CC Tuba for a doubler

[Eflatdoubler]

Any thoughts on the Tuba Exchange Mirafone copy, or those by Baltimore Brass (JZ), or the Schiller? or Dillons Model? Thanks!

[Barney]

To the best of my knowledge, all of the tubas you mentioned are from the same factory, just stenciled with different names.

If you can get to one of those stores and try one, you won't be disappointed. It's an excellent tuba.

[Eflatdoubler]

any thoughts on these miraphone 186 copies vs. a Yamaha YCB 621 CC tuba? The yamaha is a 3/4 size, but keep in mind this is for doubling, thank you.

[glangfur]

With all due respect Elephant, the local contractors for Lion King are specifically instructed to get doublers who play on a CC tuba. That's just the fact and the reality of the situation. There are no pedal B's and no C#'s, but the pedal C's are very important and very exposed, and they want the sound of a true pedal note at the end of the first act, not a note with valves down. You have to play them both loud and soft, alone and in ensemble. For a bass trombone player who plays it as a double, a pedal C on a B-flat tuba is just risky, period.

I found that most rotary valve tubas are hard for me to make a consistent sound on. I love the way great tuba players sound on them, but coming from bass trombone I find the changes in resistance as I get into the low register to be more pronounced than with piston tubas. I just feel more comfortable right away on a small piston CC than on a rotary horn, and immediate comfort - or as close as you can get to it - makes doubling any instrument MUCH easier.

My tuba is a Conn 3J, and it works great for me. The 2J is the older version of the same model, with some differences in bell diameter and other things, but it's quite comparable. I play it with a Floyd Cooley Helleberg - essentially a Conn 7B but with a bigger low register and better reinforcement of the pitch all around the horn...for me. This is as big as I can go comfortably on a tuba mouthpiece, and it's more than enough to do the job in a show pit. It might get replaced with a Warburton TG-3, which is a very comparable size. The tuba and the mouthpiece are also small enough that the high passage near the beginning of the show can really sing without tremendous effort.

It would be nice to have 5 valves, but I'm not held back with only 4 on this Conn, because the false tones are soooo good. When I'm playing it a lot, I can comfortably and convincingly play fully chromatically down to pedal C using fingerings a 5th higher. On Lion King I ended up playing the passage with the pp pedal C's as a false tone on the 4th valve, and it worked great. I usually played the crescendo on the pedal CC with the same fingering and then switched to the "real" fingering with the 1st slide pull for the ff E-flats.

Also, the price on these is right. I only paid $1800 for mine; they seem to go for about $2500 these days. If I had more cash and was playing a lot more tuba I might look for a Getzen G50, or check out the horns Sam Gnagey builds. The Miraphone 1292 is also really nice and very easy to play, but maybe a little bit big for the uses I would put it to.

[glangfur]

any thoughts on these miraphone 186 copies vs. a Yamaha YCB 621 CC tuba? The yamaha is a 3/4 size, but keep in mind this is for doubling, thank you.

I found my Conn to be a better choice than the Yamaha 621. The 621 is very smooth and easy in the middle register, but it takes more work to make the low register sound the way I want. It's kind of like a bass trombone, in that you have to keep feeding it a lot of energy in the low register or the sound sort of dies, know what I mean?