Many wind instruments, including trumpet, trombone, and even berry sacks have what's

called a spit valve, a little hatch that lets you dump out excess saliva.

You gotta do it since too much spit in your horn can give your tone a gargley sound.

The important thing is to regularly clean the band room floor.

Welcome to Strong Songs, a podcast about music.

I'm your host, Kirk Hamilton, and as always, I'm so glad that you've joined me to talk

about spit valves, leak lights, and so many other musical instrument fun facts that you

maybe didn't even need to know.

Strong Songs is and has always been a one-man operation.

I research, write, record, and edit every single episode of this show all by myself.

I'm very proud of that, but of course I wouldn't have the time to do all of it without

the support of the show's wonderful patrons, and you can become one at patreon.com slash

strong songs.

We've got a bunch of great listener questions to answer on this episode with topics

ranging from sky horn sections to practicing while standing up to some fundamental differences

between jazz and rock solos.

Just as in life, we've got a lot to cover in a limited amount of time to do it, so let's

pour some tea, put on our glasses, and get to work.

The more time I've spent living and working online, the more I've come to appreciate the

good and bad things about different types of online communication, an email, versus a

tweet, versus an Instagram comment, and so on.

There's a lot of bad out there, a lot of platforms that seem designed to encourage

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