TubeNet

OK, give or take a few percentage points, the various brasses used to make instruments are as follows, with the percentages stated as copper/zinc:

yellow 70/30
gold 80/20
red 90/10

The names given to the brass are what they look like or are reminiscent of in their polished state. Of course, copper or Conn "coprion" bells are just that: pure copper. The color version of the Bach catalog has a page with comparisons.

This is a rough description for this thread. There are several other alloys, new and old that have been/are used, especially to make bells, and others, such as monel, used just for valves. The "conventional wisdom" is that since pure copper is softer than pure zinc, the higher the copper content, the "softer" or "mellower" or "less overtones" the sound quality is.

The only way for you to decide which alloy bell to choose is to play them both, and more than one example of each. The alloy is only one factor, ALL ELSE BEING EQUAL, that contributes to tone. With differences in bore, leadpipe taper, bell taper, wrap of the loops and bows, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, the only way is to play the horn, as there are so many variables in the construction of the instrument. On the same mouthpiece, I can make my own Besson sound so fundamental you'd think it is a German Kaiser tuba, or so bright you'd think the whole thing is an iron sewer pipe clanking around, obviously not a desirable tone. Just by arching and lowering my tongue, I can make my tuba sound like one of the Australian digeridoos, with the phasing effect. Probably no musical application, but it gets the giggles going with my 8 year old son, who wants to play cornet, and anything that raises interest can eventually be focused to a desire to learn, and he has the desire.

The reason for the rambling is to demonstrate that all this is only means to an end. Purchase the tuba that sounds the best for the way you play it in your particular application, with the help of someone knowledgeable about both tubas in general and the way you play, accounting for both the ideosyncracies known about any particular model, and your desires/preferences/goals in tuba playing, whether it be a $5-digit HB or Yammy "handmade," or the $401 I spent on eBay to get my 3-valve Besson with perfect valves and as open a tone as a comp gets. As bloke said, if you're not sure, don't buy yet; go play some more horns, even ones you may not have considered the first go around.

Hey, bloke: that's why it's "conventional wisdom," the great euphemism for let's see some objective data, like a spectrograph analysis (goes with the three great lies, including the check's in the mail, I'll respect you in the morning and I won't.....). But then again, where are we going to find four or five "identical" tubas with the only variable being the bell alloy - NOT! Tell me someone, anyone, professional, amateur or hacker, who can make EXACTLY the same tone two whole notes in a row, much less over time to enable such a mental m............ Anyway, with all the different alloys available, and all of the marketing dross which is the inevitable corollary, doesn't it still beat each brass instrument maker having to throw zinc oxide mineral rock into a cauldron and hope it alloys with molten copper before it evaporates as you stir/swirl it?!!

...and the other "conventional" wisdom that a nickel silver/goldbrass/redbrass leadpipe makes a significant difference in a tuba's sound.

(On a trumpet, who knows? Those guys are nuts anyway.)

bloke wrote:If you've ever looked at the bell of a Conn model 8H or 88H trombone, you've observed the appearance of "gold brass".

The 8H/88H bells are actually red brass - even more copper than gold.

I'm lookin' for one of them titanium-brass horns...

bloke wrote:

glangfur wrote:The 8H/88H bells are actually red brass - even more copper than gold.

gold???....huh???...wha???...

What I meant was, red brass has a higher copper content than gold brass.

In terms of testing materials for horn construction, I do not think that it is really necessary to have a human producing a tone on an instrument. What is important in material selection (correct me if I am wrong) is the vibration characteristics of the particular alloy.
The reason I say this is because sound waves are simply vibrations being conducted through air. It is true theoretically that the production of tone does not rely on air at all (at a fundamental level) It simply relies on the buzzing of your lips.

If you could buzz your lips without air (impossible) you would still produce a tone. The reason air is necessary is because buzzing relies on bernoulli's principle (the movement of air creating alternating high/low pressure areas above the "open tube" of your resperatory system and oral cavity) So by using more/less air you are simply affecting the way your lips vibrate, and not really the actual propulsion or delivery of the sound. If you do not believe me, then just put a balloon lightly in your bell. I bet you won't be able to blow it out no matter how hard you try. So this points to the fact that we must remove air movement as an excuse for finish/alloy selections except for in the more immediate areas of our horns (leadpipes, valve sections, etc.) In the bell area it is mostly if not all about vibration.

SOooooo all of that is leading up to this point: Manufacturers should be able to test alloys for desireability by testing their vibration characteristics, thus removing the human variable.

The above, since I am not a physics major, may all be complete hooey, but I did my best to explain my theory.

adam0408 wrote:What is important in material selection (correct me if I am wrong) is the vibration characteristics of the particular alloy.

Yup.

For those hung up on the different sound of subtle alloy differences in brass, what do you think affects vibration? Stiffness? Strength? Malleability? Ductility? Corrosion resistance?

Brasses with higher copper contents are indeed more malleable and ductile than brass. They are very slightly less strong. They are more resistant to corrosion.

But they have EXACTLY the same stiffness. For a given stress, the strain is the same, up to the yield strength. And the damping characteristics are the same, too.

At very high frequences where the sibilance of the metal is part of the sound (this is true with horns played loud or stopped and probably with trumpets and trombones, but not tubas), the alloy may have a very subtle effect.

But it is not strength or workability that affects resonance and vibration. The stress of vibration is nowhere near enough for those to matter, and if it was, the instrument would fatigue and crack very quickly.

It is stiffness of the material, its mass, its residual stresses, and its elasticity that affect vibration and resonance. All brasses have the same stiffness and they are all nearly perfectly elastic (like most solid metals below yield strength). I have antique clocks with 160-year-old brass mainsprings that still work fine. Mass and residual stress are the result of design and manufacturing processes, not the material.

I dunno what people are sensing when they insist on these differences, but I have never figured out how to explain it based on materials science.

Rick "who thinks the hand-made aspects of old horns make a far bigger difference" Denney

Rick Denney wrote:........
At very high frequences where the sibilance of the metal is part of the sound (this is true with horns played loud or stopped and probably with trumpets and trombones, but not tubas), the alloy may have a very subtle effect.
......

There definately is an effect, and although not huge, it's not subtle at all.
A french horn in yellow brass will get brassy quite a bit sooner than one in gold brass. The effect is certainly noticable.

Then there remains the question which of a material´s properties, (malleability, for example, or the amount of internal stress...) and what value of such property will be "beneficial" to an instrument´s sound, provided there is any noticeable effect at all.

This turns us back towards the all-inspiring silver-vs-lacquer discussion, which has been thoroughly carried out MANY times on tubenet.

On phenomenon is striking me: How come there exist two individual horns in the US that have acquired such a fame ?
It´s almost as if the YORK people had worked some kind of magic into these. I´d like to know when it was that rumour started to spread about the CSO Yorks.
Right after production ?
When Mr. Jacobs became THE American tubist and made them famous ?
After his retirement ?
In case these horns had been regarded to be superior right after production, why didn´t York make hundreds of them or at least preserve the exact drawings to sell licenses to other manufacturers ?

tubeast wrote:In case these horns had been regarded to be superior right after production, why didn´t York make hundreds of them or at least preserve the exact drawings to sell licenses to other manufacturers ?

These horns were built by ear as prototypes, I doubt that there were ever any "drawings", and the orchestral market at the time was nothing compared to the band market, so there was no money in building CC's for orchestral work. York was sold not long after to Carl Fischer Musical Instruments and the designer left the company. I have a suspicion that they knew at the time, all right, because in speaking to someone who later worked with Bill Johnson, he remembers them being talked about. Unfortunately this person was a cornet player, so the discussions didn't have much meaning to him.

iiipopes wrote:yellow 70/30
gold 80/20
red 90/10

depends which company... but this does give a ball park

bloke wrote

bloke "who wishes there was someone just like the c. 1964 AuH2O to run in '08"

GOLDWATER ..... I get it !!!! Very funny ,Joe .

Jonathantuba wrote:Is "Rose brass" just another name for Red brass?

It can be. Or it could have a couple of percentage points more zinc. The names are descriptive, roughly, of the color that results.

Jonathantuba wrote:Is "Rose brass" just another name for Red brass?

yes and no, rosebrass is possibly easily identified to be lighter in colour to red brass which is supposed to almost look like pure copper. It would fit between Gold and Red brass, in theory.

Rose Brass however, as any of these terms, is not an industry wide standard. It is alot like the grading systems in University (even within a single university) an 80 might have gotten you an A- with one prof but it may have gotten you just a B with another.

Some companies have horns that they call red brass that have the same content as another company's rose and another company's Gold brass.

Very simply put... voodoo.

... all that brass hoodoo, and voodoo, that you do, so well

corbasse wrote:There definately is an effect, and although not huge, it's not subtle at all.
A french horn in yellow brass will get brassy quite a bit sooner than one in gold brass. The effect is certainly noticable.

"Subtle" for me is when the difference in sound is not noticed by a non-horn player without an explained, A-B comparison.

Rick "not equating 'subtle' with 'insignificant' or 'unmeasurable'" Denney

tubeast wrote:In case these horns had been regarded to be superior right after production, why didn´t York make hundreds of them or at least preserve the exact drawings to sell licenses to other manufacturers ?

1. They would have made hundreds of them had there been hundreds of buyers. But at the time, the Conn marketing machine was much stronger and the Depression made the purchase of much of anything difficult.

2. Arnold Jacobs bought the instrument as a young student. He didn't become influential until many years later, when York no longer produced professional equipment in their own factory.

3. What drawings? We don't even have really good photographs of the Yorks, and they still exist.

4. Here's the real question: Would the CSO Yorks, if stolen from the CSO, relabeled as a Something Else, and offered to the market as an "old copy of the (now extinct) CSO York", gain any more consideration than the many copies of the York now being made? It is quite difficult to talk about the York qualities for most people who have never experienced them. I have played converted Yorks, and thought them quite wonderful. But I think my Holton is rather wonderful, too, at least to the extent that I can evaluate wonderfulness.

windshieldbug wrote:York was sold not long after to Carl Fischer Musical Instruments and the designer left the company.

Pop Johnson was with York for some years after York made the instrument for Donatelli. The instrument was made in perhaps 1930, and Carl Fischer bought York during WWII. He was there more than long enough to make more of the big CC Yorks, assuming anyone had wanted to buy them. 6/4 instruments just weren't the style in those days, as they weren't in the days that followed right up to at least the late 70's. Jacobs's influence really crescendoed in the 70's, and I think that created the first big demand for that style of instrument.

Rick "who thinks the similarity of a copy to the original is less important than its individual musical qualities" Denney