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Well would you - do you? I sense another frustration setting in but am tempted. From the little I understand it’s virtually all in the head. Recognise it!!

Please let me know your thoughts -

John

huh

Huh?

Play it - do it - take part in it!! What did you think I meant! Walked the dog on Boxing Day to a local course. He [the dog Domino said why not!] The wife said you dare - so do you? Are there common frustrations?

Regards John

I played golf long before I owned a bass tuba. I am a natural at the short game but struggled to become a decent ball striker (no double entendre there, that is the golf term for the "long game"). Most people are the other way around, which meant that other people always thought I was better than my actual scores would indicate. Golf allowed me to confirm what I had suspected for a while, namely that I have good fine motor skills (small muscles) and poor balance/coordination/strength (big muscles). I was also a late bloomer physically; I didn't "develop" like my high school baseball teammates until my sophomore and junior years of college. Golf was a real struggle until that age, which conveniently enough was the age where I realized that golf was way too expensive and time consuming to remain a priority. I used to practice daily and be terrible; now that I've grown up physically, I play twice a year and score in the low 80's.

Parallels to the bass tuba? The bass tuba was frickin easy! I was one of those kids who saw the bass tuba as cheating for a while. I wanted to man up and play everything on BBb. My teacher soon made me get an F; it was a love-hate relationship (with the horn, not the teacher) the entire time, BUT...the increased flexibility and the higher pedal range led me to develop my playing in ways that I would not have on the BBb. Ironic because when I was young and stupid, I anticipated it being exactly the opposite (that the bass tuba would spoil me and make me weaker). Eventually, I decided that the need to find a single medium sized instrument outweighed key considerations; after years of forethought and saving money, I bought the MW and lived happily ever after (well, it's only been 5 months but you know what I mean).

Nevertheless, the lessons of my golf game HAVE been important for my tuba playing: I'm still good at the fine stuff and not as good with brute force. My breathing is not ideal and my embouchure is frickin terrible if you go by the book. But like with golf, I've figured out a way to make my set up work through a <i>result oriented approach.</i> In tuba and in golf, I know that fighting my autodidicatic technique is the WRONG way to go. I embrace my "bad" habits and turn them to my advantage.

Is that what you wanted?

I gotta throw the bulls**t flag on this one......

Trolling.....on the offense.....10 yds....

Repeat 1st down.....

AVC

BTW....if I'm wrong....consider me very un-enlightened.....

I am sorry to have confused you. My apologies. In essence the post is quite simple. Performance and the bass tuba is important to me but my career does not depend on it. The tuba is not the most important thing in my life - my family is. The game of Golf [which I am contemplating venturing into ]seems to me - even before I pick up a club – to have most if not all of the high and low points of musical performance – i.e. it’s in the head etc and includes a huge opportunity for experimenting with clubs [read mps etc etc.]

So the post is “do thoughtful tubists with time on their hands etc pay golf or no?’ If yes what are the pitfalls

Thanks John

Let me be the first to apologize....

Sure....I enjoy golf....harder to get a driver around my expanding waistline nowadays....hehehe

But I do enjoy it.....applying my mental processes could definitely make my golfing better...but I don't know if I play golf to be good at it. It just something to enjoy.

Once again...my apologies.

AVC

I play whenever I've time! Find it so frustrating that it's addictive!

Trying to better my handicap of 18 at the moment, and my goal for 2007 is to shoot around 85 consistently!

Anyway, more practice required for that!

I have always defined myself with my music-including tuba.When the excrement hits the fan, I react by taking on a new music project.
The two times I tried golf, I sucked rocks at it.
Around here we got golfers and we got sailors. The two groups seem to be mutually exclusive. Golfers rarely sail and sailors rarely golf. My son golfs and finds sailing in a boat confining. I sail, love the freedom of going anywhere the wind can blow me and can't stand the idea of being confined to fairways gouged out of the woods and playing each hole in exactly the same order.
I find a positive correlation between sailboats and music. Never want to sail beyond radio range without a geetar aboard.

John,
I can see the similarities of golf - it is something I might like to try when I retire (a little way off yet!).

However, I wonder if it is really as good a use of time as playing music? Yes, golf does test skills, provide a sense of achievement, give exercise in the open air and provide a social outlet. But, at the same time one is not an integral part of a team like playing music in an ensemble, and you playing golf does not give others pleasure (I assume you will never become another Tiger Woods!).

Personally, if I had spare time, I think I would rather spend it practicing more to become a better tuba player, or learn a second instrument - maybe a double bass to play when there is no tuba part in the orchestra.

Just my random thoughts.

AndyCat wrote:I play whenever I've time! Find it so frustrating that it's addictive!

truer words have never been spoken

Trying to better my handicap of 18 at the moment, and my goal for 2007 is to shoot around 85 consistently!

you are like Tiger Woods compaired to me!

Golf is one of the best walks in the woods I have ever taken .

Golf may be addicting, and there IS an element of performance in each,

but golf is NOT music.



(even though one may be frustrated enough to communicate DURING golf... )

Yes, I shoot in the 80's. 90 degrees is too hot.

That aside, yes, I play. I don't have a measured handicap, but I play about bogey golf. I have a really nice set of Tour Edge clubs that I bought a couple of years ago and had adjusted after being measured by a local club pro. No, I don't play scratch golf, but just as someone who wears a size 43 jacket is always going to find a 42 a bit tight and a 44 a bit loose until he has one or the other altered, so did I to make sure nothing but myself was to blame.

I also have an old left elbow injury from a bike wreck which complicated matters. My swing speed indicated marginally a stiff shaft, but conventional stiff shafts hurt my elbow. But with a regular shaft, I lost control. Now, add to this I love hickory shafts, and although I can only hit an old mashie I picked up for $5 at a flea market @150 yards, I hit it straight as a string, with no elbow pain. I then saw a show on Golf network where someone, I believe it was Byron Nelson before he died, was talking about how hickory torques out more than modern shafts. Ah HA! I went looking for a "stiff" graphite shaft that also torqued out more. I found the Tour Edge set surfing. I went to a local shop, tried it out, and the rest is history. The stiff shaft matches my swing speed, the extra, or would that be softer, torque sucks up the impact stress from reaching my elbow, and I hit straighter, just like the hickory sticks, but longer, with more control. It just happens that at the same time I found my set the Golf Network was running the old series with Bob Jones "How I Play Golf," where he uses his hickory set. I recorded and watched the episodes; I modified my swing accordingly, and the slice that plagued me as a young man evaporated. I still screw up fairway shots from all those years of incorrect shafts, but overall, life on the course is good.

Whew! That was a long ramble. Time for the 19th hole!

Wanna get that kind of mental exercise, a BETTER physical workout, and not spend nearly so much money?

Disc Golf.


the Professional Disc Golf Association is the governing body of the sport. You can play for free on most courses, and those that do charge ask for minimal money, usually because it's on private land. ($5 is pretty common). You can buy one golf disc (a regular ol' Wham-O will work, but not well) and play just fine, or you can get a whole bag of different kinds of golf discs and look like you know what you're doing. Discs can run anywhere from $6 to $20 or beyond, but you can start with those in the $6-$10 range. And, your dog can join you for the casual rounds.

There are something like 6,000 active members of the PDGA, certainly not all professional players. there are something like 1,700 courses in the US (course directory is on the PDGA website) and you can buy discs from many places on line.

Disc Golfers just might be even friendlier to deal with than tuba players. And that says something.

steve
#21177
disc golf hacker

Doc wrote:In your search for straight tee shots, did you try increasing the degrees of your driver to help reduce sidespin, or was the torque adjustment alone sufficient?

Whew! That was a long ramble. Time for the 19th hole!

I'm with you!

Just the shaft. My driver is a moderate sized Tour Edge Lift-Off "Hyper Steel," and here's what it looks like:

http://www.touredge.com/products/mens/hypersteel.html

I also found out my hands take a 1/32 oversize grip, so once that was sorted out, mid-season when the wrists are limber and the grass is green and well maintained, I can get anywhere from 270 to 300 on a medium sized steel head with 10.5* loft and the traditional bulge and roll face to a traditional pear-shaped head of less than 300cc. No titanium, no "magic" shaft of exotic length, construction or inlaid rare earth fibers, standard 17/4 stainless woods and 431 stainless irons heads with standard grooves, etc.

Ironically, once I sorted out my slice, I had to get different heads for the fairway woods, which are part of the SP-1 set that includes my irons, since they were made with closed faces, and I started pulling. So I got a set of blue steel Dynacraft heads in 3-15*, 5-19* & 7-22* to match my driver and the weight, size and profile of the old fairway heads. They were too traditional, so they only lasted one year in the Dynacraft catalog!

The irons are here:

http://www.touredge.com/products/mens/menssp1plus.html

I had to have them shortened 1/4 inch, and made progressive by half degrees of lie instead of jumping every other club. So I had them shortened at the hosel rather than the grip butt to make them marginally stiffer. I don't remember the torque spec right off, but where steel shafts have less than 2* of torque, the fairways and irons have about 4 1/2*, making them just soft enough to take the stress of my elbow. I bought a Dynacraft 60*/3* wedge and aftermarket shaft with similar specs to match, evened out the lofts a little bit, and found a hybrid looking Dunlop putter that looks half way between a Ping Anser and a mallet. Again, very stable without resorting to an oversized head.

Now, here's the kicker: in researching club specs, length and lie are pretty linear. But to get the best uniformity in distance segments, loft is not. And only the manufacturers of some lines of womens' clubs have looked into this to any great degree (pun intended), rather than just juicing the loft to make what is numbered a 6 iron the same as a 5 iron 30 years ago, then try to sell you a "gap" wedge after juicing the wedge to 9 iron specs. As distance is a function of club head speed more than anything else, loft needs to be determined according to differential sine function extrapolated from your swing speed to get your traditional 10 yard difference between clubs, then work that back to what sine number corresponds to what degree of loft to bend each iron to on the bench. I measured my 5 iron and 6 iron distance, adjusted the loft mathematically to get what a 10 yard difference would be, worked out the sine function equivalent differential of the loft, used that differential as an additive function to get the sine numbers for the rest of the irons, then used the inverse sine function on my old TI-30 calculator from high shool to get the degree numbers to give to the shop pro to adjust them out on his bench to the nearest 1/2 degree per club. It just so happens that this does work out to a rule of thumb of about 4* difference per club in the middle irons for most people, but not always. If you swing slow, you'll need more loft differential from club to club than if you swing fast.

But this is a tuba forum. I better shut up now.

Hey, Doc -- as long as you can still work the beer cooler, I'm right there with you!

We've all come a long way. My dad died when I was nine, and I initially learned how to play when I was twelve by reading his paperback copy of Arnold Palmer's book and I drug out his clubs from the back of the garage: A 1958 or 59 set of Wilson Staff irons, still with the original leather grips (boy, are they slick now!) and a set of Spalding woods of a similar vintage that had plastic heads. I still have them.

The local country club where my folks were members took pity on me, and when my Mom asked about dues, they let me play on his membership at a "student rate" discounted annual dues of only a few hundred dollars, so from the time I was twelve until I graduated from college all I had to do was call ahead for a tee time and sign the book. I had a real Bag Boy brand pull cart, so I would ride out to the course on my bicycle with one hand on the handle bars and the other pulling my clubs behind me on the pull cart before I was old enough to drive, meet my friends who also played golf who were sons of other members, have a good, cheap lunch, and play the rest of the day until dinner.

As you said, Ah, the glory of youth!