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This is a question for our repair techs out there. I have a usa line ( been told it could be a york or a holton stencil) Eb w/ 19 1/2 inch bell. Had a couple of people go through it and have not found a leak, the valves need work. When I don't use alternate fingering the horn is Very flat on open low Eb( almost 35%+ flat). I am thinking on getting the valved rebuilt. What other things could I tell the local guy to do to try to make it stay intune throughout the octaves? ran the numbers and come up with two dates circca pre 1900 or 1930's ish

Some of those old Eb tubas were meant to be played by mouthpieces much smaller than the ones most of us use today. It's not that unusual for the open Eb to be a bit flat but before you drive yourself nuts trying to figure out what's wrong... try some SMALL mouthpieces. It WILL raise the pitch.

TubaTinker wrote:Some of those old Eb tubas were meant to be played by mouthpieces much smaller than the ones most of us use today. It's not that unusual for the open Eb to be a bit flat but before you drive yourself nuts trying to figure out what's wrong... try some SMALL mouthpieces. It WILL raise the pitch.

I'll second Dan on this. I have a 1905 York Monster Eb that plays beautifully but it strongly favors the "All * Star E -- Bass" mouthpice that came with it 40 years ago when I acquired it.

If it doesn't leak (so why do the valves "need work"?), and it is pretty much uniformly flat across its range, you need to consider that some of those old Eb horns were not pitched to 440 -- and some of them (like mine) were pitched to BELOW 440 (like 435, 438, ...). If you have (or get) an appropriate mouthpiece, and it's still playing like that, then start setting your tuner at different pitches and see if a reasonable scale emerges. This is more likely if the date is more towards 1909. Less likely if it was made in the 30s.

Leaky valves yes leaky plumbing no. It has a tuning slide attach ment that takes it to high pitch. Tried different pitch centers from470 to 390 . Same results upper eb in tune lower eb flat. As said I do alternative fingering to get it tune, but sometimes I forget myself.

You're boned unless you want to play only free form jazz on it.

bigtubby wrote:

TubaTinker wrote:Some of those old Eb tubas were meant to be played by mouthpieces much smaller than the ones most of us use today. It's not that unusual for the open Eb to be a bit flat but before you drive yourself nuts trying to figure out what's wrong... try some SMALL mouthpieces. It WILL raise the pitch.

I'll second Dan on this. I have a 1905 York Monster Eb that plays beautifully but it strongly favors the "All * Star E -- Bass" mouthpice that came with it 40 years ago when I acquired it.

+1

And some of these are just plain flat (like A=438 or so)... but the odds of a too-big mouthpiece are great. A Yammy 67B4 with a properly fit shank should be small enough; and Doug Elliott makes some properly sized mouthpieces for these too.

Mine met Mr. Hacksaw and a 3rd valve kicker, and we are living pretty happily in terms of intonation and pitch.

I ran into a problem where one of my cornets was always flat on open pitches. And-or everything else was sharp except my tuning pitch.Turns out the valve alignment in the second valve was way off from a bad cork and felt replacement. Drove me nuts for weeks until I redid the alignment myself.

I will second Bloke's informed opinion (although he clearly has more experience working with such horns). I have owned several tubas with high pitch/low pitch attachments, including the York "donut." It seems that when such arrangements existed the high pitch standard was always too high to be pulled into modern pitch and the low pitch was too low to be pushed up to modern pitch. On one of those horns I had the low pitch extension cut and was able to play in modern pitch without trouble. A hacksaw may be your best bet for it.

Here is a photo of the donut on a York Eb (it's the tubing with the ring at the bottom of the photo):



And here is the horn that it was on (which I no longer own):



There are times I still miss that horn, but I had the same low pitch/high pitch issue that you see to have and didn't want to cut the horn to deal with it. It was huge for an Eb. For perspective I took a photo of it next to my King 2341 (which is one of the few tubas I still own):

I had the same problem with low pitch/high pitch on my Martin. Lee Stofer fixed this for me by cutting the low pitch section. He also did the same thing on my Helicon. He also made the mouthpiece receivers accept American shank mouthpieces. Both horns work great and are players after his expert repair. I have been using both for community bands all summer.

Northernlb wrote:One thing I have noticed on the older horns, anything before 1920, is they are very mouthpiece sensitive, not only to size but to the the length of the shank. If the shank is to long/does not go in very far into the receiver I have noticed the horn will play very flat, the further in the shank goes the more the pitch will center and play in tune.

Just another idea to try before you do anything to drastic.

+1