What made you decide to play tuba

[williamp]

When I was about ten years old, I was going through my dad's record collection and found the Dukes of Dixieland's recording of "Asleep in the Deep." It featured the tuba and I was hooked. In sixth grade, I took my school's fiberglass sousaphone to an audition for Interlochen summer camp and played "Asleep in the Deep" for the panel. It started me on my journey of playing tuba. Almost 50 years later, I finally had a chance to recreate the recording that made we want to play the horn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfw2Z_3zog8

[iiipopes]

When I was a freshman in high school, I went to the first day of class and was told everybody marches for the high school football games. Well, I would have been just a 3rd trumpet black speck on the field. Then the director brought out a sousaphone and said he needed volunteers since he had about half the section graduate the year before. I thought, "If I play that, they will see me!" So I volunteered. My mother, of course, said, "What have you done?!" But she supported it. I learned quickly that trumpet players, lead guitar players, rock-n-roll vocalists, etc., are a dime-a-dozen. But if I could play bass well, I would always have a gig. That was in August of 1976. I still play, even after taking a few years off to raise my son. So yes, whenever I wanted a gig, I got it. I now have my own sousaphone for outdoor gigs, including a Dixieland wedding last weekend, as well as my concert tuba for community band and other gigs.

[tylerferris1213]

In my middle school, you had to do band or choir. When I started 7th grade, we got a new choir teacher and she was TERRIBLE. I decided midway through the year that I couldn't take it anymore and that I'd switch to band. I walked up to the band director after one of the last football games of the season and said, "Hi! I'm Tyler, and I want to join band." The band director asked what I wanted to play. I hadn't thought that far ahead..... I just remember blurting out "tuba."

About 20 years later, I'm still playing tuba, I started my own brass repair/restoration company, I have a bachelor's degree in music, and that band director is a lifelong friend!

[circusboy]

I started playing cornet in 4th grade. I had great teachers from 4th-8th grade, then a horrible teacher in 9th. We were playing "Malaguena" in 8th and "Popeye the Sailor Man" in 9th. I quit. Didn't play anything for several years.

Then when I was 27, I just woke up one day knowing that I wanted to play the tuba. I found a band shop with an attic full of old horns and traded my cornet plus some cash for a York Monster Eb. I spent some more cash getting it refurbished and mostly taught myself. Been having fun ever since.

[Dylan King]

I avoided being considered a tuba player at all costs. I was a huge kid, and figured that I’d be made fun of if I became a “tuba player”. I told everyone that I was a trombonist who just happened to play tuba until I got into college.

I played trombone in my Junior High School band, and when the tuba player got expelled for dealing weed, the teacher practically begged me to switch, since the concert was just a week out and we had no bass. I was the best trombone player by far, but there were several; so I brought the school’s tarnished 1930’s Reynolds’s Eb home over the weekend, learned how to play it by writing in fingerings, and played the concert the next week.

It went so well that our band director decided to perform Tubby the Tuba for the year-end concert. My cousin was Lester Dropkin, a pro player in the Inland Empire, and he found me my first serious horn, a Mirafone 185 CC. I performed Tubby the Tuba a week after receiving that horn and learning the new fingerings. It went very well. I also got my first paid gig in Junior High, playing Christmas Carols in the Glendale Galleria mall. I had never had more than twenty bucks in my pocket until I got $300 for that. I started to like playing tuba more.

I auditioned for the performing arts magnet in LA, the Hamilton Academy of Music, on both trombone and tuba. The brass teacher there was David Sears, who played trombone with the Temptations and later became a VP at NARAS. He said that I played both great, but that I was going to be the star first chair tubist in my freshman year. So I played tuba in all of the groups, and trombone in the jazz bands. But I still told everyone that I just played tuba as a side instrument to trombone.

By the time I was a senior in high school I was gigging pretty regularly around town, and was offered full scholarships at several universities. I decided to go to UCLA, since they gave me a full ride, including room and board. It was like getting athlete’s status for playing the oom pah pah. I also wanted to study with Tommy Johnson. I had been taking lessons with Doug Tornquist all through high school, and he talked about Tommy all the time. Since my dad had played basketball at UClA under John Wooden, I went with the Bruins over USC. Tommy was teaching at both schools when I entered college in 1992.

Once in college, I pretty much stuck with the tuba full time. I no longer felt that it was an instrument that would embarrass me, and I liked that people wanted to pay me to play it. And after all, it is the best instrument ever created. I dropped out of UCLA in my fifth year with only three classes needed for graduation. I didn’t like what was being taught in the general education classes, and was earning real money playing around town. I had also decided that I wanted to be a rock star, which is a whole other story…

I never did earn a bachelor’s degree, but have been doing music (and film) as a career my entire life. No regrets. And now I really do consider myself a tuba player. Um pah pah.

[circusboy]

I auditioned for the performing arts magnet in LA, the Hamilton Academy of Music, on both trombone and tuba. The brass teacher there was David Sears, who played trombone with the Temptations and later became a VP at NARAS. He said that I played both great, but that I was going to be the star first chair tubist in my freshman year. So I played tuba in all of the groups, and trombone in the jazz bands. But I still told everyone that I just played tuba as a side instrument to trombone.

I know David! What a fine fellow, indeed. A gentleman and a scholar. Huge heart.

[b.williams]

In the mid 80s, I was a Navy fleet band euphonium/trombone player. Two of the tuba/electric bass players decided that they wanted out of the Navy and started getting high every day. They used their urinalysis test failures to get out of the Navy. Soon, I was cordially invited to grab a sousaphone and get on the bus. Prior to that, I never played more than a few minutes on tuba.

[opus37]

When there were about 12 cornet players in Jr. High band, I was upgraded to tuba. I never looked back.

[jayfarlow]

In fifth grade, when it was time to choose a band instrument, I wanted to play a wind instrument. I was mostly interested in clarinet. I had a huge overbite, however, that orthodontia would not finish correcting until ninth grade. The only wind instrument that would work with my overbite was the tuba.

[Tom B.]

I played horn from fifth grade through graduation college graduation at UW-Eau Claire after not doing particularly well on piano as an elementary school student. Playing horn was fun, especially the concert band, brass quintet and brass choir, but it required a lot of consistent practicing to maintain the embouchure. When grad school and career gobbled up my time, I gave it up.

After life stabilized a bit, my brother-in-law and I were at a wedding with a decent wedding band providing music. He looked at me across the table and said, “We could do that, couldn’t we?”. I was willing to give it a try. And two years later he was playing guitar and I was playing electric bass with a drummer and singer at a wedding. It was mostly classic rock, but we had a dinner set of standards.

After a few years, my wife and I moved just about the time I was listening to more jazz. I started lessons with a jazz electric bass player in my new town. Until that time, he was really the only jazz bass player around. I progressed to the point that he thought I was ready for a jazz gig and suggested we do it. I said “With two basses?”. No, he replied, because, unbeknown to me, he was also the best jazz guitarist in town.

That got my juices flowing again, and not too much later, I bought an upright bass to get that classic jazz sound. But there was still something missing.

I was visiting my sister in Utah, and she invited me to her brass quintet rehearsal. She was mostly an organist/piano player in college and afterwards, but had played horn in high school--not terribly well. To my great surprise, her quintet was top flight and she was holding her own on horn!

That was it. If she could do it, I knew I could too. It had to be a brass instrument, and I always loved bass lines. So, 28 years after last playing a brass instrument, I bought a CC tuba (similar fingerings to a horn) from a “for sale” on Tubenet. I perused several Tubenet discussion and decided I should buy the tuba version of Arbans. When it arrived, I noticed one of the authors was Dr. Jerry Young, and he was at my old alma mater—UW-Eau Claire. I found his email and asked if he was up for teaching a 51 y/o beginning tuba student. Thankfully, he was.

So, I began lessons, driving 400 miles every six weeks to meet Jerry in Eau Claire, WI. That gave me a great start and began a wonderful friendship that is ongoing. After a year I moved too far away to travel to Eau Claire but eventually ended up in Columbus, OH where I met Gary Tirey and became one of his last students. Gary also was an excellent teacher and great human being. I took lessons with him weekly for the 3 years I lived in Columbus and it helped me become a much better player. I miss him and think about him every day when I do his “spider” warmup.

Now I’m finally retired and live in a community where I hope to be the rest of my life. I play an average of 4-5 gigs/month which is perfect and even get paid for some. I still play the electric and upright bass fairly regularly, but consider the tuba to be my main instrument.

Sorry for the long story, but it was a winding path.

[Easy Mac]

I was told playing the tuba would make me an instant "chick magnet".

I was misinformed…

[Txtx]

Think seeing Howard Johnson’s Gravity on SNL - probably in a rerun but it couldn’t have been too much after the original air date - followed by doing pretty well on the pitch and rhythm test they gave all the kids at the end of sixth grade - got me interested. So I started on the tuba even though I had to sit on two large phone books to play it. After six months I was in the regular band, after a year I only had to sit on one phone book.

I played all through high school and started playing electric bass and writing a little music. I played school horns all the way through so figured I was done with the tuba when I graduated, so I gave away my mouthpiece and method books.

A couple years later I found a very old French Eb tuba in a pawn shop for $150. Why not? So it went home with me. I didn’t do much with ut except decorate it for Christmas and toot on it for New Years.

About 15 years ago I decided to get back into playing live music and joined an improv tribal-style belly dance band. That eventually morphed into the adventurous worldly folk band I’m in now, which has some music that cries out for tuba. Eric Satie’s Gnossienne 1 is what got me to break out the horn. Ten years later I finally got around to getting a grown up horn and am working on getting better. But at least these days I don’t have to sit on any phone books.

[fpoon]

I started on trombone in 6th grade. A new middle school opened up, and I was rezoned to go to it in 7th. My new director (big Star Wars guy, which we had in common) needed tuba players and had been trying different bribes for trombone/baritone players to switch. It cost him an Empire Strikes Back and a Return of the Jedi poster (they had recently come out, he had somehow gotten the legit two sided posters from our local theater). Good deal for us both

[Lew]

When we were asked if we wanted to play an instrument in 4th grade (around 1965), I chose cello because I always got out of breath easily and didn't think I had the ability to play a wind instrument. I played in orchestra and a local youth orchestra through middle school. The Summer before I started high school I was asked if I was told that they didn't have an orchestra, but I could join the band. I was already about 6' tall and knew bass clef so the band director took a look at me and said, you should play the sousaphone in marching band. I decided to give it a try. I took lessons over the Summer and found that I had no problem having enough air to play and enjoyed playing the parts, so I played throughout High School.

When I got to college, I decided that I didn't want to march, but played in the concert band my freshman year. By Sophomore year I decided that an engineering major with business minor wouldn't allow me the time for band, so stopped playing, since I didn't have my own instrument. After not playing for eighteen years, my wife, who had heard how I had enjoyed music when I was younger, bought me a tuba for my birthday. I started practicing and joined a local community band. More than 30 years later I'm still playing, having added an Eb to play in a British (style) Brass Band when I lived in the the Richmond, Virginia area.

[ccflyerguy]

I decided to join my school's middle school band in 7th grade...and my first instrument was a mellophone. About a year after that, the tuba section lost several players, so our conductor asked me to shift over. As the junior guy in the section, I got the most decrepit instrument. It was a mass of dents, scratches, and repairs, but had good tone...and I found that I enjoyed playing the bass parts.

Moving into high school (this school went from 5th grade through high school), I joined Concert Band, got a better tuba, and was section leader for my last two years...also played around with an orphan E-flat three valve upright tuba (the four tubas shared bass parts with two giant bass saxophones...amazing instruments...turned out the school had gotten them in the 1930s, after local jazz bands moved away from using them).The Concert Band was good enough to tour annually to the east coast (we were in St. Louis), and once to San Antonio during their world fair...we had a lot of fun!

Unfortunately, my college only had a Drum and Bugle Corps...and I didn't enjoy marching with a bass bugle on my shoulder. Quit after one year...didn't play again until I picked up a CC four-valve orchestral tuba at an antique store a few years ago. There's no band in my area (we are way out in the sticks), so I play for personal pleasure!