TubeNet

You're not a contrarian, I am.

I Practice in the smallest space I can fit inside. 0 x -2

That is one of the reasons I come here. Dissenting opinions are always a good thing.

Bloke is one of the few people who, if he had been alive back then, would be one to recognize the world is round when everybody else in a prior age, including the Church, maintained it was flat. These are not "contrarian" viewpoints. They are "myth-busting" truths.

I will add a contrarian comment to the "how do I play louder" discussions, from my experience, at times being the only tuba or sousaphone for bands from anywhere from a dozen to fifty or more:
Tubenet: get a "Loud" brand mouthpiece, larger bore horn, more air, more air, more air
iiipopes: every player has a physiological limit as to the amount of air the player can put through a horn, and a physiological limit as to how efficient the player's embouchure will work. So at a particular point, no matter how hard the player tries to push more air through the horn or work on buzzing the embouchure, a player cannot play any louder. So instead:
1) focus on proper breath support
2) focus on proper articulation, intonation and phrasing, especially dynamics (When playing a soft passage as soft as it should be, it will cause the subsequent loud passage to seem that much louder; likewise, when appropriate, a true marcato will sound louder due to the space between the notes, rather than a blurred articulation; and carrying out a phrase to its end rather than either breathing in an incorrect spot, not giving proper "shape" to the phrase, or not playing through the end of the phrase will give the impression of a "fuller" sound, if not louder; and an in-tune note will feel more substantial than one out of tune.)
3) remember that due to many aspects of the physics of sound, a discussion of which goes way beyond the bandwidth of this forum, bass seems louder out front than the player thinks it is sitting under the horn (yes, even as the sole tuba supporting 50 other horn players, at times I have gotten "the hand."
4) Proper attention to the above will do more to support an ensemble of whatever size, more than just a number on a dB meter.
5) The player is still just one person. If the conductor wants more, then the conductor should recruit additional players.

Well Done Bloke!

You'd be right, if
1) you weren't so determined to bring the incorrect assumptions about the bassoon reed into it. You could use the clarinet reed instead as your example, which can be and is played without striking the opposed surface.
2) the "tubenet" position really were as you imply that the sound is generated by lip contact. Someone may believe that, I don't think there's any evidence it's a widely held belief. Most people who have looked at the slowed-down video seem to be convinced that there is lip contact. Which certainly might affect the sound, as double reed beating affects the characteristic double reed sound.

I suggest that the weak point is that we don't have any reason to believe that brass player lips always beat, as clarinet/saxophone reeds do at some dynamic levels and not at others, and I think we don't have any videos of tuba players. My casual impression is that the more I consciously separate my lips, the better my sound gets - pitch is clearer, etc.

The lips vibrating and making a tone has nothing to do with whether or not they actually touch. Any touching is merely incidental. The vibrations of the embouchure, which are processed through the embouchure and eventually manifest as a pitch, are a function of Bernoulli's principle: As air is expelled over the embouchure, with the lips having a smaller aperture than the windpipe, throat and mouth, the velocity of the air rises. As velocity rises, pressure decreases, causing the lips to come closer together, if not actually touch, which it doesn't matter if they do or not, so long as it is regular. This narrowing of the aperture slows velocity and raises the static pressure of the breath being expelled through the embouchure, which opens up the aperture back up. If controlled properly by the embouchure muscles, this sets up a form of simple harmonic motion which gets translated into pitch.

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peterbas wrote:http://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/brassacoustics.html

FINALLY!!!
A chart that shows what I am talking about with velocity and pressure going back and forth!!!
Including defining the "Bernoulli term"!
THANKS!!!

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I dunno..... All that stuff sounds like a lot of work. I think I would like it better if I could just sing it in my head, blow the air a certain way, and magically have the music come out perfectly every time.

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