Neptune leadpipe question

[bort]

On the rotary Neptune, how much actual (audible) difference is there between the two leadpipe? Any?

Or, is it more about the experience for the player, and what it "plays like"?

[Roger Lewis]

The Neptune rotary tuba is a very unique beast. It comes with a medium large leadpipe and a large leadpipe. It also comes with a flat whole step fifth valve slide and a whole step fifth valves slide. You use the medium large leadpipe and the flat whole step fifth valve slide when playing it as a CC tuba. But! If you reverse the fifth valve, which is easily done, you put in the whole step slide and use the large leadpipe and you have a great 4 valve BBb tuba. You have to pull all the other slides out a bit to get it to play right, but it works!

This is a very well designed instrument.

Roger

[bort]

Thanks Roger!

I owned one of these for a few months, but sold it before doing much of anything serious on it.

At the time, I wasn't much of a "big tuba" player... but that was almost 4 years ago, and I have grown a lot since then.

I'm selling my PT7 to get a rotary tuba... so naturally the Neptune is on the list. Yes, it is well designed, and does a lot of things well.

It's not without its faults... but there are some unique characteristics, and there aren't exactly a lot of BAT CC rotary tubas out there.

[jeopardymaster]

Thanks, Roger! I tried both leadpipes when I first got my Neptune, expecting not to find that much difference, but I GREATLY preferred the ML pipe. I suspected that I must be some kind of wimp, but it's not like anyone checks to see, so what the heck. I've never tried the conversion to BBb, but your recipe makes sense if I ever do.

[barry grrr-ero]

Both myself and my tech. - also a tuba player - feel that my rotary Neptune plays better with the larger lead-pipe. My tech. doesn't play on large equipment either. Try them both out, if you can.