Advice Tongueing

[dmeacham5]

I was told by my assistant band director and my lesson teacher that I need to work on clarity in my sound.I used to start and stop my notes with my air and articulation has always been a little challenging for me. Can someone please give me some insight into having a clear precise articulation. Thank you for any advice!
Dmeacham5

[Reptilian]

I have my kids think of an old school sprinkler head where the water is constant and the tongue acts like the little arm that bounces back once it comes in contact with the water. The air never concedes to the arm. Hope that helps.

[Will Hammer]

The only thing the tongue does is stop air. It is like a garage door that can essentially open and close. So when using the tongue, you don't need any sort of muscle to make the note speak. Just blow and bring your tongue down at the same time. It's very similar to saying Doh. When the timing between the two is right, then your note will speak immediately with no effort.

[NCSUSousa]

Good news! You already do an 'air' attack and use air to stop the notes. These are both good things to master.

For articulating the start of a note, try using different parts of your tongue for different articulations.
Use reference consonant sounds as your starting point. Sound I've used - 'Go', 'Ga', 'Ko', 'Doh', 'Di', 'To', 'Te', 'Tih', 'Yih'.
You'll need to play around with them to see what happens with your particular horn/mouthpiece combo. Some will work well for accented entrances. Others will work well for slurred notes or soft entrances.
Also, some combinations ('Di'-'Ga' being the most common) work well for tonguing fast notes since you use different parts of your tongue to articulate each note.
Once you have a feel for what different consonants sound like as articulations, you can start using them while playing.

For clarity once the note is going, little changes to your tongue position can affect how clear or stable your sound is.
Think of the tongue position based on vowel sounds. 'Ah' or 'Oh' is much different from 'yee' or 'yih'. You may need different vowel sounds in different ranges on your tuba. One brass clinician that I've heard talked about how using the 'ee' vowel position causes the air to speed through your mouth and is useful on hard articulations (/\ symbol or > symbol). By contrast, I want the biggest 'OH' sound I can get when I'm playing pedal tones so I don't have to keep pulling on the slides.

Keep in mind that all of these 'sounds' are just mouth shapes. I'm not actually saying 'Oh' into the mouthpiece while also buzzing my lips.

[Untersatz]

The air never concedes to the arm. Hope that helps.

Could we also have the English version?
What, are you an attorney or something?