"False" Tones

[Allen]

I was wondering how many of you used false (or privileged) tones. After a lot of experimenting, I have added their use alongside of the regular-fingered low notes.

Not all tubas do these notes well (or at all), but most of the horns I have played seem to do well enough. For my CC tuba, the false notes start at low F (open), and go down from there using the regular descending fingerings. For my Eb tuba, they start at low Ab (open), and also go down from there. [And, for the BBb tuba I used to have, they started at low Eb.]

I find that these notes differ from the regular-fingered ones by being less resonant. That is, the resonance "slot" is very broad. This means that the tone is not as nice, and I'm very much on my own for getting the pitch right. Another point of difference is, since the resonance is very broad (an engineer (me) would say that the instrument has a low Q), there is little stored energy in the instrument, and therefore a note can start and stop more quickly. Generally, using fingerings with less tubing helps, too.

When I want a low note to have a good tone, I use the regular fingerings. On the other hand, when playing in band I need to play low notes that are very short, I use false tones, as they speak much faster. Since the rest of the band is playing, good articulation and pitch are more important than the best solo tone. If I am going to hold a low note, I don't use false tones.

What are your experiences with false tones? Is it cheating, or is it just another technique to have in one's bag of tricks -- all in the service of making the best musical results?

Allen Walker

[GC]

I do a lot of low note work, I don't have a 5-valve horn, and I hate to pull slides. I use false tones for low notes most of the time because they tend to be better in tune and less stuffy than most 4th valve combination notes. With a lot of work, the tone can be improved to the point where it's hard to tell the difference.

False tones don't work well on some instruments. I owned a CC Cerveny 601 a few years back whose open false tone should have been an F, but was dead center between F and F#. Even though the horn was huge, its low register was unusually difficult to tune, so I had to get rid of it.

Also, I've found that the false open tone on most trumpets is a G instead of an F, and the false tone on most trombones is an F, not an Eb. I guess that the difference comes from cylindrical vs. conical bore.

[Leland]

They work fine, especially in an ensemble setting when you've got another instrument to reinforce the sound. There's something about false tones that lets them carry really well, too.

I was told a story where a well-known player went to watch a friend of his play a particular piece in an orchestra-choral concert. There was an upcoming low D that he knew was difficult to bring through the ensemble, and when it came up, it "was incredible, just this huge, solid sound coming from the back." He went up to his friend afterwards and asked how he did it, and the answer was that it was a false tone.

I keep mine reasonably decent by treating it just like any other partial. One other thing I do is play it as the root of a major triad and do arpeggios down & back up, both slurred and articulated. I'll also do a Remington-type 0-2-0-1-0-12 exercise down there.

Back in college, a friend of mine was arranging a field show based on Star Wars, and he asked if we could play a low D on our sousaphones. I said, "Sure, we can do it, and if you double the octave above it'll sound pretty fat." So, we did, fingering it 2nd valve (open was Eb, of course), and.. well, life was good, I guess.

[GC]

It's hard to predict which horn will have good false tones and which won't. Many big brass sousaphones (especially the big Conns) have remarkable false tones. Most Conn 20j tubas have excellent ones. My King 2341's false tones aren't especially easy to get, but they're acceptable with work. My monster Cerveny 601 CC had a difficult range from low F# down to pedal C, and I got rid of it mostly for that reason. A friend's big Holton 345 has the best false tones I've ever seen; they could be made to sound just like regular tones, and they were so solid that you could easily fill a big room with a clean, bone-rattling sound. My old Meinl-Weston 25 from my college days was so stuffy that I couldn't get 1-2-3-4 to speak at all, but false tone C's and B's played just fine.

I've found little way to predict which model horn will have good falsies other than that horns with big throats and bells with small bore sizes don't seem to do really well. Horns with extremely low blowing resistance also seem to have problems; a little resistance (but not too much) seems to help. You just have to try a horn out to see.

[Lew]

Interestingly the horn that seems to have the best false tones of any of my horns is the Besson 983. From the pedal Eb down to a pedal Bb and below seem to pop out much easier than on my King 2341 or even my 6/4 sized Martin.

[Lew]

I have been using a Denis Wick 3L on the Besson, and a Doug Elliot R6 with a 130 rim on the King and Martin. Yea, the Besson response surprised me too.

[Art Hovey]

If you straighted them out, some tubas would be mostly conical in shape, and others are more like exponential horns. Old-style Kings, Conns, and most sousaphones are conical, and those are the ones that seem to have the best false pedal tones in my experience. Bessons that I have tried and Yamaha top-action BBb tubas are more like exponential horns, and they seem to have weaker false pedal tones. I have no idea why that is the case. The Olds tubas that came out in the 1960's are quite small in tubing diameter but are very conical in shape; they have wonderful false pedal tones.
I used false pedal tones a lot on a 3-valve King with fixed recording bell and tuning slide in the leadpipe when I was in high school, and have a recording of me playing the contrabasson part to the Brahms 1st symphony, using the false pedal D. It sounds better than any damned bedpost ever did.
Now that I have four-valve tubas with large bore, I prefer the sound that I can get with the valves. But I still use false pedal for low BBB on a BBb tuba because I don't think that one note justifies a 5th valve.

[Rick Denney]

I was wondering how many of you used false (or privileged) tones.

I do. The fourth valve on the Holton is a bit too open-blowing for me, and my low range sucks big time even with resistance. The low F I can manage, and I struggle with the E. But I can play a solid Eb and D using false tones, and "out front" the difference in tone is negligible. On that instrument, it's much easier to pop out those two notes using false tones, and they come to me without much struggle.

Rick "whose York Master has a better fourth valve, but who uses false tones on that instrument, too" Denney

[Z-Tuba Dude]

the Besson 983. From the pedal Eb down to a pedal Bb and below seem to pop out

Am I wrong, or do the privledged tones on an Eb start with the Ab below the staff, and down?

[Dean E]

the Besson 983. From the pedal Eb down to a pedal Bb and below seem to pop out

Am I wrong, or do the privledged tones on an Eb start with the Ab below the staff, and down?

Yes. On my Eb, 3-valve York, I love playing that false Ab in (1) Ab versions of the Star Spangled Banner, and (2) the Ab chords in the first three measures of the trio of National Emblem.
To my ear, the privileged (false, frog) Ab tone is more pulsating than the legitimate A natural one-half step above it.
FWIW, I've read that the open-fingered Eb (fifth ledger line below the staff) is a real tone--in fact a pedal Eb.

[Leland]

Since false tones are never mentioned in the overtone series, and since they vary from horn to horn, I don't think that they are legitimate partials. If not, then what are they, and why do they vary from each different tuba?

Well, they're not legitimate partials. They don't fall into the easy fundamental-octave-fifth-octave-third-etc pattern of the overtone series.

As we've been saying, they vary so much from horn to horn, and that's because there's more to their usability than simply the total length (flare, taper, overall bore, bell style, etc). Others have correctly pointed out that other brass voices have their false tones on entirely different notes, too.

I figure that as long as it's usable, then it's a legitimate note, even if it's an illegitimate partial.

[Rick Denney]

Since false tones are never mentioned in the overtone series, and since they vary from horn to horn, I don't think that they are legitimate partials. If not, then what are they, and why do they vary from each different tuba?

Fred Young might tell you that they are the true pedal tones of big tubas, with the supposed fundamental being the "false tone".

The notion that the partials conform to any particular series is a misconception. The reason those partials conform to a series is because the instruments are designed such that they do. It would be quite possible to design an instrument that looked like a tuba but that did not have musical partials. The shape of the taper is absolutely critical in shaping the resulting impedance of the instrument.

Just as the instrument must be designed to provide musical direct partials, the design of the instrument affects the pitch of partials that vibrate in other resonance modes. Musically usable false tones are therefore as much a part of the instrument's design as the main harmonic series. I suspect many instruments included the desire to have good false tones as an explicit objective during an instrument's development.

Tuba design is a mixture of compromises. One maker may decide that the particular sound, or the scale of the instrument in association with a particular sound, may work best if they sacrifice the false tones. Other makers may allow one or two of the conventional partials to slide a bit to provide good false tones. Instruments with good false tones don't need as many valves, so this might have been a popular trade-off in the days when more valves meant an unacceptable price point even for professional players. Now, pros buy as many valves as they need and don't worry about the price, but the false tones still remain as artifacts of older designs.

Clearly, the fourth valve on my Holton was designed to make the low C as powerful as possible. The tubing is larger than the other valves, and it the low resistance of that tubing makes playing below F a real chore, even for good players. The false tones really come to the rescue. I can handily play low Eb's and D's using false tones that without them require precise alignments of the planets (and a better player) to pump out through the fourth valve combinations. I see the clear hand of a tuba designer at work there--they didn't have to worry about the playability of the fourth-valve combinations below E because the false tones were so good, and this allowed them to make an earth-mover low C. Of course, the designer's name may have been Mr. Happy Accident, but I'm glad he was on the job in any case.

Rick "who thinks an organ pipe model is too simplistic a description of conical tubas" Denney

[Allen]

Rick makes a good point about a brass instrument's "overtone" series. There is a lot of design work that goes into making the partials resemble a natural harmonic series. Here is a web site that contains lucid explanations, and includes an indication that the open "false" tone is the real fundamental of a brass instrument:

http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/3941/

I have found the various comments from false tone users interesting. I'm going to work on false tones as possibly more incisive versions of some of the low notes.

Allen Walker