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I'm seeking some advice on playing with a brass quintet as accompaniment for a double choir with a pipe organ. Mainly, I'm trying to figure out just how i should attempt to fit in. The music is centered around Vaugn Williams' Six Choral Songs In Time of War -- he wrote other pieces??!?!??? . Should I worry about separating my sound from organ pedals? Should I use a BAT? Etc. Etc.Any advice from musicians familiar with this type of setup would be greatly appreciated.

Dave M. wrote:I play once or twice a year in a small ensemble with a choir and a huge pipe organ. I've used my little Wurlitzer with ok results, but the big King recording bass can't be topped for this situation. As for the organ pedals, if that organist decides to jump on it, which he sometimes does, NOTHING can play above that! I find that my tuba BLENDS very well with the organ, and have had compliments from the choir on the sound.
Dave M.

Ditto the bit about the organist--it's darned hard to compete. What works best is a work with some organ-brass antiphonal sections. Compared to the sound of a 16' or 32' rank of pipes, your BAT can sound positively feeble.

Dave M. wrote:if that organist decides to jump on it, which he sometimes does, NOTHING can play above that!

I dunno about that, when I had a Mirafone 190 "Daisy Cutter" and used a medium sized mouthpiece - big enough for full overtones but not too big to loose all that Mirafone color - I could take on an organ and win. This is one of those situations where a "colorful" big sound that has a slight edge to it at FFF will dominate more than a "foghorn" sound that some BAT's have - a conductor once said my 190 sounded like 4 tubas. I am actually selling that mouthpiece in the FS section now, and there is a guy on the West Coast selling his 190. Perhaps we should market them together as an organ killing combo.

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Thanks for all the advice! I had thought of using a borrowed PT4, but will probably be using the tried and true PT6 with a GW Diablo. Normally I would say that the PT6 would be obnoxious with a quintet (no flames lol), but the small GW mp (instead of a pt-50+) will help cut through/brighten it a little.

It will be damned hard not to want to play over the organ however futile -- just that tuba player nature, I guess -- LOWER, faster, louder.

KarlMarx wrote:A good bassbone can outdo any organ any day in the pedal area.

But only if you want the edge to come through, and that may be a good thing. A bass trombone playing a pedal has the acoustic characteristics, as Fred Young so colorfully put it, of a hammer on a frying pan. The sound is all overtones, even brittle high overtones. That's what does the cutting. You can hear that a trombone is playing along with the organ, but the meat of sound is still coming from the organ.

It would seem to me that the role of a brass quintet when accompanying organ (which is accompanying a choir) is to put color on top of color. Most organs can make more volume of sound than any five brass musicians, just because of the amount of air being moved and how much work it can do. Think of blowing a tuba with a 4" bore and you'll understand that the organ is orders of magnitude ahead of a tuba in quantity of vibrating air.

But the organ (unless it has well-designed and placed high-compression trumpets, and even then the tonal palette for them is limited) cannot produce the intensity of brass instruments, even the tuba, as long as the tuba player isn't seeking too dark and broad a sound. The quintet puts sharp points of color on top of the broad organ sound to give it clarity. If the brass players try to compete with the organ, they'll approach it the wrong way and they won't be happy with the results.

I would bring my F tuba, which is what I always play in quintet.

Rick "who thinks precision and clarity will be more conspicuous than usual by their absense" Denney

I've sometimes thought that it's a dirty shame that the double bass saxhorns aren't made anymore:

One might be the perfect quintet instrument--a tuba with a bit of "edge' to the sound without souinding like something made by Stihl.

I wouldn't worry about it too much, because unless it is a HUGE choir you will be sucking wind anyway. The organ and brass will easily drown out the choir and the choir director will constantly be asking for less organ and brass. This has been my experience in 95% of my playing with choirs, which I have done scores of times.

ken k

Organ is a massively powerful instrument, but it's not a very expressive or melodic one. The role of the brass quintet is to add some expression, connect the notes together and generally be the icing on the cake. It is similar to the new hollywood trend of using very nice sounding synthesizers for all the background parts of an orchestra and hiring a group of principal players to add the first parts, the ones that need expression. The tuba you use doesnt need a massive sound, it needs to be able to project a lot of the middle harmonics that give the notes expression and that bass organ pipes generally lack unless the organist really steps on the gas (in which case your puny tuba is toast anyway).

-Eric