Tooting his own horn: Local man makes trumpets for the stars

By Jerry Fink

Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2001 | 10 a.m.

Tony Scodwell is a man who blows his own horn -- a trumpet to be exact -- one of about 65 he has assembled in the garage of his northwest Las Vegas home.

This time of year, when kitchens are filled with the aroma of pies and cookies, at Scodwell's residence the smell coming from the oven is more likely to be part of a trumpet baking.

"Actually, it's in a self-cleaning oven set at 850 degrees for exactly 30 minutes, no more and no less," explained Scodwell, 58, who has been a full-time freelance photographer for the past 12 years, and was a full-time musician for 28 years before that. He also conducts lectures on wine, and used to restore cars, but now restores old motorcycles.

Between his symphony of activities he manages to make trumpets for musical instrument dealers and for professional musicians, among them noted trumpeter Doc Severinsen of "The Tonight Show" fame.

Scodwell, who played trumpet with the Harry James Orchestra in the 1960s, has known Severinsen nearly 40 years and accompanies him and his Tonight Show band in engagements at least twice a year, most recently at a New Year's Eve gig in Scottsdale, Ariz.

"I've been playing one of Tony's trumpets for two or three months now," Severinsen said during a recent telephone interview from his Los Angeles home. "It feels good and it sounds good."

Severinsen said he acquired the trumpet when Scodwell was with the band on the road for a gig last year.

"He brought four trumpets along for me to try, so I dug into them and found one I liked," Severinsen said. "I played it five minutes one day and set it aside. The next day I played it a little more. By the third or fourth day I was starting to play it in the show."

Now it's one of his favorites. "It lifted a weight off my shoulders when I started to play it," he said. "You don't have to worry about playing bad because of the instrument."

Severinsen respects Scodwell as both a musician and technician, a combination that helps the Scodwell produce superior instruments.

"He is a tremendous mechanic," Severinsen said. "Most guys doing that kind of work may have the mechanical and engineering ability, but they don't play. They're kind of walking around in the dark.

"But Tony, he knew what he was looking for. What makes his trumpets good is a combination of things that he has put together over the years, dimensions of this and that and other things. I'm sure a lot of it is simply from observations he's made over the years about what this should be or that should be, and he just finally got around to putting it all together."

A horn of plenty

Scodwell, who used to make occasional prototype horns for companies in the 1960s and '70s, began making them for his own purposes in 1988. He sells them for $1,500 apiece.

"My horns are underpriced," he said. "Some production-line models are retailing at $1,800. (But) I can't make them on a specified time schedule, so I don't charge full value. If I devoted all my time to this I could do one trumpet a week (32 hours to complete).

"Right now I have orders from a fellow in Denver, two guys in Seattle, one in Boston, and a Japanese fellow wants another horn in addition to this one."

Scodwell held an ornately engraved, gold-plated trumpet that was about to be sent to Takaya Yashima, one of his most dedicated customers in Tokyo. Yashima is a record producer and brass-instrument retailer who has bought six other trumpets from Scodwell.

"He commissioned this one and he wanted it fully engraved and gold-plated. It's the first one I ever put my name on," he said. "And I don't ever put a finish on them -- as far as plating, I don't have a plating facility. I sell the instrument in its raw brass state. Gold plating changes the way the horn plays."

Normally Scodwell's instruments are not engraved, either, not even with his name. But Yashima insisted that the latest horn not only be ornate, but also have Scodwells' name etched into it. (The horn will cost, $3,800. The plating and the engraving were done by craftsmen in Los Angeles and cost extra.)

Scodwell also uses craftsmen in Los Angeles to make sections of the trumpets he assembles, such as the bell (the curved tubing and end of the horn where the music comes out), the lead (pronounced "leed") pipe into which the mouthpiece is inserted and the valve section (which contains the three valves that create the range of notes).

"There was a time when I made each and every valve section," he said. "It was quite an involved process, from a machining standpoint, to make these kinds of pistons that have these kinds of tolerances -- we're talking 3/10,000 maximum clearance (inside the pistons)."

Instead of wasting his time manufacturing things in his garage that are made just as well in a factory, he buys what he can and applies his talent to assembling the instruments, which includes baking the bell -- a process that takes place before it is attached to the valve assembly and lead pipe.

"It's called annealing," he said. "You heat treat the brass bell, which makes it really vibrate for the players.

"(Heating) transforms a piece of brass. Annealing a bell, in effect, lines the molecules up in a uniform fashion so the length of the brass works in unison. It makes the trumpets livelier in your hands and to your ears. The sounds have got more vibrancy, more pizzazz."

Scodwell said every step of assembling a trumpet is critical, from getting the correct width of the lead pipe's tapered end (8.75 millimeters) to the points where braces are soldered on to stabilize the instrument.

"You have to find the sweet spot for the braces," he said.

The location of the braces affects the tone of the horn. "Sweet spots" vary with each instrument. No matter how standard the production process is, Scodwell explained, every trumpet will vary by degrees because of differences in the metal and other factors. "From doing prototypes for others, I know what works. Some things are mechanically constant, but will play different because of metallurgical differences, that's just the way brass is," he said.

During the assembly process, Scodwell frequently tests the instruments by playing a few notes, listening for subtle changes in the tones and making adjustments until he has the sound he wants.

"Factories can't make two trumpets in a row that sound the same because they make too many. They make 100,000 a year, or whatever."

And even if the assemblers working at the factories could spend as much time at Scodwell does playing the instruments to tweak them during the assembly process, he said, "Nobody at a factory plays as good as I do."

Plenty of horn

The Wisconsin native attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and after graduation in 1960 began playing trumpet for Stan Kenton and his orchestra. Two years later he joined Harry James' band.

At the time Scodwell played a trumpet made by the Getzen Co. He was curious about how the instruments were made and spent time over the years at the company's factory observing and asking questions, eventually making prototype horns for them in Elkhorn, Wis.

"I watched how they did things (at the plant) and then what the ingredients did out in the field. Then I would go back to the factory and see what the guys in the factory would suggest to change things," Scodwell said. "Every trumpet player has his own idea of what you should do to make it sound better."

He met Severinsen at the Getzen factory in the early 1960s.

"Doc was doing development work on a Severinsen-Getzen B-flat trumpet when I first met him," Scodwell said. "I'd be hanging out there (at the factory) while he was there and he'd say, 'Here, Tony, see what this one sounds like.' We became good friends."

Scodwell spent 28 years as a professional trumpeter. Even though he was on the road most of the time early in his career, he bought a home in Las Vegas in 1968 because he knew he would settle here someday.

The day came sooner than he expected. He married in 1970 and decided the road no longer held his interest. He played at many local venues, and from about 1973-88 he was a member of a replacement band that filled in for the house musicians at the Frontier.

When taped music began replacing live bands in local showroomsm Scodwell decided to become a part-time musician and a full-time freelance photographer. (His wife, Mary, is a science photographer with Bechtel Corp., and often works at the Nevada Test Site and other security-sensitive locations around the country.)

"Photography was always a second profession for me, even in high school," he said. "I always treated it as a business. On the road (playing trumpet) I had the luxury of shooting who and how I wanted."

When he became a photographer, he found he had more time on his hands and began making his own trumpets in the garage, which is where he also restored cars, until recently.

"When I was with a band my days were free," he said. "In this garage I've (restored) 28 Alfa Romeos, two Ferraris and a Maserati."

One of the Ferraris was a 1961 model convertible. "Only 225 of this type were made from 1958 through 1962," he said.

He bought the car for $1,500, even though mice were living in it and it didn't run. After restoring it, he drove it for a couple of years sold it in 1972 for $3,800.

"I wasn't wealthy. I had to sell one to buy one and I wanted to buy a 1973 BMW so I sold the Ferrari to a kid in L.A.," he said. "Two years later he sold it for $15,500, and the last transaction I heard about the car (was that it had) sold in 1988 for $800,000 in England, untouched since I restored it."

There was a Ferrari craze in the car market for a few years, he said. Today the same car would cost about $200,000.

Scodwell no longer restores cars. It takes too much time, money and space, he said. These days he restores old dirt-bikes.

"I used to ride dirt bikes a lot," he said. "The desert was a block from my house when I bought (the home), and I could ride all the way to Red Rock (National Conservation Area) without crossing a road."

His current project is rebuilding a 1963 Bultaco motorcycle, a classic bike that he will sell at an auction.

"Bikes are cheap and easy to restore," he said. "I don't ride anymore."

Which leaves him time for another sideline, that of a professional wine taster and lecturer.

Scodwell and his wife always had an appreciation for fine wines, but following a trip in 1979 to the wine country of Napa Valley in Northern California, "the bug hit" and they became more attentive.

For their 25th wedding anniversary in 1995 they spent six days at the Chateaux Loudenne in Bordeaux, France, where they attended lectures on wine -- and sampled most of the lessons. Now Scodwell is paid to lecture and conduct wine-tasting events.

No doubt it will only be a matter of time before he begins making his own wine, too.