What tuba do you regret buying?

[DavidBalcerzak]

I bought one from India, enough said

[Worth]

That one I bought without talking to my wife first . . .

If you customize FedEx delivery to have it held for pick up you can be pretty stealthy....

[circusboy]

The first one, because it got me hooked.

[largobone]

I've only ever bought one tuba, a Conn 14J Eb just a couple of months ago. No regrets so far!

Might sell my small Eb, but it's so unique I could never find another if I wanted to

^I'm actually planning a little project with my Conn very similar to your's to hopefully be done over the next year!

[tylerferris1213]

I regret buying a Thor right out of high school. It's not that it was a bad horn. It simply wasn't the right horn for me, and I would have known that if I had played one prior to purchasing it. I will say that selling it allowed me to buy my favorite all-tuba (that I still own to this day) and a cheap F tuba to learn on. The F tuba was terrible, but I don't regret buying it because it turned out to be a wonderful cimbasso!

[EMC]

Miraphone firebird, dont know what the hype is about them aside from the low register which was good, but the one i had was one of the most bland sounding and disatisfying tubas ive ever played. I really gave it a shot held onto it for the better part of a year, it may have been a one off just bad playing firebird but yeah i do not miss it one bit.

[David Richoux]

Back in the early 1980s I bought a Miraphone 4 rotor BBb from a shop in San Luis Obispo - played it for a few months and sold it back. There was just something about it I was not happy with, hard to describe. Never tried another Miraphone since then. The two round trips on the Greyhound bus were memorable!

[PaulMaybery]

Okay, perhaps in looking back, way way back to 1964, I bought (well mom and dad actually paid for the bulk of it.) a German made York (B&M) "CEFESCO" model from a small music store in Philly, Henry Glass. It had rotary valves and a detachable front bell. It looked great. It was loud, but had no where near that special timbre of say the piston valve Master Model that seems to get a fair amount of attention or mention these days. You might say it was very stiff and a bit stuffy. Piano playing was certainly not its forte. (pun intended) The valves had clock spring rotarys that became very noisey and eventually one broke. I held on to it for a dozen or so years and then sold for double what we paid. I did transplant a MW paddle and spring assembly to replace those clock springs. (all to the tune of $70.00 back in 1970.) For the longest time I always felt "the other guy" got the better pick of the litter. My fortune eventually changed and with patience and the discretionary cash at hand I was eventually able to purchase horns with which I was impressed. Part of that meant getting around an trying a lot of horns, both new and used. But then it seems that better and better horns keep emerging on the market. But if the tuba was the best one available to me at the time and it did the job, then I suppose I should really have no regrets. Perhaps what come along is a certain wisdom from having learned what suits you and gets the results you are trying to achieve. Then, it seems one can accept the instrument on which they perform as being sort of like an extension of your musical self

[groth]

That one I bought without talking to my wife first . . .

If you customize FedEx delivery to have it held for pick up you can be pretty stealthy....

Haha, THIS ^^ Also eliminates a few extra hands touching the package along the route and re-loading into the truck if you aren't home.