Couturier Sousaphone

[Lew]

I am not the seller of this, but this is certainly something you don't see every day. Couturier came up with a design for brass instruments to have a continuously conical bore from the mouthpiece to the bell, other than a relatively short straight piece for the tuning slide. The result was an instrument on which there were no tuning slides for the valves. I have seen a number of smaller instruments of this design, including an Eb tuba, but never a sousaphone. I wonder what kind of difference in sound this design may have?

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