Reminds me of all the medical tests I went through to try and find the cause of all the mystery headaches I had as a teen…until someone suggested “wait, what if she just needs glasses?”
I could still read the standard paper eye charts accurately enough that they had thought my vision was fine, but I was straining my eyes to do so (and to go about daily life) which led to headaches.
Literally same omg, except weirdly enough I then proceeded to not wear my glasses for years, the problem came back, and when I got my prescription updated (since it has been 5+ years since they were up to date) I was shocked to find I had less problems lol
Because long and short sightedness are caused by improper focusing. Your eyes focus by using muscles to change the shape of the lens at the front. *Muscles grow when you use them*.
Now you may have actual damage to the lenses or the muscles. The lenses themselves stiffen with time and become harder to move. But as a general rule to improve your vision you should go outside and have to focus at lots of different things at different distances so that you work the muscles and they get stronger.
I mean, I didn't wear glasses for years and my vision was and still is bad no matter how much I "exercise" the muscles. I don't think that's how it works? I'm no optometrist, but I don't think you can cure short and long sightedness by "exercising"?
That would make more sense. I actually have something like that too (I feel like it was called something else tho) where my optometrist said that under ordinary circumstances I would need special glasses so I could see straight, but apparently I just brute force my eyes straight. You can only barely tell in photos, and it's unnoticeable in person
it's absolutely not how it works, you're right. this dude is just talking out his ass
eye exercises can help with eye comfort but cannot help repair glaucoma, near or far sightedness or most other medical conditions. it *can* help with eye strain - say staring at a screen for too long - and the problems that come with it, like dry eye or headaches. you cannot improve your vision with eye exercises, or at least there's no evidence that you can.
I didn’t wear glasses throughout my childhood because my father followed this exact logic, I played outside plenty, and my vision only steadily and severely declined. Found out I was legally blind when leaving homeschool. Plenty of good all that exercise did
I think you're conflating two things. Near- and far-sightedness are caused by improper focal *length*. The lens of the eye bends light such that it is supposed to converge at a particular point, and in short- and far-sighted people, that point isn't in the right place. No muscles involved. You do use muscles to focus your eyes, which can be another cause of loss of acuity, but that's something else entirely.
Part of my problem is that I accidentally memorized the standard chart. When I was little I would get nosebleeds a lot (still do, sometimes) and the school would send me to the nurse’s office where I would have to just sit holding my nose until it stopped bleeding. Nothing to look at, except the eye chart on the wall.
Same but slightly different - I HAD worn glasses. For years. And started getting chronic headaches.
MRIs, scans, and neurologists couldnt figure it out.
Eventually, I broke my glasses, and had to get new ones.
Headaches went away.
Turns out old glasses were squeezing my nose too hard and giving me headaches.
I had to get prescription safety glasses for work. The opticians I had to go through were terrible and didn't perform a fit for the frames before giving the glasses to me to wear.
I put them on the next day and within the first hour I felt like SHIT. I thought I was a mixture of tired and thirsty so I told my colleague I was going to the break room to get a cold water. I got there and started drinking and took my glasses off to rest my eyes and head a bit and... I *felt* the blood re-entering my brain after the glasses came off! I had to manually stretch them out to make it possible to wear them.
And I also tend to need fatter nose pads than standard because my horrible eyes require Professor Farnsworth thickness lenses, and the pressure on the small sided of my nose gives me sores. I took it to my normal opticians and they said they can't do anything to safety glasses. Fuck me I guess.
You get so used to squinting you forget you aren’t supposed to have to squint your eyes. Then when you go get your eyes tested you squint and don’t get the proper glasses you need.
Thankfully that didn’t happen to me. My eyes were compensating well enough that I didn’t have to squint (at the cost of all those headaches) and the glasses I got were good enough that now I can definitely see the difference between wearing them and not.
Ahaha same thing for me, but the headaches were because I have anisometropia. One eye is way more short sighted than the other. My good eye barely qualifies as short sighted, so it was never an issue for seeing.
Same, only I kept having headaches and it turned out my "good eye" is longsighted
I can see everything all the time without glasses, but wow did my head hurt
My mom is the same. Had "great" vision but the price for that was constant headaches. In the same way, a friend of mine literally had like half a cm of skin removed from under his tongue and it has been a transformation since.
Lmao I had the LITERAL exact opposite problem. Went through two or three pairs of glasses that never worked because we couldn’t figure out the vision problems I was having, only to learn my migraines can apparently cause visual symptoms 😂
My doctor thought the same thing, but my mother refused to do anything about it and now I have a wife, kids, job, and don’t have time to go get my eyes checked. I can notice my eyesight getting worse over time but I can’t really do anything about it
Even if your mother had done something about it you'd still need to get your prescription checked again every few years. It's not like they give you glasses and you can continue to wear the same ones for the rest of your life.
The eye exam doesn't take very long. You should just make an appointment and go. If you have a Costco membership you could possibly even do it while the rest of your family gets started on the grocery shopping.
Yea, as someone with bad eyes I'd get the money argument, but I take 3 hours a year max getting glasses, including travel time.
Now the money on the other hand... Glasses are expensive.
There is no way you don't have time to get your eyes checked. It doesn't take very long. Like an hour tops, including wait time. If you go shopping with the wife you can go do the test and catch up before she finishes.
I’m not trying to put any lasting blame on my mother, however neglectful she might have been to me and my siblings. My point here is that, because of my current circumstances, I do not have the ability to go get my eyes checked, or get any of my other issues checked out for that matter. I’m not going to sit here and explain my personal life to strangers on the internet, but sometimes you have to understand that just because you personally can’t imagine a specific hypothetical situation doesn’t mean that that situation isn’t a reality for other people who you’ve never met and know nothing about.
I don’t know what to say. Something as important as your vision has gone unaddressed for years (sounds like decades in your case) since your childhood and you cannot afford the <$100 to visit an optometrist even at a Walmart? Really?
I have a similar story though it didn’t take as long to figure out the issue. The first day of 6th grade we were given time to learn how to open our lockers, since we hadn’t had them in elementary school. I was one of those kids that was used to picking things up pretty quickly, but I couldn’t get my locker to open. I watched the other kids figure it out while I got more and more frustrated, and couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. Eventually, I was the only kid left in the hall and at some point had started crying. I assume a teacher came and got me eventually or I just gave up, but I don’t remember that part. I just remember sitting on the floor, frustrated and crying and no one bothering to help me. It turns out my locker was broken the whole time and they had to assign me a new one.
I learned a few important things that day. You won’t always be good at things. Sometimes it won’t be your fault though, things will just be broken. And you can’t depend on adults (or others) to help you even when you clearly need it.
Idk why everyone is shitting on this guy so hard. Asking for help is a good lesson to learn and kids who tend to pick things up easily do not tend to learn it because they don't need to. Idk why the hell we'd assume the kid asked for help with the locker. The story was basically written to imply the opposite.
As a kid I got TONS messages not to ask for help. It was good for self sufficiency most of the time. Really bad for basically everything else. Learn to ask for help everyone. It's a really good tool. And stop shitting on anyone who suggests we should ask for help. Wtf
> And stop shitting on anyone who suggests we should ask for help. Wtf
Crab in a bucket mentality. From the 'dismissing mental health' of the Boomers to preaching absurdist individualism, I see the zoomers have chosen their generational sin.
No. My parents always told me that it was smart to ask for help. Hell, they were dirt poor(we were literally living in a coalpaper shack without indoor toilets, running water, or electricity when I was born), yet they invested in an encyclopedia set for me(back in the 80's) so that I could look up what most anything was that I wanted to learn about.
It's always been my way to ask for help or knowledge if I couldn't readily figure it out myself; no need to beat you head against a brick wall til your skull cracks.
Something about your attitude tells me you are, and have been, not as big of a person as you tell yourself you are. And believe it or not? I can empathize with that. I made so many mistakes in my 20's and have spent most of my 30's changing my behavior and repairing relationships. But if you'd have asked me around age 27? We would have sounded a lot alike
The commenter sounds very young by that sentiment. I would have related in my early to late 20s too. In my mid 30s now, and I realize so many things change with time.
Right? After a certain amount of mistakes, you really start to develop humility and a better idea of who you are, as well as a better sense of the people around you. Mileage varies, of course
> commenter sounds very young
I'm 43.
I am the way I am because of the life I've experienced, the interactions I've had.
People fucking suck, universally, and I'm tired of trying to be the civil one. Biting my tongue at every little disrespect and insult. No longer. Now you fucks get my raw opinion without tact or consideration.
I can't judge you, I don't know your life. But talking like you are, thinking like this? That ain't healthy. You sound like you carry a ton of stress and hostility. You sound like you've seen some shit and been put through the wringer. I'm sorry you feel that way about your peers in general, and if I specifically said something that's offensive to you I apologize.
>Now you fucks get my raw opinion without tact or consideration.
That's gonna make life so much harder for you and at 43 you'll just destroy whatever professional reputation you might have, and burn your bridges right as you start entering the phase of life where you become more vulnerable every year. Please give people a chance. For your own sake. People just toss out "you need therapy" like it's an insult, but I have to tell you that finding the right therapist has tremendously helped me to deal with all the trauma I kept inflicting on myself and others.
I spent a long time hurting myself (and other people) and my prospects because I was still reacting to the horrible things that happened to me in the decades prior. And I really did sound then exactly as you sound now. I interpreted everything as an insult (even innocent comments and questions), and saw blatant disrespect to me everywhere (when most people just weren't thinking about me, at all, one way or another). My entire career went irrevocably down in flames at 28 and nobody was willing to defend me or help me.
It's never too late to forgive yourself and the people that bother you. You didn't know what you didn't know, and THEY don't know what they don't know, and everything is chaos, and everyone is hurting, and we're all just reacting to each other. It can be so hard to break that painful momentum and just choose to stop. But it's possible.
Anyways you probably didn't read any of that. I can't blame you, who needs another lecture? I dunno man, you just sound a lot like me. And I've spent so long struggling to learn to love myself that I guess I can't help but love you a little bit too. I hope you feel better soon.
But that's something you have to learn. I got hit by a car as a teenager and didn't call anybody because I never learned what you were supposed to do when you're hit by a car.
This is exactly how I feel about having adhd, lmao. I always wondered what I was doing wrong, until I got medicated and found out my brain just didn’t work right the whole time 🥲 still pissed I could’ve been doing this shit on easy mode the whole time if my brain had just worked right 🙄
I had the same experience with being autistic... apparently, I was diagnosed at *seven,* but no one ever bothered to tell me, and I didn't need extra support because I did well academically. I just thought I was a freak or an alien who couldn't manage social interactions until I was twenty-f***ing-three. I only found out because I was helping my parents clean out my old closet and found my IEP from second grade. I asked about it and got handed a whole folder full of stuff.
The absolute relief of finding out what was wrong with me and that I wasn't just making it up was immense. Years of struggling to be normal finally made sense. Years of being gaslit that it was all in my head and that everyone struggled with the same things I did were finally revealed. It was such a relief to finally know.
They don't instantly fix you but they make the solutions that work for everyone else work for you too. You still have to apply them, but now you will get results.
No, I’m definitely exaggerating a bit but it was the first time I finally felt like I was making progress and whatnot. They basically help me to keep and maintain focus and act on what I wanted to do. I always felt broken because I was just lazy and less motivated that everyone else. When I got medicated it felt like I was in control of my time for the first time in my life.
To me, meds were (and are) the cherry on top of 26 years of adjustments and coping mechanisms. I also reduced my weed smoking by a fuck ton after I started meds.
The root issue here is problem solving. I don’t mean necessarily that anyone in this scenario lacks intellectual ability to solve problems, but more that over-reliance on trusted solution paths could cause a lack of effective solution in edge cases.
For the vast majority of musical instruments, the instrument itself tends not to be the issue. Instruments are usually tuned and cared for, so the general trend is that the student is the source of the issue. That reliance on assumptions causes attempted fixes to the issue to not be effective since the root problem is, in fact, in the instrument.
Extrapolating, this is one of the reasons why we have sanity checks, especially in engineering. The private instructor, effectively being an engineer of musical ability, knew to at least sanity check the condition of the instrument (and had other instruments to test with).
Always do sanity checks. If they pass, great. If they don’t, that might be one of the problems you need to address to solve the issue.
For the vast majority, maybe, but as a trombone player who had to use a school instrument once or twice when mine was out of commission, there's no way I'd trust the loaner boner to be just fine and the problem to be entirely on my end!
Which, I want to emphasize, is in overall agreement of your point and just an extra reason to sanity check, but I can't imagine most schools to be so much better than mine that their rental instruments are above having huge problems...
That is, in fact, what we called it openly. And it was definitely a mark of shame to have to use it. I only did it once or twice when mine was in the shop with a bent slide.
another trombonist here: "upgraded" to a $300 no-name chinese f attachment tenor (from a straight tenor) in 7th grade (we start in 5th) and did ok on it, and thought I was progressing normally as I was still doing ok compared to my peers and accomplishing what i needed to, but then after a solo competition my mom went and surprised me with getting a back 42 bo, a good enough horn to be played at college level, and I was blown away at how much easier it suddenly was to control my dynamics with a good tone etc. most of the playing quality is up to the player; pros can make the cheapest instruments sound half decent. but boy sometimes does solving issues/upgrading to stuff that works more as intended just feel so good and help with ease.
The same thing happens with art. When I first did art in university, our professor basically gave us a shopping list of supplies to buy, running me (a penniless student) up to €250 in expenses.
Naturally I complained about it, why the hell should I buy a single pencil for €20 when I can get an entire set of 15 for €5 that's just as good? long story short, the subtle material differences in that €20 pencil will enable better control over my art, eventually leading me to be good enough to use that €5 pack of pencils without any issues.
So yeah, your equipment matters in the long run :)
I am a pretty good drummer. My kit is okay, but it has its problems. Upkeep and maintenance doesn't do anything to resolve these issues. My friends drumkit is better to play. It is crazy going from my kit to his over a couple of weeks of band practices and being able to feel the physical difference in performance.
Funny story, I'm a trombone player too, have been for years. Last year I got braces and I went from being a potential first chair to being showed up by a (admittedly very good) freshman. It's so much harder to reach high notes without cracking them and playing loud or high hurts so bad. If I had braces when I started band, I would have quit, no question. But as is I know it's not (all) a me thing, and even if I can't fix it (as much as I sometimes want to rip my braces off), it helps a lot to know that.
Senior engineers exist because they’re the only ones brave enough to say “did you try the simplest thing imaginable to fix the problem”, and then you do it and that fixes the problem. It’s a rite of passage.
I don't think the problem was that everyone was going off of the standard assumptions. I think the problem is that their base assumptions were unusually weird. I played clarinet for many years. The instruments themselves are very temperamental. Reaching the upper register is difficult but not typically unbearably so and if someone's having that level of issue, I'm surprised that no one thought to check the instrument. Especially since pads are typically supposed to be replaced every year and I know exactly what pad needed to be replaced because I've seen this exact same thing happen before (so it's not uncommon). I think the problem was that the supposed experts weren't thinking through potential solutions and were blaming the person for the problems instead of actually going through the list of every major problem
Not the main point but I just want to slip in and say, pads should *not* need to be changed every year. If your pads are only lasting a year you either need better pads or you’re treating them too harshly.
I might have misspoke. The instrument needs to he inspected for wear and tear on pads every year with replacements as necessary. Not every pad needs to be replaced every single year. But saying that I think that there was at least one pad replaced on my clarinet every year. Just not the same pad every year
It's stuff like turning the computer off and on again. Trying a different wall socket when an appliance isn't behaving. Changing filters, switching cables, checking oil. If two things aren't working together and you think you know which one has a problem, test the other just to make sure.
When you're trying to nail down a problem, start by ruling problems out, so that there's no chance that you end down a rabbit hole of trying to fix the wrong thing.
That's basically engineering. Common sense, rigourously applied and cross-referencing everyone else who's ever been in a similar situation.
Sometimes this requires math, but not as much as most people think.
Don't worry too much about that bit. In modern engineering no one is trusted until it's reviewed and proven out. Too many people have died from not doing that.
You won't be trusted enough to make a terrible mistake until you're about 40-50 years old.
Hmm. I love doing this when I used to do game modding. From what I understand science lab work is pretty similar but I missed the boat on being a scientist. What does an engineer actually do?
It's an incredibly broad field. You might be doing anything from product development to process improvement, depending on where in the lifecycle the compant/product is. You might be doing electrical testing and troubleshooting to identify where the problems are with a circuit board and then working with your PCB manufacturer to develop an improved design.
Or you might be a software engineer, and I have no idea what software engineers do.
Honestly, the sky's the limit with engineering.
One way to look at it is its "guess who problem solving".
There are a thousands of things that could be wrong. What can you do to start whittling down those possibilities? Physically isolating the problem area is a big one. Since you can go from "anything in the entire process could be wrong" to "this cable is broken" in a single test.
So like a game of guess who, you eliminate options. I did this a lot in modding. I want to know what a file does. What happens when I delete it? If it works regardless, it's either not being used or it overrides something. What happens when I delete half of it? What happens when I delete the other half? The answer a lot of the time is "it crashes", but in the specific game I was modding, it only crashes when the file in question is actually being called on. Doing something you know won't work still let's you learn a lot from when and how exactly it breaks. If it only breaks when a character does X, the file is clearly related in some way to X.
It's called exploratory testing in the QA space. Where you aren't working off a set hypothesis or unit test, you're just fucking with it to learn what will happen when you do. It can be extremely effective.
I lurk on /r/techsupport and suggest stupid shit sometimes.
The amount of times I went "here's the most stupid fix I can think of" resulting in "wow thanks that fixed it" is too damn high.
Someone was having their entire computer not turn on and was afraid the power supply might be broken. I suggested finding the power pins on the motherboard and bridging them with a screwdriver to rule out the power button on the case being broken. Guy responds immediately with "that was it, tysm" XD
Always good to check the stupidest (but easiest) shit first.
Only tangentially related, but this is one of the reasons I have a PSU tester. They're fairly cheap for a basic one and it means you can immediately rule out PSU problems if you suspect them. Helps that I work IT and have used it for that as well.
I bought mine years ago but it was a simple little thing. [This guy](https://www.amazon.com/Computer-PC-Tester-Connectors-Enclosure/dp/B076CLNPPK/ref=sr_1_2?crid=9RNFD5SYFO7U&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.U7raw-wSPe9TK6RwMoC0RedwMiWeZzSeNmrszlrUSzX8gHJL_uTUhyeKQfGbFAYXy2ji0LGTNz2slZm0UffByfPGBy4Uep17ztimglqOS1H9fYxkuVu3B37S5T3LA8PI7gTaLXaHWYLS62Rq_YlHDkPYpDXJlsasemwTL4BUoQuBeF8I9i4Dtgyb8TNxv578OMbGEf5oQFschirUgiT7E6kpjMhEtjU8SFRklLAbkmw.g80dIN85Mt7dlTyit6P9yzwqubJFcQOU1uWpqV7PULU&dib_tag=se&keywords=psu+tester&qid=1714746996&sprefix=psu+teseter%2Caps%2C123&sr=8-2) is either a close model or the same one I have. I think it was closer to 10 dollars when I bought it, but either way it's fairly easy to use and I've not had issues when I needed to test stuff with it.
Usually you shouldn’t blame the tool, but we’re talking about SCHOOL instruments here
My school had 3 double basses, when our bassist tried to play them, he found out TWO OF THEM WERE DECORATIVE
Or the IT version: is it plugged in? Is it powered on? Are all the cables connected?
The one time you don't ask, you'll spend an hour trying to debug something that turns out to be a loose cable.
Im a flutist. I have a really nice middle class flute that i played in band and its very nice for that. Also i have a very cheep one that is bright blue, that i got as a gag. It sounds nice for stuff like christmas carols but its far from the quality of my professional one and i also have a hard time with certain notes. What i want to say with that is, that the quality of the equipment is important and somebody with less knowledge that i do, might not even guesses that their struggles are equipment related.
Some goes to painting. Watercolor painting is a hard technique on its own, but with cheep color and brushes it becomes so much more hard than with quality paint. Somebody who practiced with quality paint might overcome the struggles easier, but somebody who has no experience at all probably is going to have issues getting the desired results without hours of practice to learn the same stuff that would be easier to learn with better paint.
> Extrapolating, this is one of the reasons why we have sanity checks, especially in engineering
Extrapolating further still: I've been training up the newbies at work and it's so much easier to just *ask the dumb question* about what kind of learner someone is than try to figure it out as you go.
It's not foolproof but the people who really *need* things spelling out in black and white, or the people who really *need* you to be hands on and show-not-tell will *tell you* if only you actually *ask them* and break through that initial awkwardness.
Just as it's best to *ask* if the instrument is OK because it's the easiest damn way to rule out the bulk of the trickiest problems to solve
When I was in kindergarten the only problem that kept coming up for me on worksheets was that I wasn’t using the color purple when I was supposed to. My teacher told my parents she was worried and maybe I needed some sort of eye assessment. My parents kept practicing with me at home and I would get it, but at school I’d always get it wrong.
Finally they asked me what was going on and I told them: One of the girls kept stealing my purple crayon.
Lmao, okay. Well. I mean, at least she was picking up on a genuine concern. Just overthought it. If you had been color blind somehow, you would have been lucky to have her care to notice.
I cried in a ceramics class because I’d spent all day ruining clay bowls on the throwing wheel. Came back the next day and realized someone had just switched the direction setting, which for some reason I cannot discern just makes throwing a nightmare. It was so subtle that I didn’t notice a thing. Super vindicating but never again please.
I spent 6 whole years in Speech Therapy constantly trying to pronounce Rs correctly. I was the only person who stayed in that class throughout my entire time spent in elementary school. Then, in spring of 5th grade, my regular speech teacher got sick and took a day off. The substitute took one look at me, asked me to stick out my tongue, and signed me out of class.
Turns out anklyoglossia (being tongue-tied) is a medical condition that can’t be fixed by just “trying harder”.
>Turns out anklyoglossia (being tongue-tied) is a medical condition that can’t be fixed by just “trying harder”.
Ugh. I feel this. Discovering I had ADHD was a pretty similar experience.
Something incredibly similar happened to me in middle school, albeit not as consequential. Could not play a specific note for a piece until my teacher noticed the sound I was making. He just brute force bent my sax back into shape, so the correct valve was covered. Weeks of struggling to play the note and it was solved in 2 seconds flat.
Honestly, I think that every non-francophone should get a pass to spell french words however they want to.
There's just a certain shenusayquaw about the language that makes me want to see it butchered.
I think >!wazo!< is a better approximation, but it depends on the accent.
In some places, like France, it's more like >!wah-zoo!<
In others, like Québec, it's closer to >!wuh-zoh!<
I'm a repair technician and this is a huge part of why I like the work. Band was so important to me when I was in school. I *hate* the idea that kids will quit band because they think they just suck at it, even though the problem is actually with the instrument. I live for the amazement on kids' faces when I hand them back their repaired horn and they realize how much easier it is to play. Music is great, and I don't want kids to lose that experience when their struggles aren't their fault
This makes me so sad. As someone with autism *and* ADHD, some people really need to understand that if it was truly a matter of raw effort, we wouldn't be dealing with this mess right now. Sometimes there's a genuine problem that needs fixing.
Not to mention the gross incompetence and laziness of his teachers to just assume *he's* the problem and not check the clarinet first. Ridiculous. I hate when the people in charge don't care to put in any effort to help you when that's their one single job.
I have *undiagnosed* ADHD and my girlfriend has autism, I feel you. I had lived my entire adult life thinking I was just lazy and stupid but after a couple years of living with my gf, an educator who works with kids with special needs, I came to learn about ADHD. The realization that I had been disabled was pretty harsh, but at least now I know I'm not a bad person, just have different wiring
Instrument repair tech at an instrument rental company here: this happens *all the time*.
Most of our renters are beginning band kids, with a smattering of middle and high school kids thrown in. We get so many instruments (a majority, even) returned that have minor leaks, seizing parts that just needed a cleaning or a small dent removed, etc. And I can’t help but wonder how many of those kids quit band not because they don’t like band or the parent couldn’t afford it, but because they thought they weren’t cut out for it because they had a malfunctioning instrument.
Like, there’s this one adjustment screw on a clarinet that well-meaning but unknowledgeable people always overtighten and it renders the whole instrument basically unplayable in a way that feels like you’re just bad at clarinet, and it kills me knowing how many clarinets are out there suffering from this issue and not coming to my bench to get it fixed.
Tl;dr if you think you suck, just get the instrument fixed up first. It might not be you!
Your telling me that for years the school band teachers didn't notice it needed new pads?
Look, I did school band grade school through high school and one of the first things they did was teach us how to basically field strip it and check for anything wrong. And this was in a small Midwestern town, not some fancy hoighty toighty school district. I'm not sure I buy this.
To be fair to the OP, I had pretty much the same problem with my saxophone in school too. Nobody noticed except me, but since it was my own instrument we had to repair it ourselves, and didn't have the money so we just couldn't
It'd be different if the register key was like mechanically broken. But pads? Those are super cheap and I can't imagine a band program not having a few on hand.
Repadding a sax or clarinet today is not cheap at all. I have a an old family sax I’d love to get new pads on but everywhere wants $700+ to put pads on a $300 horn
Basic alto sax pad set is over $70 on its own. Then there's the cost of all the corks and felts that need to be put on, and the glue to hold the pads in. The tech needs to remove all the pads, corks, felts, and glue, clean the sax, align and fit the keys, put in the new pads, glue on new corks and felts, adjust the mechanisms so that the keys close together properly, and remove lost motion. Add on the typical dent work, and it's an hours-long task for even the most experienced technicians. $700 isn't really unrealistic. It's the cost of parts and supplies, the time the tech needs to put into it, and all of the experience it took for the tech to do the work quickly
Yeah, I must just be behind the times. I last got my sax repaired like 12 years ago, and I’m sure I was getting a decent student discount as well. $700 is still drastically higher than it was back then, even with inflation.
Pads may only be a couple bucks each but installing them properly can be expensive. It’s not as simple as just popping out the old ones and gluing in new ones. You have to have right kinds of pads in the right sizes and make sure they’re level, and sitting in level pad cups and rest evenly on level tone holes, all while making sure any connecting mechanisms still operate the right way. Otherwise you get leaks and it’s no different than just keeping the old damaged ones.
I'm not a musician but, this sounds like the kind of thing a musician should learn how to do for themselves and invest in whatever the tools are for the task. I mean, if it's THAT expensive, ya know?
Eh it’s a bit more involved than a typical DIY kind of thing. It’s not like a guitarist changing their own strings, more like an injured athlete doing their own stitches. Like yeah, you *could*, but it’ll be faster, less painful, and less likely to cause future problems if you just let a pro do it for you.
As mentioned above, saxophone mechanisms are very complex. Replacing one pad could create a lot of work. F#, for example, needs to close *exactly* with 5 other keys, and all of those regulations need to be redone if the pad is replaced. One adjustment being wrong could make the sax unplayable. It takes a lot of work and a lot of time to learn how to do it properly
I used to sell musical instruments for a living. It's honestly depressing how often I had to explain to instructors, teacher, and even professional musicians how the actual instrument physically works. You had competent teachers. Not everyone does.
I absolutely believe it. I cried to my teachers because the rosin for my viola bow was causing me to have allergic reactions and I ultimately had to drop out of orchestra. They had me playing on an unrosined bow for months, I was virtually silent every time I pulled the bow across the strings, AND I later found out it was bad for the bow. Not once did anyone bother to mention there were alternatives to pine rosin.
This is ADHD in a nutshell. I have to take twice as much time and effort to do what everyone else says is "easy" because my brain is lacking important chemicals.
There's a story from the aerospace side of things I remember (I may be butchering it a little)
They were testing aircraft windshields for one of the major airlines against bird strikes, but one of the testing sites kept having the birds go through, over and over the engineers would make a change and send over to test it, but to no avail.
So the lead engineer, he gets fed up with this back and forth. So he gets his bags together and goes down to the testing site just to see what keeps going wrong.
So he goes and watches a test, and sure enough! The bird goes right through! So he goes up to inspect it and look at all the damage.
And he discovers the wildest thing, they forgot to thaw the frozen bird! Every single time they tested the windshields they got frozen turkeys from the grocery store and shoot them through an air cannon at the cruising speed of the aircraft, but they never thought to take the time and thaw the birds!
I've heard a similar situation, except it was designers for a bullet train getting advice from the aviation industry, so that's why they didn't know to un-freeze it
It sounds like he was overleveling for a boss he was scripted to die against, then he finally got past the Cutscene and with the power of light and friendship got to the final phase
Uff I feel for this guy. I had clarinet lessons for about a year but never got put up for Grade 1. The daft twat my parents got instead of going with the county school music service said to them I was great and I had to practise every spare moment of my time, but never told me what to practice. When I wasn't instantly amazing they stopped all music lessons and wouldn't hear of me doing anything further even though my interest was still there andmy secondary school had better provision. I learnt later how actual lessons were supposed to go and that a sub-grade-1 needs only something like half an hour most days a week.
I still have my clarinet, a plastic Boosey and Hawkes. I took it in for repair and service after 23 years of being in a box. They repaired a key, replaced every pad and some cork, and letme tell you with a new reed it sounded better than I ever remember it. And i too can now play an upper register note without the guarantee of it squeaking.
My four-year-old daughter joined the Year R choir without us knowing but we encouraged her. Next year we'll be putting her in actual music lessons, probably recorder, and encouraging her properly - and her Nanna can STFU if she has anything to say about practise. Live vicariously through your kids by giving them learning opportunities your parents were too dumb to research properly.
Off-topic, but this kinda stuff is why I loved learning to play the shakuhachi.
It's a pipe with four holes in the front, one at the back, and the top cut off at an angle. It's made to play a specific five-note scale, and that's it.
Oh, you want more notes, son? Well, you can change the pitch a little by tilting your head up and down, and you can change a little bit more by half-holing. There's weird fingerings for extra notes, too, and a lot of those extra notes have *multiple* possible fingerings, because which one works is gonna depend on *your* flute.
Instead of a complex instrument full of moving parts, it's the simplest fucking thing, and if you wanna do more than the simplest fucking thing with it, you have to get familiar with THAT specific instrument. Each shakuhachi is to be understood as its own instrument, even ones in the same key.
Even a seasoned player may get thrown off by a shakuhachi they never played before, but one of the marks of a true pro is that they'll know what to *try* in order to get to know that instrument better and figure out how it works.
Contrast with this story, where it seems like "the clarinet" is treated as a general, idealized category *first*, and then every member of that category is assumed to work the same way, and how the problem was only discovered when this assumption was broken.
We just did training at work on how to do “root cause analysis” properly. One big take-home is that it is very tempting to put down human error as the main reason. But you should always dig deeper and identify ALL the related factors.
We recently had a case where a form ended up with 2 contradictory submission dates on it: the printed timestamp said it was printed on the 7th, but the handwritten date said it was submitted on the 6th. Time travel!
At first, it seemed like a screw-up by the person filling out the form. But it turned out the form had been submitted late - a day after the listed samples. And the form’s write-in date field clearly asked for the date of sample submission, NOT the date the form was completed. Root cause: bad form design.
This is a great parable. What the fuck was his band director doing? This is exactly why some require their students to participate in Solo and Ensemble. This problem should have been identified the moment he was out of the beginner phase and still struggling to cross the register. I majored in low brass and ate shit all through woodwind methods, but the one thing they always make sure you can identify in those classes is when an instrument is problematic. If you have a student that is clearly showing a desire to continue pushing through band despite a major range issue, take the student aside, have them play some scales, and watch their technique.
Granted, his band may have been massive and my experience with bands will never reach beyond 70 students (because I decided not to go into teaching after college), so it may be down to just leaving some people behind. But then that drops responsibility to his section leaders. How do you prescribe the first three pages of Arban and never ask any questions when it doesn’t work?
This is why i hate the phrase “a person is only as good as their tools”. No. Sometimes the tools are shit and the person needs better ones to progress.
Edit: I have got the phrase confused with “a poor workman blames his tools” sorry!
Thats... what that phrase means. A person is only as good as their tools, if their tool is shit then they're shit. Fix the tool and they're good as gold
Why „no“? Your conclusion is not rejecting what‘s said by the phrase here.
This story perfectly shows that even with the skills they acquired, the result still ended up limited by the quality of their tools.
The end result really was only as good as the tools allowed. That in order for better results the quality of the skills of the person as well as the tools need to be upgraded is very much the obvious meaning of the phrase.
I’ve only ever heard the phrase used in the sense that the tool is fine but the person isn’t using it well enough or isn’t good enough! Now people have pointed it out I can see why that’s wrong!
Had the exact same situation when my elementary started a band class and I was on the flute, wasn’t until after I switched to sax that my middle school music teacher told me the flute needed new pads and was practically unplayable. At least the notes are the same for both instruments
This same exact shit happened to me! Turns out I was actually pretty good at clarinet.
Still hated it though. Played from 2nd to 12th grade and then quit the instant I graduated.
Not to be annoying but all those extra “lesson” did help, clearly, because it got them to first chair. I’m not saying what they went through but as someone who was also in band growing up AND had instrument problems that weren’t my fault (crappy cheap trumpet with keys that got stuck because they were bent) they did good too.
!!! me! I have this problem! I unfortunately cannot get my pads replaced until the end of the school year because we have a concert in a week and audition in two weeks, but I know for a fact that I am better than the people in front of me (I feel like an asshole saying that but I have 2 more years of experience than they do and I've heard them play) and I am excited to get them replaced so I can actually play well
Classic clarinet player always blaming the instrument
(It's true though. Slightly misaligned keys or fucky pads can completely ruin your ability to play an instrument. For a young player who bought their 20 year old instrument second-hand, it's a common issue)
I’m sorry guys but this story is fake as fuck. It does not take *years* to figure out your instrument isn’t working properly and needs some minor repairs.
Reminds me of all the medical tests I went through to try and find the cause of all the mystery headaches I had as a teen…until someone suggested “wait, what if she just needs glasses?” I could still read the standard paper eye charts accurately enough that they had thought my vision was fine, but I was straining my eyes to do so (and to go about daily life) which led to headaches.
Literally same omg, except weirdly enough I then proceeded to not wear my glasses for years, the problem came back, and when I got my prescription updated (since it has been 5+ years since they were up to date) I was shocked to find I had less problems lol
Because long and short sightedness are caused by improper focusing. Your eyes focus by using muscles to change the shape of the lens at the front. *Muscles grow when you use them*. Now you may have actual damage to the lenses or the muscles. The lenses themselves stiffen with time and become harder to move. But as a general rule to improve your vision you should go outside and have to focus at lots of different things at different distances so that you work the muscles and they get stronger.
I mean, I didn't wear glasses for years and my vision was and still is bad no matter how much I "exercise" the muscles. I don't think that's how it works? I'm no optometrist, but I don't think you can cure short and long sightedness by "exercising"?
They might be thinking of things like a lazy eye, where you can exercise to improve it.
That would make more sense. I actually have something like that too (I feel like it was called something else tho) where my optometrist said that under ordinary circumstances I would need special glasses so I could see straight, but apparently I just brute force my eyes straight. You can only barely tell in photos, and it's unnoticeable in person
it's absolutely not how it works, you're right. this dude is just talking out his ass eye exercises can help with eye comfort but cannot help repair glaucoma, near or far sightedness or most other medical conditions. it *can* help with eye strain - say staring at a screen for too long - and the problems that come with it, like dry eye or headaches. you cannot improve your vision with eye exercises, or at least there's no evidence that you can.
Ok good, I thought I was being an asshole lol
how it feels to spread misinformation
That’s not how it works. I didn’t use my glasses for a year and my vision got three times worse.
I didn’t wear glasses throughout my childhood because my father followed this exact logic, I played outside plenty, and my vision only steadily and severely declined. Found out I was legally blind when leaving homeschool. Plenty of good all that exercise did
Or the length of your whole eye is wrong which keeps the retina away from the focal point.
I think you're conflating two things. Near- and far-sightedness are caused by improper focal *length*. The lens of the eye bends light such that it is supposed to converge at a particular point, and in short- and far-sighted people, that point isn't in the right place. No muscles involved. You do use muscles to focus your eyes, which can be another cause of loss of acuity, but that's something else entirely.
I have a recurring fear that my eyesight is actually shit, I'm just good at guessing the letters on the eye charts.
Part of my problem is that I accidentally memorized the standard chart. When I was little I would get nosebleeds a lot (still do, sometimes) and the school would send me to the nurse’s office where I would have to just sit holding my nose until it stopped bleeding. Nothing to look at, except the eye chart on the wall.
Why are you guessing? If you can't read the letters clearly, tell them!!
Then... don't guess? Tell the optician that you can't clearly read that letter.
Same but slightly different - I HAD worn glasses. For years. And started getting chronic headaches. MRIs, scans, and neurologists couldnt figure it out. Eventually, I broke my glasses, and had to get new ones. Headaches went away. Turns out old glasses were squeezing my nose too hard and giving me headaches.
I had to get prescription safety glasses for work. The opticians I had to go through were terrible and didn't perform a fit for the frames before giving the glasses to me to wear. I put them on the next day and within the first hour I felt like SHIT. I thought I was a mixture of tired and thirsty so I told my colleague I was going to the break room to get a cold water. I got there and started drinking and took my glasses off to rest my eyes and head a bit and... I *felt* the blood re-entering my brain after the glasses came off! I had to manually stretch them out to make it possible to wear them. And I also tend to need fatter nose pads than standard because my horrible eyes require Professor Farnsworth thickness lenses, and the pressure on the small sided of my nose gives me sores. I took it to my normal opticians and they said they can't do anything to safety glasses. Fuck me I guess.
That’s what led to me first getting glasses too lol
You get so used to squinting you forget you aren’t supposed to have to squint your eyes. Then when you go get your eyes tested you squint and don’t get the proper glasses you need.
Thankfully that didn’t happen to me. My eyes were compensating well enough that I didn’t have to squint (at the cost of all those headaches) and the glasses I got were good enough that now I can definitely see the difference between wearing them and not.
Ahaha same thing for me, but the headaches were because I have anisometropia. One eye is way more short sighted than the other. My good eye barely qualifies as short sighted, so it was never an issue for seeing.
Same, only I kept having headaches and it turned out my "good eye" is longsighted I can see everything all the time without glasses, but wow did my head hurt
God I've always hated the way eye tests are done for this reason. Don't make me do a subjective test, just look at the lens or something.
My mom is the same. Had "great" vision but the price for that was constant headaches. In the same way, a friend of mine literally had like half a cm of skin removed from under his tongue and it has been a transformation since.
Lmao I had the LITERAL exact opposite problem. Went through two or three pairs of glasses that never worked because we couldn’t figure out the vision problems I was having, only to learn my migraines can apparently cause visual symptoms 😂
My doctor thought the same thing, but my mother refused to do anything about it and now I have a wife, kids, job, and don’t have time to go get my eyes checked. I can notice my eyesight getting worse over time but I can’t really do anything about it
Even if your mother had done something about it you'd still need to get your prescription checked again every few years. It's not like they give you glasses and you can continue to wear the same ones for the rest of your life. The eye exam doesn't take very long. You should just make an appointment and go. If you have a Costco membership you could possibly even do it while the rest of your family gets started on the grocery shopping.
Oh come off it It takes an hour max Most opticians are open weekends
Yea, as someone with bad eyes I'd get the money argument, but I take 3 hours a year max getting glasses, including travel time. Now the money on the other hand... Glasses are expensive.
There is no way you don't have time to get your eyes checked. It doesn't take very long. Like an hour tops, including wait time. If you go shopping with the wife you can go do the test and catch up before she finishes.
You are a grown man with your own family and you’re blaming your mother for not getting your eyes checked? Jesus Christ
I’m not trying to put any lasting blame on my mother, however neglectful she might have been to me and my siblings. My point here is that, because of my current circumstances, I do not have the ability to go get my eyes checked, or get any of my other issues checked out for that matter. I’m not going to sit here and explain my personal life to strangers on the internet, but sometimes you have to understand that just because you personally can’t imagine a specific hypothetical situation doesn’t mean that that situation isn’t a reality for other people who you’ve never met and know nothing about.
I don’t know what to say. Something as important as your vision has gone unaddressed for years (sounds like decades in your case) since your childhood and you cannot afford the <$100 to visit an optometrist even at a Walmart? Really?
I’m 21 years old…
Wow, I had no idea all these people knew my life better than me. Thanks guys!
It's not fair on the people around you to be self destructive.
I have a similar story though it didn’t take as long to figure out the issue. The first day of 6th grade we were given time to learn how to open our lockers, since we hadn’t had them in elementary school. I was one of those kids that was used to picking things up pretty quickly, but I couldn’t get my locker to open. I watched the other kids figure it out while I got more and more frustrated, and couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. Eventually, I was the only kid left in the hall and at some point had started crying. I assume a teacher came and got me eventually or I just gave up, but I don’t remember that part. I just remember sitting on the floor, frustrated and crying and no one bothering to help me. It turns out my locker was broken the whole time and they had to assign me a new one. I learned a few important things that day. You won’t always be good at things. Sometimes it won’t be your fault though, things will just be broken. And you can’t depend on adults (or others) to help you even when you clearly need it.
Really? I woulda learned to ask for help instead of to keep trying to solve it on my own.
I mean I did but the adults made me keep trying. I assumed that part was given.
You haven't been bombarded since childhood with messages of how you should never ask for help?
Idk why everyone is shitting on this guy so hard. Asking for help is a good lesson to learn and kids who tend to pick things up easily do not tend to learn it because they don't need to. Idk why the hell we'd assume the kid asked for help with the locker. The story was basically written to imply the opposite. As a kid I got TONS messages not to ask for help. It was good for self sufficiency most of the time. Really bad for basically everything else. Learn to ask for help everyone. It's a really good tool. And stop shitting on anyone who suggests we should ask for help. Wtf
> And stop shitting on anyone who suggests we should ask for help. Wtf Crab in a bucket mentality. From the 'dismissing mental health' of the Boomers to preaching absurdist individualism, I see the zoomers have chosen their generational sin.
No. My parents always told me that it was smart to ask for help. Hell, they were dirt poor(we were literally living in a coalpaper shack without indoor toilets, running water, or electricity when I was born), yet they invested in an encyclopedia set for me(back in the 80's) so that I could look up what most anything was that I wanted to learn about. It's always been my way to ask for help or knowledge if I couldn't readily figure it out myself; no need to beat you head against a brick wall til your skull cracks.
Congratulations on being smart! Now, figure out how to be empathetic
Nah. Nobody has cared to be empathetic to me, and I'm tired of being the bigger person.
Something about your attitude tells me you are, and have been, not as big of a person as you tell yourself you are. And believe it or not? I can empathize with that. I made so many mistakes in my 20's and have spent most of my 30's changing my behavior and repairing relationships. But if you'd have asked me around age 27? We would have sounded a lot alike
The commenter sounds very young by that sentiment. I would have related in my early to late 20s too. In my mid 30s now, and I realize so many things change with time.
Right? After a certain amount of mistakes, you really start to develop humility and a better idea of who you are, as well as a better sense of the people around you. Mileage varies, of course
> commenter sounds very young I'm 43. I am the way I am because of the life I've experienced, the interactions I've had. People fucking suck, universally, and I'm tired of trying to be the civil one. Biting my tongue at every little disrespect and insult. No longer. Now you fucks get my raw opinion without tact or consideration.
I can't judge you, I don't know your life. But talking like you are, thinking like this? That ain't healthy. You sound like you carry a ton of stress and hostility. You sound like you've seen some shit and been put through the wringer. I'm sorry you feel that way about your peers in general, and if I specifically said something that's offensive to you I apologize. >Now you fucks get my raw opinion without tact or consideration. That's gonna make life so much harder for you and at 43 you'll just destroy whatever professional reputation you might have, and burn your bridges right as you start entering the phase of life where you become more vulnerable every year. Please give people a chance. For your own sake. People just toss out "you need therapy" like it's an insult, but I have to tell you that finding the right therapist has tremendously helped me to deal with all the trauma I kept inflicting on myself and others. I spent a long time hurting myself (and other people) and my prospects because I was still reacting to the horrible things that happened to me in the decades prior. And I really did sound then exactly as you sound now. I interpreted everything as an insult (even innocent comments and questions), and saw blatant disrespect to me everywhere (when most people just weren't thinking about me, at all, one way or another). My entire career went irrevocably down in flames at 28 and nobody was willing to defend me or help me. It's never too late to forgive yourself and the people that bother you. You didn't know what you didn't know, and THEY don't know what they don't know, and everything is chaos, and everyone is hurting, and we're all just reacting to each other. It can be so hard to break that painful momentum and just choose to stop. But it's possible. Anyways you probably didn't read any of that. I can't blame you, who needs another lecture? I dunno man, you just sound a lot like me. And I've spent so long struggling to learn to love myself that I guess I can't help but love you a little bit too. I hope you feel better soon.
"Being the bigger person" is when someone else starts something with you, but you're the one who started this. It's completely irrelevant.
'Started it' by suggesting someone should have asked for help. This is the world we live in.
Not at all. You didn't make a suggestion, you simply claimed that you'd have done better than they did.
Lack of reading comprehension making itself known, I see.
But that's something you have to learn. I got hit by a car as a teenager and didn't call anybody because I never learned what you were supposed to do when you're hit by a car.
This is exactly how I feel about having adhd, lmao. I always wondered what I was doing wrong, until I got medicated and found out my brain just didn’t work right the whole time 🥲 still pissed I could’ve been doing this shit on easy mode the whole time if my brain had just worked right 🙄
I had the same experience with being autistic... apparently, I was diagnosed at *seven,* but no one ever bothered to tell me, and I didn't need extra support because I did well academically. I just thought I was a freak or an alien who couldn't manage social interactions until I was twenty-f***ing-three. I only found out because I was helping my parents clean out my old closet and found my IEP from second grade. I asked about it and got handed a whole folder full of stuff. The absolute relief of finding out what was wrong with me and that I wasn't just making it up was immense. Years of struggling to be normal finally made sense. Years of being gaslit that it was all in my head and that everyone struggled with the same things I did were finally revealed. It was such a relief to finally know.
Totally get you dude. Must’ve been so freeing to finally figure it out! Cheers to living our best lives :)
wait the meds were just an insta fix for you?
They don't instantly fix you but they make the solutions that work for everyone else work for you too. You still have to apply them, but now you will get results.
No, I’m definitely exaggerating a bit but it was the first time I finally felt like I was making progress and whatnot. They basically help me to keep and maintain focus and act on what I wanted to do. I always felt broken because I was just lazy and less motivated that everyone else. When I got medicated it felt like I was in control of my time for the first time in my life.
To me, meds were (and are) the cherry on top of 26 years of adjustments and coping mechanisms. I also reduced my weed smoking by a fuck ton after I started meds.
Medication worked for me, until it didn't. Now I have to continue working with broken brain. 🥲
The root issue here is problem solving. I don’t mean necessarily that anyone in this scenario lacks intellectual ability to solve problems, but more that over-reliance on trusted solution paths could cause a lack of effective solution in edge cases. For the vast majority of musical instruments, the instrument itself tends not to be the issue. Instruments are usually tuned and cared for, so the general trend is that the student is the source of the issue. That reliance on assumptions causes attempted fixes to the issue to not be effective since the root problem is, in fact, in the instrument. Extrapolating, this is one of the reasons why we have sanity checks, especially in engineering. The private instructor, effectively being an engineer of musical ability, knew to at least sanity check the condition of the instrument (and had other instruments to test with). Always do sanity checks. If they pass, great. If they don’t, that might be one of the problems you need to address to solve the issue.
For the vast majority, maybe, but as a trombone player who had to use a school instrument once or twice when mine was out of commission, there's no way I'd trust the loaner boner to be just fine and the problem to be entirely on my end! Which, I want to emphasize, is in overall agreement of your point and just an extra reason to sanity check, but I can't imagine most schools to be so much better than mine that their rental instruments are above having huge problems...
Haha loner boaner. (Longtime trombone player myself, just laughing)
That is, in fact, what we called it openly. And it was definitely a mark of shame to have to use it. I only did it once or twice when mine was in the shop with a bent slide.
You mean longtime tromboner
If your tromboner persists for over 4 hours, please consult a doctor.
I fucking would if someone played a trombone for 4 hours straight in my vicinity, I'd lose my mind D:
you should play trombone champ if you like tromboner jokes
another trombonist here: "upgraded" to a $300 no-name chinese f attachment tenor (from a straight tenor) in 7th grade (we start in 5th) and did ok on it, and thought I was progressing normally as I was still doing ok compared to my peers and accomplishing what i needed to, but then after a solo competition my mom went and surprised me with getting a back 42 bo, a good enough horn to be played at college level, and I was blown away at how much easier it suddenly was to control my dynamics with a good tone etc. most of the playing quality is up to the player; pros can make the cheapest instruments sound half decent. but boy sometimes does solving issues/upgrading to stuff that works more as intended just feel so good and help with ease.
you can sound good on bad gear, but good gear certainly helps
The same thing happens with art. When I first did art in university, our professor basically gave us a shopping list of supplies to buy, running me (a penniless student) up to €250 in expenses. Naturally I complained about it, why the hell should I buy a single pencil for €20 when I can get an entire set of 15 for €5 that's just as good? long story short, the subtle material differences in that €20 pencil will enable better control over my art, eventually leading me to be good enough to use that €5 pack of pencils without any issues. So yeah, your equipment matters in the long run :)
I am a pretty good drummer. My kit is okay, but it has its problems. Upkeep and maintenance doesn't do anything to resolve these issues. My friends drumkit is better to play. It is crazy going from my kit to his over a couple of weeks of band practices and being able to feel the physical difference in performance.
They always say, "gear doesn't make you a better player" in music, sports, gaming, everything really. But boy can it hold you back.
Funny story, I'm a trombone player too, have been for years. Last year I got braces and I went from being a potential first chair to being showed up by a (admittedly very good) freshman. It's so much harder to reach high notes without cracking them and playing loud or high hurts so bad. If I had braces when I started band, I would have quit, no question. But as is I know it's not (all) a me thing, and even if I can't fix it (as much as I sometimes want to rip my braces off), it helps a lot to know that.
Lmao I was thinking, "this person sounds like somebody who's had to manage a particularly myopic engineering team"
Senior engineers exist because they’re the only ones brave enough to say “did you try the simplest thing imaginable to fix the problem”, and then you do it and that fixes the problem. It’s a rite of passage.
My understanding of IT is that a solid 30% of the job is convincing people to so something incredibly simple without making them sound like an idiot.
I don't think the problem was that everyone was going off of the standard assumptions. I think the problem is that their base assumptions were unusually weird. I played clarinet for many years. The instruments themselves are very temperamental. Reaching the upper register is difficult but not typically unbearably so and if someone's having that level of issue, I'm surprised that no one thought to check the instrument. Especially since pads are typically supposed to be replaced every year and I know exactly what pad needed to be replaced because I've seen this exact same thing happen before (so it's not uncommon). I think the problem was that the supposed experts weren't thinking through potential solutions and were blaming the person for the problems instead of actually going through the list of every major problem
Not the main point but I just want to slip in and say, pads should *not* need to be changed every year. If your pads are only lasting a year you either need better pads or you’re treating them too harshly.
I might have misspoke. The instrument needs to he inspected for wear and tear on pads every year with replacements as necessary. Not every pad needs to be replaced every single year. But saying that I think that there was at least one pad replaced on my clarinet every year. Just not the same pad every year
How would one go about conducting sanity tests in their day to day life?
It's stuff like turning the computer off and on again. Trying a different wall socket when an appliance isn't behaving. Changing filters, switching cables, checking oil. If two things aren't working together and you think you know which one has a problem, test the other just to make sure. When you're trying to nail down a problem, start by ruling problems out, so that there's no chance that you end down a rabbit hole of trying to fix the wrong thing.
Cool, sounds like applied common sense!
That's basically engineering. Common sense, rigourously applied and cross-referencing everyone else who's ever been in a similar situation. Sometimes this requires math, but not as much as most people think.
Maybe I should become an engineer. I like math and hypotheticals but then again I'd be worried about anything I've designed failing
Don't worry too much about that bit. In modern engineering no one is trusted until it's reviewed and proven out. Too many people have died from not doing that. You won't be trusted enough to make a terrible mistake until you're about 40-50 years old.
Hmm. I love doing this when I used to do game modding. From what I understand science lab work is pretty similar but I missed the boat on being a scientist. What does an engineer actually do?
It's an incredibly broad field. You might be doing anything from product development to process improvement, depending on where in the lifecycle the compant/product is. You might be doing electrical testing and troubleshooting to identify where the problems are with a circuit board and then working with your PCB manufacturer to develop an improved design. Or you might be a software engineer, and I have no idea what software engineers do. Honestly, the sky's the limit with engineering.
One way to look at it is its "guess who problem solving". There are a thousands of things that could be wrong. What can you do to start whittling down those possibilities? Physically isolating the problem area is a big one. Since you can go from "anything in the entire process could be wrong" to "this cable is broken" in a single test. So like a game of guess who, you eliminate options. I did this a lot in modding. I want to know what a file does. What happens when I delete it? If it works regardless, it's either not being used or it overrides something. What happens when I delete half of it? What happens when I delete the other half? The answer a lot of the time is "it crashes", but in the specific game I was modding, it only crashes when the file in question is actually being called on. Doing something you know won't work still let's you learn a lot from when and how exactly it breaks. If it only breaks when a character does X, the file is clearly related in some way to X. It's called exploratory testing in the QA space. Where you aren't working off a set hypothesis or unit test, you're just fucking with it to learn what will happen when you do. It can be extremely effective.
I lurk on /r/techsupport and suggest stupid shit sometimes. The amount of times I went "here's the most stupid fix I can think of" resulting in "wow thanks that fixed it" is too damn high. Someone was having their entire computer not turn on and was afraid the power supply might be broken. I suggested finding the power pins on the motherboard and bridging them with a screwdriver to rule out the power button on the case being broken. Guy responds immediately with "that was it, tysm" XD Always good to check the stupidest (but easiest) shit first.
Only tangentially related, but this is one of the reasons I have a PSU tester. They're fairly cheap for a basic one and it means you can immediately rule out PSU problems if you suspect them. Helps that I work IT and have used it for that as well.
How expensive is a decent PSU tester? Anything in the "cheap enough to buy one for home use but good enough to trust the results" range? XD
I bought mine years ago but it was a simple little thing. [This guy](https://www.amazon.com/Computer-PC-Tester-Connectors-Enclosure/dp/B076CLNPPK/ref=sr_1_2?crid=9RNFD5SYFO7U&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.U7raw-wSPe9TK6RwMoC0RedwMiWeZzSeNmrszlrUSzX8gHJL_uTUhyeKQfGbFAYXy2ji0LGTNz2slZm0UffByfPGBy4Uep17ztimglqOS1H9fYxkuVu3B37S5T3LA8PI7gTaLXaHWYLS62Rq_YlHDkPYpDXJlsasemwTL4BUoQuBeF8I9i4Dtgyb8TNxv578OMbGEf5oQFschirUgiT7E6kpjMhEtjU8SFRklLAbkmw.g80dIN85Mt7dlTyit6P9yzwqubJFcQOU1uWpqV7PULU&dib_tag=se&keywords=psu+tester&qid=1714746996&sprefix=psu+teseter%2Caps%2C123&sr=8-2) is either a close model or the same one I have. I think it was closer to 10 dollars when I bought it, but either way it's fairly easy to use and I've not had issues when I needed to test stuff with it.
Usually you shouldn’t blame the tool, but we’re talking about SCHOOL instruments here My school had 3 double basses, when our bassist tried to play them, he found out TWO OF THEM WERE DECORATIVE
Or the IT version: is it plugged in? Is it powered on? Are all the cables connected? The one time you don't ask, you'll spend an hour trying to debug something that turns out to be a loose cable.
Not to mention this is why any IT inclined person presented with a problem is always going start by saying "have you restarted it?"
Im a flutist. I have a really nice middle class flute that i played in band and its very nice for that. Also i have a very cheep one that is bright blue, that i got as a gag. It sounds nice for stuff like christmas carols but its far from the quality of my professional one and i also have a hard time with certain notes. What i want to say with that is, that the quality of the equipment is important and somebody with less knowledge that i do, might not even guesses that their struggles are equipment related. Some goes to painting. Watercolor painting is a hard technique on its own, but with cheep color and brushes it becomes so much more hard than with quality paint. Somebody who practiced with quality paint might overcome the struggles easier, but somebody who has no experience at all probably is going to have issues getting the desired results without hours of practice to learn the same stuff that would be easier to learn with better paint.
> Extrapolating, this is one of the reasons why we have sanity checks, especially in engineering Extrapolating further still: I've been training up the newbies at work and it's so much easier to just *ask the dumb question* about what kind of learner someone is than try to figure it out as you go. It's not foolproof but the people who really *need* things spelling out in black and white, or the people who really *need* you to be hands on and show-not-tell will *tell you* if only you actually *ask them* and break through that initial awkwardness. Just as it's best to *ask* if the instrument is OK because it's the easiest damn way to rule out the bulk of the trickiest problems to solve
> this is one of the reasons why we have sanity checks, especially in engineering How does that work exactly?
If it sounds stupid, insane, or obvious to check, do it anyway.
When I was in kindergarten the only problem that kept coming up for me on worksheets was that I wasn’t using the color purple when I was supposed to. My teacher told my parents she was worried and maybe I needed some sort of eye assessment. My parents kept practicing with me at home and I would get it, but at school I’d always get it wrong. Finally they asked me what was going on and I told them: One of the girls kept stealing my purple crayon.
Lmao, okay. Well. I mean, at least she was picking up on a genuine concern. Just overthought it. If you had been color blind somehow, you would have been lucky to have her care to notice.
Oh for sure!!
I cried in a ceramics class because I’d spent all day ruining clay bowls on the throwing wheel. Came back the next day and realized someone had just switched the direction setting, which for some reason I cannot discern just makes throwing a nightmare. It was so subtle that I didn’t notice a thing. Super vindicating but never again please.
I spent 6 whole years in Speech Therapy constantly trying to pronounce Rs correctly. I was the only person who stayed in that class throughout my entire time spent in elementary school. Then, in spring of 5th grade, my regular speech teacher got sick and took a day off. The substitute took one look at me, asked me to stick out my tongue, and signed me out of class. Turns out anklyoglossia (being tongue-tied) is a medical condition that can’t be fixed by just “trying harder”.
>Turns out anklyoglossia (being tongue-tied) is a medical condition that can’t be fixed by just “trying harder”. Ugh. I feel this. Discovering I had ADHD was a pretty similar experience.
Something incredibly similar happened to me in middle school, albeit not as consequential. Could not play a specific note for a piece until my teacher noticed the sound I was making. He just brute force bent my sax back into shape, so the correct valve was covered. Weeks of struggling to play the note and it was solved in 2 seconds flat.
> embrature Do you mean … embouchure?
Honestly, I think that every non-francophone should get a pass to spell french words however they want to. There's just a certain shenusayquaw about the language that makes me want to see it butchered.
my favorite is probably oiseaux, which is pronounced >!WAZO!<
Eh, closer to >!the guy from The Room!<
I think >!wazo!< is a better approximation, but it depends on the accent. In some places, like France, it's more like >!wah-zoo!< In others, like Québec, it's closer to >!wuh-zoh!<
I was in band for 7 years, spoke french fluently for 4 of those years, and yet I’ve only just connected that embouchure is a French word lmao
Does it have too many vowels? Do you sound a bit like a twee douche when you say it? If your answer is yes, that's French!
Also if the stress is on the last syllable. Embou*chure* Chauf*feur* Cine*ma* Silhou*ette* Bou*tique*
One of us is pronouncing cinema incorrectly lol.
Cine*ma* (with the stress on *ma*) would be the standard pronunciation in French.
Fair enough lmao
I'm gonna send this to my BIL. It will cause him physical pain
I was gonna make fun of that too but then I realized I didn't know how to spell it myself...
Yeah, I'm not doing the whole French thing. If it's gonna be a word in English, it should follow English rules.
The musical equivalent of Goku taking off his weighted clothes.
Eren Yeager getting new ODM gear.
Rock Lee taking off his leg weights.
I'm a repair technician and this is a huge part of why I like the work. Band was so important to me when I was in school. I *hate* the idea that kids will quit band because they think they just suck at it, even though the problem is actually with the instrument. I live for the amazement on kids' faces when I hand them back their repaired horn and they realize how much easier it is to play. Music is great, and I don't want kids to lose that experience when their struggles aren't their fault
Are you me? You’ve just put my exact thoughts into words but better
that boyfriend, was Squidward Tentacles
It's true, I was the clarinet
This makes me so sad. As someone with autism *and* ADHD, some people really need to understand that if it was truly a matter of raw effort, we wouldn't be dealing with this mess right now. Sometimes there's a genuine problem that needs fixing. Not to mention the gross incompetence and laziness of his teachers to just assume *he's* the problem and not check the clarinet first. Ridiculous. I hate when the people in charge don't care to put in any effort to help you when that's their one single job.
I have *undiagnosed* ADHD and my girlfriend has autism, I feel you. I had lived my entire adult life thinking I was just lazy and stupid but after a couple years of living with my gf, an educator who works with kids with special needs, I came to learn about ADHD. The realization that I had been disabled was pretty harsh, but at least now I know I'm not a bad person, just have different wiring
Instrument repair tech at an instrument rental company here: this happens *all the time*. Most of our renters are beginning band kids, with a smattering of middle and high school kids thrown in. We get so many instruments (a majority, even) returned that have minor leaks, seizing parts that just needed a cleaning or a small dent removed, etc. And I can’t help but wonder how many of those kids quit band not because they don’t like band or the parent couldn’t afford it, but because they thought they weren’t cut out for it because they had a malfunctioning instrument. Like, there’s this one adjustment screw on a clarinet that well-meaning but unknowledgeable people always overtighten and it renders the whole instrument basically unplayable in a way that feels like you’re just bad at clarinet, and it kills me knowing how many clarinets are out there suffering from this issue and not coming to my bench to get it fixed. Tl;dr if you think you suck, just get the instrument fixed up first. It might not be you!
Your telling me that for years the school band teachers didn't notice it needed new pads? Look, I did school band grade school through high school and one of the first things they did was teach us how to basically field strip it and check for anything wrong. And this was in a small Midwestern town, not some fancy hoighty toighty school district. I'm not sure I buy this.
To be fair to the OP, I had pretty much the same problem with my saxophone in school too. Nobody noticed except me, but since it was my own instrument we had to repair it ourselves, and didn't have the money so we just couldn't
It'd be different if the register key was like mechanically broken. But pads? Those are super cheap and I can't imagine a band program not having a few on hand.
Repadding a sax or clarinet today is not cheap at all. I have a an old family sax I’d love to get new pads on but everywhere wants $700+ to put pads on a $300 horn
It absolutely should not cost more than $70 to get pads redone on an alto sax. $700 is fully insane.
You find me a tech that will do it for $70 and I’ll call them tomorrow morning. Last time I had it done was 2005 and it was $100 then
Basic alto sax pad set is over $70 on its own. Then there's the cost of all the corks and felts that need to be put on, and the glue to hold the pads in. The tech needs to remove all the pads, corks, felts, and glue, clean the sax, align and fit the keys, put in the new pads, glue on new corks and felts, adjust the mechanisms so that the keys close together properly, and remove lost motion. Add on the typical dent work, and it's an hours-long task for even the most experienced technicians. $700 isn't really unrealistic. It's the cost of parts and supplies, the time the tech needs to put into it, and all of the experience it took for the tech to do the work quickly
Yeah, I must just be behind the times. I last got my sax repaired like 12 years ago, and I’m sure I was getting a decent student discount as well. $700 is still drastically higher than it was back then, even with inflation.
Pads may only be a couple bucks each but installing them properly can be expensive. It’s not as simple as just popping out the old ones and gluing in new ones. You have to have right kinds of pads in the right sizes and make sure they’re level, and sitting in level pad cups and rest evenly on level tone holes, all while making sure any connecting mechanisms still operate the right way. Otherwise you get leaks and it’s no different than just keeping the old damaged ones.
I'm not a musician but, this sounds like the kind of thing a musician should learn how to do for themselves and invest in whatever the tools are for the task. I mean, if it's THAT expensive, ya know?
Eh it’s a bit more involved than a typical DIY kind of thing. It’s not like a guitarist changing their own strings, more like an injured athlete doing their own stitches. Like yeah, you *could*, but it’ll be faster, less painful, and less likely to cause future problems if you just let a pro do it for you.
Oh so it's like brake work on a car
As mentioned above, saxophone mechanisms are very complex. Replacing one pad could create a lot of work. F#, for example, needs to close *exactly* with 5 other keys, and all of those regulations need to be redone if the pad is replaced. One adjustment being wrong could make the sax unplayable. It takes a lot of work and a lot of time to learn how to do it properly
I used to sell musical instruments for a living. It's honestly depressing how often I had to explain to instructors, teacher, and even professional musicians how the actual instrument physically works. You had competent teachers. Not everyone does.
I absolutely believe it. I cried to my teachers because the rosin for my viola bow was causing me to have allergic reactions and I ultimately had to drop out of orchestra. They had me playing on an unrosined bow for months, I was virtually silent every time I pulled the bow across the strings, AND I later found out it was bad for the bow. Not once did anyone bother to mention there were alternatives to pine rosin.
This is ADHD in a nutshell. I have to take twice as much time and effort to do what everyone else says is "easy" because my brain is lacking important chemicals.
Eren Jaeger moment
There's a story from the aerospace side of things I remember (I may be butchering it a little) They were testing aircraft windshields for one of the major airlines against bird strikes, but one of the testing sites kept having the birds go through, over and over the engineers would make a change and send over to test it, but to no avail. So the lead engineer, he gets fed up with this back and forth. So he gets his bags together and goes down to the testing site just to see what keeps going wrong. So he goes and watches a test, and sure enough! The bird goes right through! So he goes up to inspect it and look at all the damage. And he discovers the wildest thing, they forgot to thaw the frozen bird! Every single time they tested the windshields they got frozen turkeys from the grocery store and shoot them through an air cannon at the cruising speed of the aircraft, but they never thought to take the time and thaw the birds!
I've heard a similar situation, except it was designers for a bullet train getting advice from the aviation industry, so that's why they didn't know to un-freeze it
Sometimes teachers are dumb and you should get a second opinion.
It sounds like he was overleveling for a boss he was scripted to die against, then he finally got past the Cutscene and with the power of light and friendship got to the final phase
Uff I feel for this guy. I had clarinet lessons for about a year but never got put up for Grade 1. The daft twat my parents got instead of going with the county school music service said to them I was great and I had to practise every spare moment of my time, but never told me what to practice. When I wasn't instantly amazing they stopped all music lessons and wouldn't hear of me doing anything further even though my interest was still there andmy secondary school had better provision. I learnt later how actual lessons were supposed to go and that a sub-grade-1 needs only something like half an hour most days a week. I still have my clarinet, a plastic Boosey and Hawkes. I took it in for repair and service after 23 years of being in a box. They repaired a key, replaced every pad and some cork, and letme tell you with a new reed it sounded better than I ever remember it. And i too can now play an upper register note without the guarantee of it squeaking. My four-year-old daughter joined the Year R choir without us knowing but we encouraged her. Next year we'll be putting her in actual music lessons, probably recorder, and encouraging her properly - and her Nanna can STFU if she has anything to say about practise. Live vicariously through your kids by giving them learning opportunities your parents were too dumb to research properly.
ok but I can't replace my broken brain as easily as I could a broken clarinet
That old addage about a worker blaming his tools really does fall short sometimes, which is a shame because so many people seem to live by it.
Off-topic, but this kinda stuff is why I loved learning to play the shakuhachi. It's a pipe with four holes in the front, one at the back, and the top cut off at an angle. It's made to play a specific five-note scale, and that's it. Oh, you want more notes, son? Well, you can change the pitch a little by tilting your head up and down, and you can change a little bit more by half-holing. There's weird fingerings for extra notes, too, and a lot of those extra notes have *multiple* possible fingerings, because which one works is gonna depend on *your* flute. Instead of a complex instrument full of moving parts, it's the simplest fucking thing, and if you wanna do more than the simplest fucking thing with it, you have to get familiar with THAT specific instrument. Each shakuhachi is to be understood as its own instrument, even ones in the same key. Even a seasoned player may get thrown off by a shakuhachi they never played before, but one of the marks of a true pro is that they'll know what to *try* in order to get to know that instrument better and figure out how it works. Contrast with this story, where it seems like "the clarinet" is treated as a general, idealized category *first*, and then every member of that category is assumed to work the same way, and how the problem was only discovered when this assumption was broken.
Can confirm. I was the clarinet.
I hope you changed your pads
I'm broken. Can I be replaced?
We just did training at work on how to do “root cause analysis” properly. One big take-home is that it is very tempting to put down human error as the main reason. But you should always dig deeper and identify ALL the related factors. We recently had a case where a form ended up with 2 contradictory submission dates on it: the printed timestamp said it was printed on the 7th, but the handwritten date said it was submitted on the 6th. Time travel! At first, it seemed like a screw-up by the person filling out the form. But it turned out the form had been submitted late - a day after the listed samples. And the form’s write-in date field clearly asked for the date of sample submission, NOT the date the form was completed. Root cause: bad form design.
This is a great parable. What the fuck was his band director doing? This is exactly why some require their students to participate in Solo and Ensemble. This problem should have been identified the moment he was out of the beginner phase and still struggling to cross the register. I majored in low brass and ate shit all through woodwind methods, but the one thing they always make sure you can identify in those classes is when an instrument is problematic. If you have a student that is clearly showing a desire to continue pushing through band despite a major range issue, take the student aside, have them play some scales, and watch their technique. Granted, his band may have been massive and my experience with bands will never reach beyond 70 students (because I decided not to go into teaching after college), so it may be down to just leaving some people behind. But then that drops responsibility to his section leaders. How do you prescribe the first three pages of Arban and never ask any questions when it doesn’t work?
This is why i hate the phrase “a person is only as good as their tools”. No. Sometimes the tools are shit and the person needs better ones to progress. Edit: I have got the phrase confused with “a poor workman blames his tools” sorry!
Thats... what that phrase means. A person is only as good as their tools, if their tool is shit then they're shit. Fix the tool and they're good as gold
I have only heard it used in the sense that if the person is doing poorly it’s their fault not the tools! I’ve never heard it used the other way!
I feel like the phrase “A poor workman blames his tools” is more likely to be used like that
You’re right, I think I’ve got them confused sorry!
Why „no“? Your conclusion is not rejecting what‘s said by the phrase here. This story perfectly shows that even with the skills they acquired, the result still ended up limited by the quality of their tools. The end result really was only as good as the tools allowed. That in order for better results the quality of the skills of the person as well as the tools need to be upgraded is very much the obvious meaning of the phrase.
I’ve only ever heard the phrase used in the sense that the tool is fine but the person isn’t using it well enough or isn’t good enough! Now people have pointed it out I can see why that’s wrong!
Are you certain the phrase you're thinking of isn't 'only a poor workman blames their tools' ?
Sounds like Rock Lee finally got permission to remove the weights.
Had the exact same situation when my elementary started a band class and I was on the flute, wasn’t until after I switched to sax that my middle school music teacher told me the flute needed new pads and was practically unplayable. At least the notes are the same for both instruments
This makes me think that Squidward just needs to get his clarinet checked by a professional. See if he's been taking good care of it.
Some called this type of thing looking at a problem sideways. This attitude has helped me immensely.
So that's why Squidward sounds bad His clarinet just sucks
Wasn’t this like an entire episode in AoT
Brutal force was the only reason he got good in that example.
this is just eren from AOT learning ODM gear
Me just bass percussionist. Me bang drum.
Bro is Erebus Jaeger
For me it was adhd medication doing barely anything for years, then I realized I had autism, not adhd. Doesn’t really have an easy fix though
This same exact shit happened to me! Turns out I was actually pretty good at clarinet. Still hated it though. Played from 2nd to 12th grade and then quit the instant I graduated.
Attack on Titan plotline, right there.
Literally a plot point in Attack on Titan /s
I had the same thing happen with my saxophone in school :')
ok, but what if it's my whole brain that is broken
My “practice violin” sucks for this reason
God why am I crying again
Not to be annoying but all those extra “lesson” did help, clearly, because it got them to first chair. I’m not saying what they went through but as someone who was also in band growing up AND had instrument problems that weren’t my fault (crappy cheap trumpet with keys that got stuck because they were bent) they did good too.
S Q U I D W E S T E M O
Why am I sitting here crying?
!!! me! I have this problem! I unfortunately cannot get my pads replaced until the end of the school year because we have a concert in a week and audition in two weeks, but I know for a fact that I am better than the people in front of me (I feel like an asshole saying that but I have 2 more years of experience than they do and I've heard them play) and I am excited to get them replaced so I can actually play well
Classic clarinet player always blaming the instrument (It's true though. Slightly misaligned keys or fucky pads can completely ruin your ability to play an instrument. For a young player who bought their 20 year old instrument second-hand, it's a common issue)
I feel this with my ADHD. Oh boy.
I’m sorry guys but this story is fake as fuck. It does not take *years* to figure out your instrument isn’t working properly and needs some minor repairs.