Jan Viggo Thuve Øwre 8 år.jpg
From the colours of hair and eyes this could have been me almost sixty years ago, but it is our Norwegian TubeNet member Jan Viggo with his first tuba, the small 700-series Besson Eb. JV had the good fortune that his father is a bandmaster who understood the right way to start out his young son.
That little Eb tuba has an in-body main tuning slide, but the same main frame also came with an in-leadpipe tuning slide. Brand names also had been Besson Westminster/Oxford and B&H Regent.
A sample of the Westminster-tuning-in-body variant on loan to my very poor youth band was a very great boost for us. The sound and scale mostly is great even with a fairly large mouthpiece like the DW1. We had to secure the main tuning slide with a string due to a long pull. And this model has a way too short 3rd slide, as it was cut not by tuning parameters, but so that it would fit the hard case. Alone an in-tune minor third takes some pulling.
When I had the chance to test a sample after I had played my Conn 26K for some years I liked that little 700 very much.
Yet I have some reservations against starting students on 3 valve tubas. In my local environment I have met three players, all older than me, all started out on 3 valve instruments, who all refused to use the 4th valve on compensating instruments. One, on Eb tuba, had an almost perfect major seventh between his F at the bottom of the bass clef staff and the F in the staff. Using 4th valve for both notes would have cleaned up that octave.
Klaus