The... Blatieness and tone

[Bandmaster]

What Bryan says is right on the money. Someone helping you in person can give you the best suggestions.

But being that you recognize there is a problem, try checking a few things on your own. Is your embouchure relaxed and natural or do you tend to pushing your lips into the mouthpiece a little? It should be relaxed and natural. When you force your lips into the mouthpiece they will roll open a little and the vibration (buzz) will occur on the softer, inner lip tissue and is much harder to control. I have had a lot of my band students have this problem when they first started out on tuba. Then try playing as softly as you can and see if you can feel where on your lips the tone first starts to occur. It should be as close to the center of your embouchure as possible. It is not the end of the world if it is off one way or the other just a little (mine is off to the left a little from all my years of playing a sousaphone), but the target should be to center it as best you can. Once you get it centered and relaxed, then work on stamina and control with long tones, low notes and lip slurs. Good luck.

[Rick Denney]

Hi everyone,
I've been wondering for three years about how to blat on the tuba. Well I found out really quickly. I have been blating every since I played the tuba. I've been wondering if anyone has advice to give me on how to not blat? Also my tone is really bad. If you have any advice about how to improve the tone I would like to know. Thank you for reading!!!!!!

Poor tone is the result of using the wrong tools. Instead of air, we use mouthpiece pressure, and this creates a thin, edgy tone. Instead of a firm and strong embouchure (made that way by appropriate practice), we use pressure and move unhelpful parts of our faces to make things happen, creating wavering pitch, clammed notes and that thin and edgy sound. Instead of a clear pitch in our heads (resulting from good ear training), we depend on the buttons to make the right notes and our tone is not at the center of resonance for the pitch we want, making it fuzzy and unfocused.

These are all shortcuts we take when we don't know better because they seem to get quicker results. But they are counterfeit and will ultimately hold us back.

That's why you want that expert advice. A good teacher will expose our shortcuts and make us go back through our learning to replace those bad habits with proper technique.

Rick "who has battled the effects of those shortcuts for decades" Denney

[Dylan King]

All of these good gentlemen are giving excellent advise. A decent teacher would be a good thing. I wonder, how often do you listen to music? Not just tuba, but all forms of music. These days it seems that critical listening is so much overlooked. It is difficult to sit for an hour or so every day only concentrating on the music coming out of the headphones or stereo.

I think the quickest way to a good tone on the tuba, or any other instrument, is understanding good tone on every instrument. Sometimes as tubists we don't even know it but we are emulating tones from other instruments. When I play Bydlo, I think of an oboe and the vibrato coming through that thin double reed. When playing The Ride, I might have the sound of the timpani roaring through my head to beat in a solid 9.

I recommend listening to an hour of music every day. It doesn't matter what. It could be the Chicago Symphony or Dr. Dre, but listen close. Think about all of the sounds and the relation they have with one another in time. Listen for different vibratos, articulations, orchestrations; listen for everything. But DO NOT BE DISTRACTED by worldy affairs. Get out of the world and all of your thoughts, worries, emotions, and just think about the music. Hear what sounds you like and dislike. Think about what sounds terrifying and what sounds silly to you. Think about why a trumpet may be muted or what kind of synthetic drum machine could be making those 128th notes, and how somebody may have come up with that idea. Be inside the music and let it be inside of you. Just for that moment of time every day. The hour before bedtime is usually best for me, but walking or riding the bus works too, as long as you can "zone-out" of the everyday world and "zoom-in" to the music.

Becoming a good listener may unlock the key to hearing yourself. Once you can 1. hear yourself, and 2. have an image in your head (or a sound) of what you want to sound like, I bet that you can duplicate that sound naturally on the tuba.