TubeNet

Our school has 6 tubas. 2 sousas, 2 convertable, and 2 concert. And now (THANKS TO THE FLIPPEN DRUMMERS), only 3 of them work. We have 1 sousa, 1 convertable, and 1 concert. And there's three of us. So we have one guy on a sousa for concert. We are screwed.

At the begining of the year, one of the drummers addmitted to throwing paper into the bell of the concert tuba I was playing. A few days later, it mysteriously became unplayable. Then one of the other tuba players was at pep band when a sousa died too. Then today, my friend tried to play the convertable tuba and it has the same problem.

So we have 2 tubas, and a sousa. And the band doesn't have the money to fix them. And neither do we. We are trying to get fundraisers together, but we need at least one tuba fixed RIGHT away. Someone is going to bathe and snake the convertable tuba this weekend. But if it doesn't work, we are SCREWED.

BOTTOM LINE, what can cause a tuba to become muffled and physically impossible to play? It definetly feels like something is stuck in it. But wouldn't the paper eventually break down and come out? We have tried everything: spun them, taken valves out, taken slides out, snaked them. Nothing worked. What are some ideas for fundraisers that can be put together quickly? What do we do about the drummers? I've had it with them, I'm about to take them out back, one by one and beat the living crap out of them. Any suggestions?

Best wishes,
A very pissed off tuba chick

Okay, thanks! I just told the guys who has the most recently broken tuba with him. I will let you know if it was either of those things

goodgigs wrote:

DevilDog-2013 wrote: I've had it with them, I'm about to take them out back, one by one and beat the living crap out of them. Any suggestions?

Please bring a camera and post it on line !

Oh, I WILL mwahaha...

When I was in high school we had one of our sousaphones come up lame suddenly, about the same as yours. It was stuffed up and wouldn't play. We tried to snake it out with no luck. I finally took it home and filled it with warm (not hot) water and just let it sit until something floated to the surface. Finally... after a day or two a trombone mute floated up to the top of the bell flange. It was made out of cardboard, so it just took awhile to soak up enough water to start falling apart at the seams.

If you teacher doesn't want to put the clamps on the drummers, he/she is not much of a band director! Directors hate to have parts missing during a major performance.... maybe the threat of no tuba section will make him/her take some action?

You can usually get most of the crumpled paper out of a sousaphone or tuba by slapping it. The vibration jiggles the paper loose.

If there is still some in there, you can drive it out by running water from a garden hose into the mouthpipe. That's a messy job, and the tuba will become very heavy when it's filled with water.

A couple of years ago a new student was faced with that problem and we did not want to go outside because of the weather, so I brought a steel tape measure to his next lesson. We removed the tuning slide from his sousaphone and poked the tape up into the larger tubing. It pushed out the remaining paper wads, and the problem was solved. That trick will only work on tubas which have the main tuning slide after the valve section; you don't want to push a steel tape through the pistons.

When I was in high school a drummer tossed something into my tuba during a rehearsal, and he was immediately thrown out of the band. Of course it didn't hurt that the director was a tubist himself, and was my father too.

To the very miffed Tuba-Chick:

Crumpled up paper shouldn't cause the horn to be impossible to play, unless it has completely plugged the bore.

What is the brand of the Tubas in question? If they are Yamaha, the valves could have easily been mixed up OR the valve guides could have slipped and been re-tightened into the vent hole instead of the valve guide pin hole, which causes the muffled, un-playable horn. This is pretty common with Yamaha Tubas.

Remember: DON'T PANIC!. Check those two problems, then if that doesn't work you might have something clogging your horn. You can remove the main tuning slide and put and run water through the larger side (the bugle of your Tuba). Forcing water through your horn should help dis-lodge any paper or other paraphernalia that is clogging it. BUT BE CAREFUL. A Tuba full of water is very heavy and you have to spin it around to get all of the water out. Make sure the horn is BONE DRY before you reassemble it, or you will have corrosion problems.

Let us know what you find out!

Pissed Tuba Chick,

Why are the students having to deal with this? If your band director is not taking this on, rooting out the drummers and suspending them, he should be getting a pretty strong rebuke from the principal/school board. If I knew that 3 of my multi-thousand dollar tubas had been sabotaged,I'd be on the warpath. What's the deal? I've never heard of students having to put on fundraisers to fix a student prank. What is your director doing about this?

elimia wrote:Pissed Tuba Chick,

Why are the students having to deal with this? If your band director is not taking this on, rooting out the drummers and suspending them, he should be getting a pretty strong rebuke from the principal/school board. If I knew that 3 of my multi-thousand dollar tubas had been sabotaged,I'd be on the warpath. What's the deal? I've never heard of students having to put on fundraisers to fix a student prank. What is your director doing about this?

She hasn't done anything. All I know is that if i ever get a shot at the drummer, I will kick him so hard, he will NOT have children. I'm fed up with these people. I am so close to dropping out of band, it's not even funny. All of us tubas are. But if that happens, the band is screwed. We owe more than that to our director. It's her first AND last year with us and we can't just let the band fall apart because we are pissed at a few people. The soulution to the drummer problem is to make him want to leave band. Problem solved. But we stil need 600+ to fix the damned horns.

BRSousa wrote:To the very miffed Tuba-Chick:

Crumpled up paper shouldn't cause the horn to be impossible to play, unless it has completely plugged the bore.

What is the brand of the Tubas in question? If they are Yamaha, the valves could have easily been mixed up OR the valve guides could have slipped and been re-tightened into the vent hole instead of the valve guide pin hole, which causes the muffled, un-playable horn. This is pretty common with Yamaha Tubas.

One is a Miraphone, one is a Jupiter, and I have no idea what the sousa is.

I will let you guys know if the bath helps. I stil haven't heard back from the guy.

Thanks for the replies

D-D:

Hang in there. I'm a HS teacher (not band) and I know the score when it comes to working with parents, kids, other teachers and administration. It is a good thing you are trying to look out for the band and not just yourself. There are quite a few school bandmasters here on TubeNet so, as Bill Clinton said, :I feel your pain..."

goodgigs,

If the bath doesn't work, then I will call "what's his name" at CSUS . Or my old band director, he (a tuba player) will know what to do. If nothing else, he can refer me to someone.

As far as the Auburn band, I haven't had time to yet. But I will probably go to one of their concerts first, then talk to someone about it.

Thanks

No help here with the actual problem, but in defense of the drummers - as I read the story, one drummer admitted to a foolish prank with one tuba. Supposing that's the cause of the problem with that tuba, it still leaves two tubas unaccounted for, so according to the story, you have

• one drummer honest enough to tell you what he did
• one or more drummers who do not otherwise appear in the story
• two incidents that could have been due to the flute players for all we know, and the only thing clear from the story is that whoever did it isn't as honest as that drummer.

So based only on the facts as presented, the drummers are getting a bad rap. Some of them may be innocent, and while one of them is guilty, if he hadn't said anything, you would have no clue what was going on. As preposterous as it may sound, you might be better off to make up with that guy and get him on your side, and for that matter all the drummers, rather than wage a war you can't win.

Donn wrote: As preposterous as it may sound, you might be better off to make up with that guy and get him on your side, and for that matter all the drummers, rather than wage a war you can't win.

Oh trust me, we can win this war. Almost everyone in band *cough, cough* dislikes this drummer. They have absolutely no respect for other instruments. Well, obviously the one who sabotaged the tubas. True, not ALL percussionists are like this. Most of them are pretty chill. But we do have witnesses of the one drummer throwing paper into the first tuba. So we are sure it was him. True, that still leaves two tubas unnacounted for. But we can still blame him for the first tuba, and only assume that it was him for the other two.

DevilDog-2013 wrote:

Donn wrote: As preposterous as it may sound, you might be better off to make up with that guy and get him on your side, and for that matter all the drummers, rather than wage a war you can't win.

Oh trust me, we can win this war. ....

No... you can't. Bury the hatchet and move on. A band is about people working together.

TubaTinker wrote:

DevilDog-2013 wrote:

Donn wrote: As preposterous as it may sound, you might be better off to make up with that guy and get him on your side, and for that matter all the drummers, rather than wage a war you can't win.

Oh trust me, we can win this war. ....

No... you can't. Bury the hatchet and move on. A band is about people working together.

+1

The best life lesson you can ever learn is how to be the "bigger" person. The proper attitude will get you very far. This is a good opportunity to be the better person. Your positive behavior will shine a positive light on you.

Can you send us pictures of the non-working horns? Also can you let us know which horns are having which problems specifically? This might help diagnose problems. (If this were Car Talk this is where I would make you make the sound that your car is making)

Sousaphones and tubas are easy targets in middle and high school.
I found soda bottles (sometimes with some drink left in them), paper wads, pencils and other crap thrown into our souzys back in grade school; especially high school.
I once even found mini umbrellas stuffed down the bells of our silver King sousaphones. Made me mad to find out it was the colorgaurd bimbos who did it
I'm sure they didn't know or care that they were "vandalizing" six-thousand-dollar sousaphones...
Most of the time I would just lightly smack the horn and rotate it until the crap would come out.

Wish you best of luck!

TubaTinker wrote:... Bury the hatchet and move on. A band is about people working together.

We can bury the hatchet when the multi- thousand dollar tubas are fixed. We have a right to be beyone mad. We are not only screwed for this year, but next. True, we will probably just have our director make an announcement to the band about it. Maybe that will help. We are trying to make this work for everyone. As much as we would like to, our band can't afford to loose tubas OR percussionists. Which is why we haven't taken any action yet ourselves. We are going to let our director handle this, as much as we would like to just fight about it. You are right, band is about working together. It's just frustrating when people will play pranks on us, unknowingly, making a multi thousand dollar instrument unplayable.

Tubajason wrote:...asking people over a chat room with no pictures or descrpition of the sound being made will not help....

I don't really know how to describe it. They are muffled and will not play. The sound and feel kinda reminds me of when you forget to fully convert the convertable tubas. Or if a vavle is not pressed down all the way. But we have checked everything.
And I can't post pictures untill I go back to school. I will take a video of someone attempting to play each horn, so you guys can see AND hear what I'm talking about. But it can't be done untill tomarrow.

Tubajason wrote:Find or get the cases for the tuba's and sousaphones, everyday my tuba players whether it is concert band or marching take the instruments out of the case at the beginnig of rehearsal and put it back in the case at the end of rehearsal, and in all those years we have never had a issue with foriegn objects being found in the sousaphones or tubas.

Whatever you do going forward put the instruments away, H.S. kids being kids will mess with tubas when they are left out, you will never even know they are doing it because the bulk of the damage/playing around will happen outside of band.

The tubas are always in their cases when they aren't being played. And if they're not (i.e. for pep band when they are in the stands), they are watched by the director or parents. They are only being messed with when we are playing them. We can't see anything being trown into them because the bells are above us, and we can't hear anything, because we are playing. So the object (paper) is blown through the horn.
And one of us would know if they were being taken out of the cases and tampered with. I am literally the first one in the band room everyday and one of the last to leave. And whenever the director is not in the band room, the instrument closet is locked. So it can only be happening when we are playing during rehearsal.

Even though, I have managed to make a total arse of myself, Thanks for the replies.

FWIW:

Your band needs some of these:

Ferree's Sousaphone Grill

http://band-orchestra.musiciansfriend.c ... ID=2179950



What is is about throwing things into a souzie? A friend tells a story about playing souzie in the HS band: They were marching in the big Rhody Festival Parade here in Port Townsend and the band stopped and played in place in front of a tavern. Someone came out of the tavern and poured a pitcher of beer in his sousaphone. Now, tuba players are known to like beer but using all that tubing to get it to the mouth makes it taste... rank.

We wanted to buy bell covers, but we couldn't afford it this year. So we were all going to save up over summer and pitch in for it. But now we have to save up to get the tubas fixed. Which means, we can't get covers untill next summer probably.

If you guys need a horn immediately, I can bring up my old Conn BBb.