[jeff kaiser - gear]

Trumpets:

I'm not a trumpet collector. I only have two trumpets, a cornet, and a flugelhorn. In fact, after years of holding a large collection of horns I hit eBay...feels good to be traveling lighter.

My number one choice for solo and improv gigs: Marcinkiewicz Rembrandt Quarter-Tone, double shepherds crook. One of two prototypes Joe made for Arturo Sandoval. The fourth valve drops whatever note you are playing by a quarter-step. This trumpet was given to me by Rob Blakeslee, a truly brilliant and creative trumpet player. You can hear him in the artists section of the following web page. I am quite indebted to him.

http://www.marcinkiewicz.com/

For ensemble work I use my Bach Stradivarious180-43, 43 lead pipe, some mods by CamBrass (love those guys)

Cornet:

More on this later, a beautiful vintage cornet going back to 1910 given to me by step-grandmother.

Flugelhorn:

Yamaha YFH-631G
Purchased from Nick Rail Music, who has also done some FANTASTIC mouthpiece mods for me...I need to write about these: odd things like putting holes in mouthpieces to let air leak out. Nick is an old friend, and one of the few trustworthy people dealing in orchestral instruments that I've met.

I use all Marcinkiewicz mouthpieces.

Electronics:

My current software version

I've been using electronics with my horns since the late 80s. Always hardware based boxes until I had to travel to England for some gigs in the summer of 2005. Carrying the 150 plus lb. box of gear on planes and trains got old very quickly. I no longer carry all that heavy stuff. Now I'm doing all my shows with my trumpet running into a laptop running software I create using Max/MSP from Cycling 74. I even wrote a paper about it that I presented at the 2007 Spark Festival of Electronic Music at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. The paper is titled, "How I lost 150 lbs. thanks to Max/MSP!"

To interface I use a Shure Beta 56A microphone for live shows, a Motu Ultralite, M-AUDIO Oxygen 8 as a bank of faders and on/off switches, three Roland EV-5 pedals, three Yamaha FC5 pedals, and a PowerBook G4 1.5 ghz.

My software has 15 modules to process the trumpet , as well as four varispeed loop samplers and a tape loop simulator with degradation simulation and transposition available in the feedback loop. The modules contain max patches I've written as well as two Pluggo plugins. The last item in the chain is PSP Audio's Vintage Warmer, very nice on the trumpet. Note: I don't use the EV-5 pedals as midi controls. I send a sine wave to them, and return it to max. Any amplitude change introduced by the pedal is then converted to controller data inside of max. Same with the Yamaha Pedals. With no extra midi pedal interface needed (they just go straight into my audio interface), that makes one less piece of equipment to carry to a gig, and the granularity of of the data as audio is much more fine, especially when compared to MIDI.

This is a pic of my old rig from an EPIC Choir Boys gig: READ more here

Shure Beta 56, Mackie 1202, MoogerFooger Ring Modulator, Alesis Bitrman, Boss SE50 (!), Two Line 6 Delay Modelers

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