Inventor Hopes His Instrument Creates a Sonic Boom : Music: Dan Neill is blowing his own horn over the one-of-a-kind mutantrumpet. He will take his invention on stage at LACE series.

In their search for the perfect sound, some musicians turn into inventors.

Take Dan Neill, 31, a New York trumpet player who is noted for his avant-garde approach in instrumentation. He is the inventor of the one-of-a-kind mutantrumpet: two B-flat trumpets fused together with a trombone slide with a smaller bell for wah-wah glissandi.

Neill, whose three-bell creation will be on stage at LACE tonight as part of the Winter Sonic Series, uses his creation with electronics and percussion. Assisting him Friday will be Don Yallech.

Neill initially got his brass brainstorm in 1981, when he was living in Ohio and playing works by Cage and Stockhausen, 20th-Century scores that require lightning-fast changes of timbre. Neill, tired of popping mutes in and out, phoned repairman Robert Cole, and together the two men tried taking a removable bell and sticking it onto a normal trumpet.

But “that was very limited because I wasn’t able to play the conventional trumpet scale,” Neill says. “That’s why I needed a second set of valves.”

So Neill and Cole performed radical surgery on two student instruments. After three days, they were looking at a two-handed trumpet with two bells (one over the other) and six valves. Later, Neill added the smaller bell with the trombone slide.

The singular advantage of the mutantrumpet, Neill says, is its “rapid timbre changes, where I tongue on the instrument very lightly so that it hardly speaks. It creates this percussive effect. It saves me from having to handle the mute so much. Much less awkward.”

For varied effects, “I can have the mute (in one bell) and one bell open, or I can have two mutes, which has enabled me to play pieces and do stylistic things with glissandi that normally a trumpet would not be capable of doing. There’s also the possibility of half-valving, where the sound can actually be coming out of both bells.”

But not everyone is a fan of the new horn. Thomas Stevens, principal trumpeter of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a specialist in new music, gives a mixed review of the mutantrumpet. “It seems to be a rehash of some past ideas,” Stevens says. “The second bell is not new, (since) the cornet in the 1920s had a second smaller bell with mute.” As for the new valve for quarter tones, the idea “is about 20 years too late.”

Still, Stevens likes a trumpet capable of antiphonal effects. “That’s one of the few things that brass players heretofore have been unable to do,” he says.

But there is hope for the innovative horn. A German museum has contracted to purchase Neill’s instrument, priced at about $2,500. In the coming months, Neill will order and slightly redesign a new model.

Musically, Neill says the mutantrumpet has stimulated and challenged him as a soloist and a composer. The mechanics, despite the goofy appearance, help him create “a dialogue of three voices that converse with each other,” Neill says. “And I use live electronics to extend that. Cage talks about how people should practice paying attention to three things at the same time.” The result is “a unified multisidedness: three bells playing three types of musical ideas, all unified in one instrument.”

After a few solo experiments, Neill “extended that concept into ensemble compositions . . . that combine baroque with rock and country-Western and minimalism. I intercut these things very quickly one to the other, and try to give the illusion that there are actually three strands of musical thought that are going on at all times.”

The mutantrumpet can, of course, be played like an ordinary B-flat horn. But Neill refuses to bring it along on gigs.

“If I showed up with it in a pit band, it would probably cause an uproar,” he says.