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One of my summer goals is to develop a better sound when playing at the extreme loud dynamic. Right now, there is too much growling, tearing, and blowouts. I have tried to make loud playing a priority in practice sessions, but this is tiring and not always practical. Any suggestions?

An observation:

The tuba players I have known that can play really loud (which does not include me) have a few things in common.

They can play loud on whatever instrument they use.
They can play loud on whatever mouthpiece they use (within reason).
They are all larger-than-average people.

That should provide some clues, but I imagine practice is very important...moreso than any equipment choice. Try doing some simple exercises repeating the same note with large dynamic changes. 8 beats from ppp to fff, 8 beats back down...that sort of thing. Try to keep the sound consistent at all dynamics...don't do anything but get louder or softer. Make some observations about how it is you get louder and softer. Watch your face in a mirror as you do it. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Since I'm guessing a large air supply is rather important as well, some work with an incentive spirometer certainly won't hurt.

Oh, and don't forget to practice playing soft, as well. Way too few players practice playing soft. It's really important, too.

Rather than learning to play "loud" you should learn to control the air and develop good tone. Those two are the basis for increased dynamic control. If you only work on playing loud you'll get bored, too.

Faster air = loud dynamics
Slower air = soft dynamics
Strength (muscle tension) is your enemy in both extremes of dynamics, weakness (relaxation) is your friend.

Play in as BIG a room as you can find, and fill it with a thick, quality sound (but don't neglect your soft practice!).

Also: Tommy Johnson used to have his students play one random etude daily as loud as humanly possible, but with good attacks & intonation. That's a good approach as well.

Biggs wrote:One of my summer goals is to develop a better sound when playing at the extreme loud dynamic. Right now, there is too much growling, tearing, and blowouts. I have tried to make loud playing a priority in practice sessions, but this is tiring and not always practical. Any suggestions?

While equipment can set some limits on how loud you can get, the two most important factors are AIR and embouchure, in that order. First, work on your air.

If your sound is breaking apart or distorting at loud dynamics, then it's likely that your embouchure is not holding your sound together. In other words your embouchure is not strong enough to vibrate at those dynamics without blowing apart. In my experience the quickest way to strengthen your embouchure is to work on flexibility exercises (lip slurs). Lip slurs can help strengthen your embouchure for loud playing, soft playing, high and low playing, and can also help improve the quality of your sound.

AIR! AIR! AIR! I have recently been addressing this problem in my own playing of creating a fuller bigger loud throughout the range of the horn. Being i used to smoke i could never achieve the air column i needed to get rich, dark sound. Quiting smoking starting a cardio exercise plan and doing breathing exercises taught to me by my private teachers has thickened my sound exponentially. I haven't changed much in my practice just really have been thinking full breath with hoe syllable. Don't buy a bigger mouthpiece or horn, play what you got just make it sound good. I bought a PT-48, PT-88, and G&W Bayamo hoping there was a miracle fix there wasn't. I am now playing on a mouthpiece smaller than all three and sounder bigger than i did on them. It was all because of the air flow, listen to what your teachers say about it. I heard what my teachers said but actually never applied it till this summer when i took a lesson with a prominent St. Louis tuba player who made me a believer. Also remember it takes time to hear the results so be patient. As Bob Kelso from scrubs once said " Nothing worth having comes easy" So keep on practicing and playing and good luck.

Sometimes a fat rim mouthpiece, like maybe a Wick 2, will help brace your embouchure, but can be an obstacle to other aspects of playing. I'm not advocating that you take this approach over others offered. I'm just sayin' ...

One of the first things Tommy Johnson instructed me to do was to play one etude (usually a Grigoriev or Blazhevich) as loud as possible for the last 5-10 minutes of my practice day. That was the last thing in my daily routine.

The key to doing this right is to play as loud as you can, not as loud as you wish you could. Play loud and legato with a controlled sound; think of making a constant crescendo between notes. Stay relaxed while doing this and make it just another normal part of tuba function rather than a feat of strength.

A few ideas...

1) Practice outside; you'll never feel like you can fill the space. Don't do anything consciously, just play well and controlled. I used to practice outside when I was at Oberlin on any nice day I could. Drove many crazy, especially the nearby pizzeria. But I learned control, and there's nothing outdoors that'll make you sound any better than you do. Quite the opposite!

2) Play with a mute. Got this one from Owen Marshall. Play with a mute; again, don't do anything special, just be heard, and you will get a workout, and learn control. And sounding good with a mute? Impossible - but you'll try

3) Ron Bishop used to demonstrate this very well. Inhale "HOHHHHH", "HUHHHHH" exhale. This means releasing all the air instantly, without force, and as quietly as possible. If you force a note, that's when it shatters and soaks the wall in a cracked note that sounds like $#!+. Swing your arm easily up to your mouth as you breath in without effort, release your arm in the same motion, as well as the air - 'HUHHH". I realize I cannot describe this well. Maybe I'll post something on youtube if people are confused. Your goal is to move a he|| of a lot of air very quickly without restraint. Ron Bishop isn't a big guy. But the amount of sound he can make - Holy %$@#!

4) Practice your soft playing. Practice your crescendi and decrescendi. Practice everything that works your aperture and air control. Force and effort are your enemies. Learn efficiency. Buzz - a lot. Any problem you have, take the mouthpiece off - bet you still can't do it! Fix it on the mouthpiece, you'll fix it on the horn.

5) Make a beautiful sound. A beautiful sound will be energetic in and of itself, and you won't have to work very hard to fill a hall.

6) Remember, most tubists play too damn loud, or are geared up for such. No reason to blow the violas off the stage (well, maybe cosmetic ones)... They're there for the same reason you are. Feeling able to do so? Priceless

J.c.S.

You can play very loud no matter what instrument/mouthpiece you use. To play something louder, I use two tricks that I just recently learned from a very good source that will remain nameless. First, I will stick an unfolded paper clip in my receiver along with the mouthpiece. It produces a very fuzzy sound as you can imagine. The objective is to use as much air as possible to make the pitches sound almost decent. Then, when you take the paper clip out your sound is so much larger and fuller. I think of it as being the donut for a baseball bat. The second technique I use is flutter tonguing. For me, I play louder when I flutter tongue an entire passage and then play it normally. However, not everyone can flutter tongue simply because of genetics. Hope this helps!

Dan Perantoni described a method that helps both with projecting sound and getting the previously mentioned purer tone that travels farther. He said to "breathe from the lips." What that means is that instead of using the upper body and abdomen muscles to push air from the lungs to the lips, think about pushing the air from the lips to the other end of the tuba. Hold your hand a couple feet out in front of you, set your embrochure and breathe so that you feel the air hitting and possibly surrounding your hand. You aren't pushing the air from your lungs to your lips, but from your lips to your hand, or from your lips through your tuba to the other end of the bell. Make sense?

I've never liked the concept of "pushing" air. Air comes out on it's own, if you let it. But a close parallel phrase I use with my students is blow THROUGH not AT the tuba.

J.c.S.

Biggs wrote:I have tried to make loud playing a priority in practice sessions, but this is tiring and not always practical. Any suggestions?

Where are you playing? Indoors or outdoors? If indoors, what size of room? If it's any smaller than a typical band room with twenty-foot ceilings, it's going to hurt.

Also, what do you mean by "growling, tearing, and blowouts"?

I could suggest a certain brand of outdoor ensemble , as the problems you describe are not favored (I never accepted them when I was teaching such a group) and you'll be encouraged to play as correctly as possible while still belting out some volume.

For me, it's easy. Play loud. Really loud. Lots of wind, but don't just throw it at the horn -- play right into the pitch. If it wobbles or does a multi-buzz, back off and figure out another approach. Use any of the tricks here, or use none.

There are really only three things I'd look for -- pitch stability, timbre stability, and overall efficiency. All three are highly affected by the stability of your windstream. It's really easy to overplay, especially as you go lower -- or maybe the term would be "underplay", as you'd think of playing really low but instead undershoot the pitch and end up with a simply trashy sound.

As you progress, play WAY TOO LOUD. I'm not talking merely VSU Horsepower (Youtube those guys ), I'm talking Howitzer. While doing so, strive for pitch & timber stability and efficiency. Don't even tongue the notes, just launch them through the horn like a combination of mortar shells and firehose.

Say that you're playing like a Toyota Camry, but want to get to the volume capability of a V8 Mustang with an open exhaust. Play like a Top Fuel dragster.

THEN, back off, and play at a reasonable volume. If the character of the music really demands some full-throttle playing, you'll find it easier and more controllable.

This is my first post so bear with me. I'm an Engineer by trade , and musician by hobby. I am by no means an expert on playing loud (although I do my fair share of it), but here's my 2c (turned into a wall of text skip to Conclusion if you want):

I've heard several different pieces of 'advice' such as spreading your lips apart to allow more air to pass through (which seems to degrade sound quality) or putting more of your lips into the mouthpiece allowing for a larger vibrating area resulting in a higher volume (but going too far seems to make the sound muddy and unfocused), so for now, assume that the lips are something that needs to remain somewhat constant to preserve the intergety of the sound.

Next, considering the horn, it is usually much easier to play louder on a larger horn than a smaller horn. I have a Bb Besson 3/4 size horn (that I've had for a few years) and a Bb Conn 20J (recently purchased) and the difference in the volume I can produce with the Conn was dumbfounding.

Some background info: When I was practicing loud on the Besson back in college, I started to focus on the response of the horn on my embouchure, and noticed that there was a point where as I increased airflow and volume, I basically hit a wall. Pushing beyond that wall resulted in the typical BLAT that I hear often from other players at my level. It seemed to me that my lips weren't really changing as I increased in volume, so I started trying to figure out what changes at that specific point. At that time I was a college student and was taking a fluid dynamics course (you may want to look that up on wikipedia if you dont know some basics, and it has a nice pic).

That wall made me think of the laminar boundary . I'm sure that everyone here knows that sound in a wind instrument travels best on a moving column of air. To me it seemed that sound would travel really well with good quality on a laminar flow, and just the opposite for turbulent flow. So looking at the basic equations for flow (Reynolds Number on wikipedia for reference) as you linearly increase airflow through the pipe (horn), you would have to exponentially increase pressure (air support) to extend the laminar boundary and create a longer velocity profile. Also pipe (tube) diameter is a critical component in determining flow properties, explaining the drastic effect the bore of the horn has on volume.

Conclusion:
So how can you go about doing that? Focused and supported airflow is the key being able to play louder without distortion, assuming that your lips are able to maintain a constant sound quality regardless of volume.

What if...
There is always a theoretical airflow bottle-neck in a tuba based on a non constant bore. What if you were able to change the bottle-neck to something that you can control? The most likely solution would be your lips. Would it then be possible to work somewhat outside of the limits of the instrument, and produce an even larger sound? It seems like people on this forum are suggesting just that, and thats where I'm heading as I get more used to the response on my Conn. From the previous posts, it seems like mainting intonation throughout the dynamic range (and pushing sound quality at upper levels) would be the way to go to attain this.