"Silent Brass" Shortcomings

[Z-Tuba Dude]

.......the mute makes me play out of tune. yamaha never said that the thing played in tune, they just said that you could practice without anyone hearing you lol

.....Well considering you are out of tune, it is just as well that nobody can hear you!

Seriously, I found that the angle of the "cone" portion of the mute, effects the nature of the out of tune-ness. If you change the angle of the mute, different notes go out of tune.

On the positive side, when you spend all of that time trying to lip those notes in tune, once you take the mute out, regular playing seems easy!

[Dean E]

Yeah...On some things I can get by, but if there's a piece that contains a passage with tight intervals...forget it!

Tuck

I have an older model SB which can input three electronic sources and play back to headsets.

On big-belled horns, the SB mute centering cone makes almost no contact with the interior of the bell. All the cone does is rattle and vibrate like crazy. On smaller horns, there is a lot of contact with the bell, and the pitch is likely to more affected.

To stop vibrations, I got some adhesive-backed felts from the hardware store and applied them to contact points on the cone.

I have two ideas for harmonizing pitches:

1. Adjust the slides to get in tune.

2. If I am playing along with a recording, the Slow Gold program will adjust the pitch of the recording, as well as the speed.

[MartyNeilan]

When using the electronics, the horn plays so horribly out of tune it makes it almost unusable (I play using just the mute).

Is there a fix?

Yeah, sell the electronics on EBay. People will pay a premium for the cable that is three times longer than what comes with any of the other mutes. As long as the horn plays close to in tune with itself , I am not worried about A 440.

Marty "who thinks true perfect pitch is a greater curse than blessing"