Eb pitch problem

[charlieJ]

Your brain and body may just trying to do what it has been trained to do - embouchure and lungs set at a trained position and trying to compensate the weirdeness of a new pitch back to what it knows....

Tell it to knock it off with a little retraining. If that makes any sense.

[Geotuba]

Hello. I'm generally a C tuba player. I've been trying to get into e-flat so I bought one - an old B&H Imperial 3+1, in pretty good shape. Problem is, I could never really get it in tune - it was always wickedly flat. I know about the whole thing with the low-pitch horns and all that, but this tuba was cut way before I purchased it. Others have played this horn and I have heard it in tune, verified with a tuner.

So I decided to try out different e-flat tubas. It's the oddest thing - on every e-flat tuba I've ever played, I play flat. And I've tried a lot of them - at least five different horns, each for an extended period of time (the least time spend with one was about two months). I have asked others to play them and they play fine.

It's not the horns; it seems to be me. I come back to it every few months, and it's always the same thing.

The slides are all pushed all the way in. I've tried a crap load of different mouthpieces.

The one thing that's helped is playing with drones - but I lip up so much, the tone gets unsteady and unfocused.

Has anyone encountered this before? I play well in tune on C and b-flat tubas. I've never really spent any amount of time with an F.

Not an uncommon problem with the B&H Imperials. I had Ron Partch do the "Fletcher Cut" on mine and it did the trick. It was definitely not my "underblowing" since I had been struggling with the beast for over 20 years in the mistaken impression that it was my fault!! See the thread on this at viewtopic.php?f=2&t=30624&start=0" target="_blank" target="_blank