should look for the Thayer valve and not consider any trombone that does not already have one installed. For trombones without such valves there are companies that do conversions, however in general it is best to purchase a trombone with the Thayer valve already installed and calibrated to the exact requirements of the instrument.
A Six Valved Trombone
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