Allen Loomis C Melody

pete

pete

Brassica Oleracea
Staff member
Administrator
Loomis Double Resonance "C Melody"

C melody? Probably not. I've only heard of the rather famous Double-Resonance Alto. Pics:

http://www.speakeasy.org/~granlund/Loomis/Loomis.html

Shame there isn't a pic of the neck, but if you look at other pics (such as in Lindemeyer's Celebrating the Saxophone), you know that the Double-Resonance alto has a rather long bell because it's got a low A key.

Here's a nice article to go with it: http://www.music.umich.edu/research/stearns_collection/Newsletters/Stearns01-2.pdf

Again, it's absolutely amazing what you find if you're not looking for it.

(Oh. The reason I stuck this under "Conn" was because Loomis was hired by Conn and did a lot of their design work. Loomis has a ton of patents.)
 
What a fascinating find Pete. I hadn't heard of this before. Kinda' odd that this tech wouldn't know the difference between a C mel and an Eb alto though. Either the article is incomplete, and there was at least 1 C pitched horn made, or ??? Interesting the article mentions Paul Cohen owns one of the 3 horns known to be in existence. I wonder if he still does, and if he would know if any more info has been uncovered since this article was written in '86.
 
I don't really think that much needs to be uncovered, really. The U. Mich. article goes into pretty good detail and we know a lot about Loomis because he worked at Conn for a long while and designed a lot of their stuff. (I do find it interesting that he wasn't a musician.)

RE: the "C Melody" comment, I'm assuming that the tech just made an honest mistake. I'd assume that most, if not all, techs test the instruments that they're repairing at one point or another during the repair process. At least I hope so!

Paul Cohen probably has the lacquered or heavily polished Loomis that was pictured in Celebrating the Saxophone. U. Mich. has one and the speakeasy.org one is #3. (Yes, it's different from the U. Mich. horn: check the left-hand bell keys. You've got 2 instead of 3).

Quoting the U. Mich article: "The serial number is 6 (Loomis is known to have made eight instruments in total)." I dunno if "3" was the number of horns known to have survived or it's a misprint. Hey, the Saxophone Journal had lots of references to the "NH White" company ....

I might contact the speakeasy.org place. I'd like to see if he's got more pics and/or can confirm the pitch. However, there haven't been updates to the Loomis pages since 2006.
 
Scott Granlund of Granlund Woodwind Repair is a world class musician and repair tech. Recently he shared this story on Facebook and I wanted to get it out to my many friends who are not Facebook users. Those readers on Facebook can LIKE GWR on Facebook and view many more pictures with detail of the instrument as it is taken apart and repaired.

If you are not on Facebook, you can check out my blog post, Allen Loomis C Melody.
 
Ah...

...the joy of machine tools. When I was a young tad, my Prussian grandfather, the one who was an engineering officer in Kaiser Bill's navy, introduced me to the fun of metal working with big, honking machines that smelled of belt dressing and cutting fluid, and I kept things up through high school. Our district had a fully equipped "manual arts" department, and while others were bothering with English Literature and Economic History, I was busy learning how to do foundry work and machine tool work.

The machine shop side of the "Shop Department" was mostly unused, as those who did take shop concentrated on the wood shop side, making cigarette lighter out of Plexiglas and wooden salad bowls that immediately cracked. I so impressed my shop instructors with my already developed talents in that direction that I was given the run of the machine shop and foundry.

I enjoyed the foundry work the most, making my own patterns and then casting out the rest in aluminum and brass, but the machine tool part was just as essential. I did a decent brass cannon barrel, complete with turning around the trunnions and boring out the bore, and worked with the seldom-used these days broach and milling machine to turn out gears and the like. Great fun, and stuff that dovetailed well with drafting/mechanical drawing.

Haven't used any of it since my Dad sold off all of his stuff back in the Eighties. Great fun while I had access to it, though.
 
Done.

OK. Can one of you Facebookers ask the guy to confirm it's a C melody by, like, playing it? I've still not seen a neck.
 
Bach built canons - I cast a cannon. A fine point, but one that needs to be made with easily confused musicians.

I did the cannon/'gun' because they make a nice lawn ornament, because it's a classic casting in brass/bronze, and because I wanted to deal with the whole boring and turning issues with the bore and the trunnions. (Doing this on a full sized casting is quite involved, with boring bars and trunnion lathes and all such stuff.)

That was one of the problems with "shop" during the 1960's. The demand for machinists had peaked in the 1950's, and school systems were abandoning the "mechanical arts" right and left. By the time I was in the program, taking anything but mechanical drawing (which back in those days, my children, was all India ink and bow pens and pounce wheels and linen and all sechlike) was strongly discouraged. (For that matter, so was the taking of Latin.)

In "shop", those who enrolled did the minimum necessary (the tool box for sheet metal, the lighter base for plastics, the bowl for wood turning) to get by. There was no real attempt at innovation, or pushing any envelope. I was a shining star in the eyes of the shop teachers (two of them), and they let me roam the metal shop free after the first month or so. Best time that I spent in high school.

(The small town in which we lived in Illinois had a full building of such stuff, all of it state of the 1950's art, donated by the local coal mining companies - it sat unused throughout the ten years that I lived there.)

So, you instrument repair folks are members of a very restrictive fraternity these days - those who can work with their hands and weird machines.

Incidentally, I visited a museum a few years back that had an extensive exhibit on the original creation of precision screw threads. It may have been up here at the machinery museum in Windsor VT; I don't recall much about where it was.

Precision screws are critical for far more than fastening purposes. Metal lathes use them to control tool feed and measurement adjustments, and they have to be finished to a higher tolerance than the product that the lathe turns out.

The main problem with them is that, in order to make a precision screw, you need a precision screw to control the feed rate and tolerances. Chew on that little problem for a few minutes...
 
SOTSDO said:
The main problem with them is that, in order to make a precision screw, you need a precision screw to control the feed rate and tolerances. Chew on that little problem for a few minutes...
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Oh, it's pretty easy: you build a machine that's a machine that builds machines that builds machines ... (to infinity and beyond) ... that make even better precision screws.

That was one of the problems with "shop" during the 1960's. The demand for machinists had peaked in the 1950's, and school systems were abandoning the "mechanical arts" right and left. By the time I was in the program, taking anything but mechanical drawing (which back in those days, my children, was all India ink and bow pens and pounce wheels and linen and all sechlike) was strongly discouraged. (For that matter, so was the taking of Latin.)
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Even though today's my birthday, I do know that I'm a lot younger than you. I took 3 years of HS Latin (continued in college) and was required to take shop. In the latter case, for years I could have showed you the scars. (Dude, when you heat something to 15,000 degrees, tell me that before you ask me to hold your form down for you.) I have used India ink and fountain pens, but not in school. Hey, Ed's the pen guy ....

Anyhow, I'm a computer tech. A very small percentage of the problems I work on are hardware related, but I do know techs that have problems changing video cards, etc. I think a lot of it is the fear of making something worse by even attempting to repair it. There's only one major thing that I know I shouldn't try to repair because I know I'll make it worse. That's my car. I also never tried or wanted to try to repair monitors/TVs with a CRT. Good reason: I enjoy living. You can easily electrocute yourself with a CRT, even if it's been off for years.
 
Three years of Latin reeks of a Catholic education. You were fortunate, in any event - Latin is the root of much of what we speak (with German a near second, and everything else far behind).

Me, I cast about for an alternative, and after a year of German, I settled into three years of Russian, followed by two more in college. Ask me how that's working out for me...
 
Incidentally, there is a magazine for hobby machinists. It covers a lot of the usual stuff that hobby books cover (the recurrent "how to" articles, profiles, a little history and so on).

While I don't "take it", I do look through issues at the magazine stand when I encounter them. In a recent issue, they covered making surfaces "absolutely" flat (which is, of course, a relative term), and it was there that I learned of the curious art of "scraping".

Once a steel or cast iron surface is "close" to flat, the old-school machinist would turn to scraping the finished item, bringing the high spots down to the correct tolerances by manual labor. You used a "flat" block (also made flat by scraping in a three-way process with three blocks, all being scraped flat at the same time) to test the surface under consideration, marking up all of the high spots with machinist's blueing placed on the surface and then rubbed with the test block. Then, you scraped down the high spots indicated and repeated the whole testing procedure.

Interestingly, there was no testing with dial indicators or any other sort of dimensioned measuring device. Instead, the ultimate goal was to get the surface so flat that a certain number of "high" spots were indicated during the testing procedure. Once you reached that number, you called it a day, knowing that you had attained your final tolerance level.

Very primitive, but apparently this sort of thing is done with a lot of precision work (like lens grinding and lapping). In any event, it looked like far too much elbow grease for me.
 
SOTSDO said:
Three years of Latin reeks of a Catholic education.
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In the sense of "universal," maybe, but only because I read a lot. I went to public school. Yes, really. I keep telling folks that I'm younger than they think, although I did have someone ask if I was 25. I responded by saying that I'll be a grandfather in November ....

Anyhow, I took Latin for two major reasons: one, it was a three-year class compressed into two. Two, because I didn't think I'd have much use for Spanish or French, the only other two choices. Of course, I now live in a state that's 60% Hispanic. Well, as you mention, SOTSDO, Latin does allow me to understand a lot of Spanish and French. Just not speak it.

True story: there was a hacker group a few months ago that broke into the county sheriff's webserver. My CIO wanted to make sure that we wouldn't be affected and wanted me to track down the source, etc. The name of the hacker group, which the CIO mentioned several times, contains a rather naughty Spanish word. I didn't mention the translation to him :). (Of course, the name of the very infamous Conficker virus is derived from a rather naughty German word ....)
 
pete said:
I don't really think that much needs to be uncovered, really. The U. Mich. article goes into pretty good detail and we know a lot about Loomis because he worked at Conn for a long while and designed a lot of their stuff. (I do find it interesting that he wasn't a musician.)

RE: the "C Melody" comment, I'm assuming that the tech just made an honest mistake. I'd assume that most, if not all, techs test the instruments that they're repairing at one point or another during the repair process. At least I hope so!

Paul Cohen probably has the lacquered or heavily polished Loomis that was pictured in Celebrating the Saxophone. U. Mich. has one and the speakeasy.org one is #3. (Yes, it's different from the U. Mich. horn: check the left-hand bell keys. You've got 2 instead of 3).
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Yes, I still have my Loomis, #5, and it is the same one in the book "Celebrating the Saxophone". I wrote an article on these horns as part of my Vintage Saxophones Revisited Columns some years ago. A truly stunning instrument for how it looks, feels, sounds, and how elegantly it is crafted.

Paul Cohen
 
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What do you think about the "C melody" comment, though, Professor C? I've asked Gandalfe about it in a different thread, because he knows the tech, but the tech didn't respond.
 
pete said:
What do you think about the "C melody" comment, though, Professor C? I've asked Gandalfe about it in a different thread, because he knows the tech, but the tech didn't respond.
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I had not heard of a Loomis C Melody until the picture on Facebook was posted. From the picture it looks real to me. Loomis had access in Toledo to one of the most advanced design and manufacturing facilities in America at that time; the Packard automobile factory on Monroe street (later the Overland factory). Who knows what else he may have experimented with?

I have come across even more improbable saxophones through the years, and am amazed at the variation and active endeavors of so many.
There are a number of C melodies with unusual pedigree or customization. I am thinking of my Selmer Paris C melody factory made to low A, as well as the Conn one-handed C melody with the amazing mechanism only found on two other saxes; my 1919 tenor and a gold plated F mezzo from the late 1920s.

Paul Cohen
 
The one handed saxophones...

...listed all date from the period immediately after World War I.

While the novelty act period of vaudeville was in full flower at that point, it is my contention that the spate of "uni-handed" instruments from this period stems from the massive number of maimed veterans of the Great War, when a "metal fragment" wound was very likely caused by a half-pound chunk of the primitive high explosive round casings from the weapons of that era. Such fragments were a large part of the reason that amputations were the result, rather than non-permanently disabling flesh wounds. (The primitive medical methods available to the surgeons at that point in time also contributed to this "trend" - it's easier to amputate a mangled limb than to surgically reconstruct it.)

(Modern metal fragment weapons (generally speaking, from World War II and beyond) are designed to wound by much smaller fragments, very often no more than a couple of grams in weight. This is because you get more fragments for a given weight of shell that way, and because a wounded soldier hit by one of those fragments is more of a burden to the military system than is a dead one; both are taken out of service, but the wounded one requires evacuation and treatment. None of this applies, of course, if the exploding round actually strikes the targeted individual, but the theory used was based upon statistical probability of injury rather than pure accuracy.)

(I still carry such a fragment around in my leg, a souvenir of my service in RVN in 1970. During the colder months, it daily reminds me that I should have heeded my mother's advice to become a lawyer and thus avoid military service entirely. I never listened to my mother then...)

France, which did not exempt musicians from front line duties, had massive numbers of amputees survive the war. Inevitably, some of these were skilled musicians who did not want to give up their craft. Specialized instruments were developed to enable their continued playing abilities, and there were some musical pieces (all composed for the "one-handed piano") that were written as well.

As much trouble as all of this must have been for all concerned, it still solved the clarinet player dilemma as to whether to play the C# to C transition by LH/RH or RH/LH...
 
SOTSDO said:
While the novelty act period of vaudeville was in full flower at that point, it is my contention that the spate of "uni-handed" instruments from this period stems from the massive number of maimed veterans of the Great War, when a "metal fragment" wound was very likely caused by a half-pound chunk of the primitive high explosive round casings from the weapons of that era. Such fragments were a large part of the reason that amputations were the result, rather than non-permanently disabling flesh wounds. (The primitive medical methods available to the surgeons at that point in time also contributed to this "trend" - it's easier to amputate a mangled limb than to surgically reconstruct it.)
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Definitely a few of the more modern one-handed instruments were made because the player had an amputation or some such. I really should put together at least a link-list to all the one-handed horns that are out there. For me, I just love the keywork.

IIRC, at least one of the one-handed instruments that were on cybersax.com was made for a WWI vet that did lose his hand/arm. 'Course, they also sold that one-handed F Mezzo.

Regarding the Loomis "C Melody," there were two reasons I paused in agreeing with calling it a C horn: no pictures of the neck and I know that the Loomis altos had a range to low A, thus explaining a longer bell (as mentioned earlier). Shame that the tech hasn't RSVP'd here. I also sent him an e-mail awhile back.
 
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