Todd S. Malicoate wrote:They may also be two of just a very small number of people who give a &^#%.
Besides,
somebody's got to give a &^#%.
A tuba section that's thinking of switching to contra has to know what they're getting themselves into. I even put together a how-to book for the Marine band in Okinawa when they changed to convertible Kanstuls.
Sousaphone is a bit simpler to start using, honestly -- put it on, get the bits right, and go. But, that simplicity can be offset by drill demands that weren't in existence when the sousaphone was invented. Contra is even simpler, hardware-wise. However, it puts more responsibility on the performer to use correct posture and technique -- because while a mediocre-marching sousaphone section still doesn't look too bad, a mediocre-marching contra section looks pretty awful. Sousaphones pointing at slightly different angles really don't look too different from each other; contras pointing at slightly different angles make it look like the section doesn't know WTF they're doing.
If I want to quickly evaluate whether a drum corps is marching well as a whole, I watch the contras. If they move smoothly, can point the horns in the right direction (in.. um, both X and Y axes
), and can hold them straight when they've got them "horns down", and they do it no matter what drill they're marching, the rest of the entire corps is almost certainly marching very well.
Todd S. Malicoate wrote:But are there marching bands, be them college, high school, or otherwise, that use contras? Not convertible tubas, real contras?
Honestly, I have no idea; I'm pretty far out of the competitive band scene. Most of the reason to use convertibles, of course, is to use one set of horns for both marching & concert band, and getting a set of dedicated contra tubas is a pretty tough sell to a school board or the band boosters. In practical, on-the-field terms, there's very little difference between convertibles and marching-only contra tubas, so all the techniques are the same.
There are no corps that use sousaphones; they're forbidden by the rules. Besides, even if given the opportunity, I don't think any of them would use them for the reasons I've given earlier.
A few corps these days keep their horns for only a couple/three years, then sell them off. I'm assuming that those horns are going to other corps with smaller budgets, but there could be some going into school programs. The Cadets were actually renting out their Yamaha contras in the fall, and that was before the switch to Bb/F -- they were using YBB-201M tubas, modified with tuning slides that dropped them to the key of GG, and switched them back to BBb before renting them out.
