talleyrand wrote:In another thread, tooba says this:
and I have to use some strange fingerings for them if sustained/longer than a typical 8th note
I don't want to hijack that thread, but this little side item speaks to something that's been bugging me. I find that playing a string of short, separately articulated notes gives me totally different intonation (flat, on the whole) than I have with longer notes, which I'm in the habit of using to evaluate tuning.
So is the eighth note really telling the true tale of my intonation on this horn?
Or is there some pattern of goofed up attacks people with this experience have typically fallen into that I could work on, perhaps with a teacher?
What the original quote very well might refer to is the fact that some players accept short notes being out of tune, whereas they know that everybody can hear longer notes being out of tune.
That short note attitude more or less is accepted in the woodwind world where trill fingerings are a standard term.
Pythagorean string theory is nice, but modern tuners reveal, that the attacks of certain plucked string instruments is sharper than the sustained notes. Simply because certain plucking styles stretch the strings as part of the attack.
In brasses there of course are aspects of playing techniques associated with good intonation. But still the main factor is about the player’s ears. In my experience there only is one way to learn playing in tune: making oneself able to play scales in all keys. The secret with good scale playing is about the treatment of the semitones.
One easy test (here exemplified for Bb instruments) is about playing an Eb concert scale in the mid range and then paying attention to the interval and to the tonal evenness between the leading note D and the Eb at the upper end of the scale.
Klaus
) tuba. But I do pull/push the first valve slide and use a couple alternate fingerings on my Eb tubas. 
