I've noticed - especially lately - contrary opinions on tubas. One model tuba that seems fairly popular has been described as a "disaster" by one player. Another player here (a recreational player / not serious) says he played a "bad one" of an older limited-run tuba. Yet he himself has bought/played several models of tubas many would deem "problematic" - one of them he now owns/plays for fun. Said player had contrary opinions to the store players/employees about an old tuba that has been there for sale for many years. He liked that tuba; yet the store didn't think it a good tuba. Very interesting. There have been other posts like those over the years here.
This just goes to show opinions here are to be taken with a tiny grain of salt, and that tubas and mouthpieces are very PERSONAL to each player. We are all at different levels, have different needs/desires/concepts on equipment. Some players are OK dealing with a few 'quibbles'; others want point-and-shoot ease.
I remember the 2155 you had in Knoxville. So good. I hope to have fun money again someday and may seek one out. Certainly a want and not a need. So flexible.
Pensacola Symphony
Troy University-adjunct tuba instructor
Yamaha yfb621 with 16’’ bell,with blokepiece symphony
Eastman 6/4 with blokepiece symphony/profundo
One of the things that makes Tubenet useful for me. Opinions, arguments, and rationales from tubists of diverse backgrounds and view points. Professionals’ opinions aren’t he only ones I find useful, though I do highly value them. I’ve learned a ton from Tubenet and also been highly entertained. After all these years, tuba still fills my brain.
Pensacola Symphony
Troy University-adjunct tuba instructor
Yamaha yfb621 with 16’’ bell,with blokepiece symphony
Eastman 6/4 with blokepiece symphony/profundo
Toobagrowl brought up more questions than he may have realized:
1) Tubas of the same make and model don't always play the same. Heck, even the most expensive tubas are not made to aircraft grade tolerances. The tolerances on the parts aren't that tight and then the things are assembled by flawed human beings with good days and bad days.
2) Human beings are not all the same. Lips, tongues, lungs, arms, hands, torso height, etc., make a big difference to personal interaction to the tuba. You will never drive a sports car well if you can't comfortably reach the pedals, shifter, and steering wheel let alone fit in the tiny seat.
3) Pedagogy varies from player to player and teacher to teacher. Just because an individual found a way to "sound good" with very fast air or very slow air doesn't make him or her the Supreme Court Decision maker on what everyone else should want.
I suspect that over the last 27 years I have played more tubas and listened to more tuba players both good and bad (With some of the worst sounding ones thinking they were hot stuff.) than most anyone else. I can't predict what tuba someone will like until I hear them play a bit or we talk about mutually played equipment and compare likes or dislikes.
I've reached some conclusions in my old age that I'd like to share:
All tubas and tuba players are different.
Sucky players sound bad on all tubas but there may be a particular configuration of tuba that helps them suck less.
Great tuba players sound great on any tuba.
Mediocre through good players really benefit from finding a quality horn that matchs up to their physical and pedagogical tendencies to help them sound better with less effort.
last but not least The Dunning-Kruger Effect is alive and well on TubeNet.
Matt Walters Last chair tubist Who Cares What Ensemble Owns old tubas that play better than what you have.
Matt Walters wrote:
...The Dunning-Kruger Effect...
Unfortunately they are the prime example of that whereof they speak, namely psychobabble! Functioning adults fully understand how they fit into the world around them. Study fools, and your study is foolish.
It seems that all bases have been covered so I'll just through in an "and this as well".
At different times in ones life you might be looking for something different, depending on the obstacles ones up against.
I have a beautifully playing (first generation) B&S F which I put in the corner for years. It helped agitate my obstacle and I felt it was necessary to concentrate on a tubas that blew differently.
Glad I never sold it cause "we" are now just fine together.
Another point is that we all have different gigs. I loved the sound of my 1930 36J I purchased from Robb Stewart. Really an ideal sound. Hated the tuning. Considering the amount of sight reading gigs and improvs I do it just wasn't worth all the choreography necessary to get the notes close to where I wanted them.
Now if I had a gig where I always new days before which notes I was playing and when I might have kept that tuba.
So even though that was truly a great tuba, for me it was terrible.
Something like that.
While there are undoubtedly a whole lot of tradeoffs in tuba design that aren't the same for everyone, and some degree of across-the-board success vs. failure,
.. at times I have seen assertions here that some model of tuba is grievously defective in some pitch or the like, and to me -- that's improbable. It implies that instrument manufacturers accept these defects and go to the expense of producing a tuba that won't play in tune, apparently not recognizing this problem in time to avoid it. And likewise that the market fails to notice and buys the tubas in large quantities anyway. And only here on Tubenet is the truth revealed about these notorious defects.
Not that the observed defects never existed, I'm just saying, they are not inherent in the design from the factory. Alternatives would be poor quality control, issues that crop up under normal wear, etc.
To cite a common example with dedicated proponents, the flat F on large Conns, or sometimes all large Americans. I've heard it, so no argument there - except, on the question of whether it's true for every one of the affected models. An alignment problem with those short valves? Gunk that might accumulate in a particular place has an outsize effect on intonation? Who knows.
Matt Walters wrote:Toobagrowl brought up more questions than he may have realized:
1) Tubas of the same make and model don't always play the same. Heck, even the most expensive tubas are not made to aircraft grade tolerances. The tolerances on the parts aren't that tight and then the things are assembled by flawed human beings with good days and bad days.
2) Human beings are not all the same. Lips, tongues, lungs, arms, hands, torso height, etc., make a big difference to personal interaction to the tuba. You will never drive a sports car well if you can't comfortably reach the pedals, shifter, and steering wheel let alone fit in the tiny seat.
3) Pedagogy varies from player to player and teacher to teacher. Just because an individual found a way to "sound good" with very fast air or very slow air doesn't make him or her the Supreme Court Decision maker on what everyone else should want.
I suspect that over the last 27 years I have played more tubas and listened to more tuba players both good and bad (With some of the worst sounding ones thinking they were hot stuff.) than most anyone else. I can't predict what tuba someone will like until I hear them play a bit or we talk about mutually played equipment and compare likes or dislikes.
I've reached some conclusions in my old age that I'd like to share:
All tubas and tuba players are different.
Sucky players sound bad on all tubas but there may be a particular configuration of tuba that helps them suck less.
Great tuba players sound great on any tuba.
Mediocre through good players really benefit from finding a quality horn that matchs up to their physical and pedagogical tendencies to help them sound better with less effort.
last but not least The Dunning-Kruger Effect is alive and well on TubeNet.
Donn wrote:...Not that the observed defects never existed, I'm just saying, they are not inherent in the design from the factory. Alternatives would be poor quality control, issues that crop up under normal wear, etc.
To cite a common example with dedicated proponents, the flat F on large Conns, or sometimes all large Americans. I've heard it, so no argument there - except, on the question of whether it's true for every one of the affected models. An alignment problem with those short valves? Gunk that might accumulate in a particular place has an outsize effect on intonation? Who knows.
All design is a collection of compromises and trade-offs. There are too many competing objectives in any complicated system to achieve optmality in all of the, or even all the important ones.
My understanding is that the 2xJ design attempted to resolve the flat fifth partial, which is hard to fix on the C, played first valve. On a typical German tuba, one pushes in the first valve slide, and plays the D above it 1-2 (or 3--which is what I observe that German players use in lieu of 1-2 quite frequently, and not just on that D; they might consider 1-2 as an alternate fingering). The report is that Conn tolerated a glat second partial to fix that flat fifth partial, because the flat F at the bottom of the staff is easy to play 1-3, which corrects it.
Even a dilettante amateur can be pretty sure about the unattainability of optimality on all objectives in a complicated sytem. But on the topic of design optimality, I speak with professional experience.
Rick "in the category of those who suck on all tubas" Denney
Something I've never really felt I really understood about these notorious flat partials:
- Why the C? if that partial (so to speak) accounts for B, C, Db and D on a BBb tuba.
- Why the F? and not B, C, Db, D, Eb, and E?
And of course - if F is "easy to play 1-3", isn't C also "easy to play 1-3", especially given that generations of tuba players have learned the necessity of that alternative?
But the leg I'm mainly trying to stand on with that particular example, is that there are a number of reports from people with 2xJ tubas that do not have that problem. Including people who would be the last you'd think would be deceived on this matter. If at this point many years later, some of them check out better and some worse, it seems to me as a starting point we ought to assume the design accounts for the good ones, and post-design accidents the bad ones.
That the fifth is flat, I understand to be sort of predictable given the math, though to my perhaps deficient perception it isn't particularly grievous on my 40K.
It’s admittedly been awhile (like 20 years) that I’ve played a 2xJ, but I also remember the slots to be pretty wide on those horns. The problem with that F below the staff is that a lot of people will start to “relax” around that range which complicates the issue.
Also regarding the width of those slots, I also think that’s why I wasn’t a huge fan of the 2xJs for my own use, because a wide slot for pitch seems to correlate with a bit of vagueness in response.
That was one of Matt's points: Tuba manufacture has never been up to recreating tuba design with real consistency, and tuba design can't find general optimality without attempting manufacture, because models are incomplete. So, it's an imperfect feedback loop and always has been.
Once the design of a prototype is worked out, tooling is created and tubas are made, mostly by factory workers not by one-off craftsmen. As each one rolls off the line (thinking of Conn back in the day, and a lot of others, too), the evaluator would play the instrument and make a determination: Out the door or back for adjustments? Out the door would have been, for all sorts of obvious reasons, the preferred choice. After Macmillan took over Conn, that was especially true, by all accounts--the "good" evaluator might have decided not to move from Elkhart to Abilene--who knows?
Handmade instruments are adjusted by masters to achieve their best, but the master and any given downstream player might have very different approaches to the instrument.
And then there's the history of a particular instrument. The 20J I owned had been solder practice in an instrument repair school, and was definitely from the Macmillan years of production in Abilene. It needed 1-3 for the F, but the C was okay. The intonation on it was merely mediocre, but the real problem was its inability to play softly, which is definitely not a congenital defect of 2xJ's, if you listen to experts like Lee Stofer. Was that poor production, imperfect student overhaul, or dilettante amateur playing? Who knows? Probably a bit of all three.
But I do listen to the recordings the bands I've been in have made, going back to San Antonio recordings on cassette (not every informative--I was the least member of a great section in that band). I do not notice poor intonation coming from me in those recordings. Not the best tone, sure. Not super loud, sure. Occasional fuzzy attacks, not as often as memory would have it. Musicality, more than I would have thought, to be honest. Better technique than I recall. (I've listened to a few of those very recently to try out a new-to-me mid-80's Nakamichi cassette deck.) I don't think I have a lot less listening experience than some DMA candidates, and maybe more than most.
One thing is true about the dilettante amateurs, however: We may be subject to confirmation bias, because we spent money and don't want it to be wasted. But nobody is hiring us to evaluate their tubas online, or otherwise endorse them.
Nobody asked for a trombone player's assessment, so I'll offer mine.
I've spent a lot of energy in the last 7 years buying/selling/trading dozens of trombones. Mostly out of curiosity, partly out of the great search for "the one" that we all tend to evolve through.
I've found that you don't really get to know an instrument until you've spent a lot of time with it. Months, maybe. I often feel like I can evaluate a horn just by playing a few notes, maybe a scale, and a loud and a soft note. It's sort of true, but you never get the nuances. Often a characteristic I don't like about an instrument in an initial playing (or week of playing) will eventually begin to grow or fade as something other aspect of the horn's voice comes into focus.
Sometimes a horn is worth adapting to. That's another part of this that is maybe unexplored, and it's definitely something that takes time. And then is it your lip or your ear that adapts?
The big problem with this idea of getting to know the more subtle points of an instrument is that I tend to accumulate specialized instruments. I have one horn that I play in church, another that goes to the orchestra, and a third that goes to quartet/quintet. Trombone choir first part? Third part? Bass part? Big band? Studio? Brass ensemble? Concert band? Sitting at home and playing Bach cello suites or Rochut etudes? I've got special horns for all of those.
I've come across very few instruments that I genuinely thought were unredeemable and couldn't be used for anything. If pressed, I could play everything on a single instrument, like I did 40 years ago. But all these instruments, or almost all, have been beautiful in one way or another. I'd be hard pressed to name a favorite, although a truly unique silver plated pristine 1967 Conn 79h was so beautiful and could play anything, that I had to sell it. If I owned something that perfect, I'd be expected to play perfectly as well.
I've discovered the answer is to buy stuff that looks like cheap crap, that vain people don't want, but plays like a dream.
Will post later when I have enough time to give a thoughtful reply.
