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Re: Eb pitch problem
Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2009 11:59 pm
by 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.
Re: Eb pitch problem
Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2009 11:53 am
by Geotuba
bubbacox wrote: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
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