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Now the place to play is in a CAVE. A while back I took a tour of a local large commercial cave, and near the end of the tour the guide played a tape in one of the large rooms. It was really resonant and just plain gorgeous. That would be a place to play! Not blasstissimo music but perfect chords with a small brass group.

MA

How about an urban cave? The Allegheny Brass Band (not to be confused with the River City Brass Band) played in the Carnegie Museum Hall of Architecture for a Christmas music show. This is one of those rooms with marble floors and a 50+ high celing. Man, that was like a 5 second reverb in there. Really cool. The low brass sounded like butter in there.

If I can make nice sounds in a small bedroom with a drop ceiling, I bet I could be rockin' like Dokken in a cave!

elimia wrote:How about an urban cave? !

Seems like a fair number of folks do this already by playing in the subway.

Of course, one could always try out the sewers...

Ever play in a church built of nothing but stone? ...About the same thing as playing in a cave.

Played in lots of weird places (various boats, steam trains, factory halls, the battlements of a castle) , and a few big cathedrals (they're a nightmare to play in if you want to keep things together), and yes, for a few minutes in one smallish cave in Czechia
I've been in a few other big caves where I wished I brought my instrument though...

We motored our rented sailboat up to Fingal's Cave in Scotland in a dead
calm.Almost sailed into the entrance.Nothing was moving but hundreds of Japanese tourists crawling al over the island.What a fantastic structure.It
looks manmade.Would love to play any accoustic instrument in there.

A loading dock at my school is like cave, in the fact thats its stone underneath, and then brick on every side except up (concrete?) and out (so people can "enjoy" you practicing). Only works about half the year cause of winter, and you gotta time it right so you don't freak out truck drivers coming in...

My most unusual place so far was playing on the top of the "Ulmer Münster" tower (cathedral in Ulm, Germany, best known to be the one with the tallest tower in the world, 161 m.
It was like a pilgrimage climing the narrow (less than 1 yard wide, corkscrew-type) stairs of about 700 steps, carrying my MW46 in a gigbag. Those chorals I played up there were deeply felt, that´s for sure !
The cathedral itself is huge, smaller than the Colgne Dom, though. Unfortunately there was a service going on while I was there, I would have enjoyed playing Bach in the main hall.

knuxie wrote:Every gymnasium I've known had good echo in it. Our marching band always recorded our annual tapes at Pan Am Center in Las Cruces, NM. Had to wait a while for the sound to quit dancing around. The band was 200 strong!

Ken F.

Was that a high school band in Las Cruces or at NMSU? I got my EE from there in 1988.

MA

tubatooter1940 wrote:We motored our rented sailboat up to Fingal's Cave in Scotland in a dead
calm.Almost sailed into the entrance.Nothing was moving but hundreds of Japanese tourists crawling al over the island.What a fantastic structure.It
looks manmade.Would love to play any accoustic instrument in there.

I do hope you whipped out your band excerpt of Fingal's Cave and went to town on it! Imagine that double tounging!

Somebody pick a date and I'll pick the cave in southern Indiana. Wild cave, right? None of that commercial stuff with lights, concrete walks, etc. We can stop at a spring afterwards for you to clean the mud out of your bells!

Actually, Marengo Cave has a room called theMusic Hall (or something like that) where dances and concerts have been held, mostly as a novelty.

Cave acoustics can really be weird, so tubas would be fun to experiment with if it weren't for the logistics. Easier than the Grand Canyon though!

TubaTinker wrote:Ever play in a church built of nothing but stone? ...About the same thing as playing in a cave.

Had the good fortune of playing in the cathedral in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, in 1977. I was in the Kalamazoo Junior Symphony Orchestra, and we were on a three-week tour of Europe. Here's a link to a web page describing the church:

http://www.geerts.com/dordrecht/dordrec ... dings1.htm

We played a mix of fast and slow pieces -- the one that worked best was by Alan Hovhaness, "Mysterious Mountain" I think. All the slow stuff rang like a bell ... it was glorious! The fast stuff was ... well ... mud, frankly (knew there had to be a down-side to all this, right?). A wonderful experience -- highly recommended!

I attended a concert of Melton tuba quartet on a brass choir festival in Oberhausen, Germany about ten years ago.
It took place in a medium sized church of circular shape.
It was a shameful choice of location / repertoire combination.

They played pieces like Washington Post March and some virtuoso Mozart tunes and the likes. All you could tell was that they were quite in tune, ´cause all you heard for an hour or so was WAAH BAAH WOOOH DOOOH chords. Especially extended 16th runs in all four parts as common in fugues were hilarious in producing giant organ clusters.
The ONE piece that worked, and very nicely so, was Arcadelt´s Ave Maria.
Hans

bloke wrote:If you stand next to the Music Building about halfway down the "back" steps going down (invisible in this picture) and blast a super-short super-loud tuba sound (all-valves-down helps) at one of the tall, narrow windows on the end of the Theatre Building (as indicated with the drawn-in directional arrow) the resulting sound is a

Dare I ask, what ever possessed you to do such a thing?

I would have though you had out grown such childish behavior.

As far as the oddest places I've played in...

One would be the inside of the old Bibliotheque (now a museum) at the Riponne in Lausanne, Switzerland. There's a large ascending staircase that splits to the four walls, leaving a large, open space overhead. Being a museum, there are stuffed wild animals, bones, insects, rocks and things everywhere. I played there with five other tuba students from the Lausanne conservatory.

The concert consisted of solo upright bass and tenor sax; jazz saxophone quintet; choir; vocal soloists; jazz trumpet/clarinet/actor guy; percussion; tuba sextet; and these weird instruments....trumpet bodies played with saxophone mouthpieces, and the tubes from each valve extended different directions with plastic funnels at the end of them. And get this....everything was played totally in the dark, only with a projector and a couple of lightshow-type things here and there. The audience sat on the steps in the middle of the room while the music came from below and above them, they saw none of the musicians until the concert was over. Sure, it sounds really bizarre (and it was!), but was really quite cool.

elimia wrote: I bet I could be rockin' like Dokken in a cave!

Wow.....never thought I'd hear that phrase again! That was one of the best hard rock bands ever! "Back for the Attack" easily is one of my favorite hard rock albums.

Oh....for my honorable mentions....

My wife played with the Winnipeg Symphony in a hockey rink in northern Manitoba.

One of the horn players here in Winnipeg made a trip to Borneo last summer. Had pictures of him playing horn for a couple of orangutans.

Gotta give recognition to a friend of mine who played in a hot tub at a tailgate party at Virginia Tech.

In my punk rock days, I played a show in an indoor skate park in North Carolina. A big, open room with lots of ramps and even an empty pool for kids to skate in. We set up at the foot of one of the ramps, lots of kids skating everywhere during the show. Good times!

That concert was the bomb Steve!! I played that gig too. I wish I could take that show on the road. Man....good times.

Tom

tmmcas1 wrote:That concert was the bomb Steve!! I played that gig too. I wish I could take that show on the road. Man....good times.

"NU-NUS!!!!!!!"

Not to mention all the free wine!! Good times, indeed!!!

The old Crystal Ball Room at the Battle House Hotel in Mobile,Alabama, is the most acoustically perfect place I ever played.The ceiling was a series of arches that produced a live sound with no echo.
The Grand Hotel in Point Clear,Alabama has an outside dance floor at the "Point",with an old time band shell.Fun to play there.

If you have Altiverb or Sound Designer plugins for your MAC, you can pretty much play anywhere you'd like from home.



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