Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by Jess Haney »

And a rotten and gross plastic tone booster in an Eb besson tuning slide.
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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by Dan Schultz »

I found a few bad notes in mine this afternoon! :)
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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by PWtuba »

I work at an instrument repair shop. We get lots of tubas and sousaphones from local high schools, and needless to say they contain many interesting things. My favorite was a fully assembled and mostly intact balsa wood toy airplane that came out of a sousaphone.
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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by eupher61 »

Tucker Jolly bought a York Eb, front 3valves, for almost nothing. It was really stuffy...but a few days later he just reared back and blew as hard as he could...something popped loose, and upon spinning it became known that Tucker also owned a red rubber ball. Monty Burch in GR added a valve and it played great.
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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by dmeacham5 »

I was at the kent state honor band this weekend and someone told me they have a sousaphone cleanout day and when they turned over the sousa they found a whole dead bird that just kinda plopped out after playing it the entire marching season. how idd it get in there i have no clue, at my high school someone tried trowing candy down the bell at a parade, or always fun putting piccolos in the bell
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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by TubaRay »

Although not about a tuba, I have one other disgusting story(since that seems to be one of the themes of this thread):

Some years ago, when I was a high school band director, I was going through all of the school-owned instruments, preparing for summer repairs, when I came across a tenor saxophone. When I attempted to remove the reed from the mouthpiece, I met with some resistance. It was seemingly glued to the mouthpiece. After a bit of a struggle, the reed came off, only to reveal maggots inside the mouthpiece. Probably the worst thing I ever came across while doing that job.
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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by JALLEN »

tstryk wrote:
JALLEN wrote: a rat had crawled down the bell, round and round, where it stops nobody knows, got stuck and perished.
I would hate to live in HIS home! Nasty!
This was nearly 60 years ago. These houses were old then, poorly insulated, mostly unair-conditioned, and back then on the edge of civilization in the Texas hill country. Encountering critters was an every day occurrence, not always rats, of course, bugs of all kinds, scorpions, snakes, and more besides. More of my classmates rode to school ON Mustangs than IN one.

I could never be sure of course, but I often imagined that the tubas we had probably came from Santa Ana's army band as they passed through San Antonio on the way to San Jacinto, or maybe on the way back(!), thrown in the river, then discovered some 100 years later, dried out and given to the schools, leaky, beat up, odoriferous, discolored, uncertain in operation. You had to really want to be in the band to play those things! They had newer, much nicer, tubas, sousaphones actually at high school and playing those was easy by comparison.
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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by Steve Marcus »

From a similar thread that circulated on TubeNet in late November 2011:
Re: What's The Weirdest Thing Found In Your Tuba?

Post by Steve Marcus » Mon Nov 28, 2011 8:01 am

When I had just acquired my Conn 48K Grand Jumbo sousaphone in the summer of 2010, it was black with soot and the bottom bow was almost completely banged in. It had obviously been neglected for literally decades.

When Lee Stofer and his staff skillfully removed the bottom bow, they discovered a Harper High School (Chicago) newsletter dated April 1, 1951 (it was indeed their "April Fool's Day" edition) and a Wrigley's gum wrapper from the same time period as evidenced from the old logo.

For reference, the horn had originally been built in 1930.
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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by Tom Holtz »

There was one fiberglass sousaphone in high school that nobody would use because it sucked so bad. When I finally wised up and dumped it out, there was a ski mask covered in leaves, serious "uh-oh" there... There was also a Texas Instruments calculator that I used for the rest of high school and a few years of college.
      
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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by Matt Walters »

Ladies panties stuck in the tuba. I put them in a plastic bag and handed them over when the tuba owner picked up his tuba. The wife/girlfriend gave him that evil look and said "I've never owned a pair like that." I said "Uhh...you can pay the guys up front, I've got got to go!"
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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by Tubajug »

Matt Walters wrote:Ladies panties stuck in the tuba. I put them in a plastic bag and handed them over when the tuba owner picked up his tuba. The wife/girlfriend gave him that evil look and said "I've never owned a pair like that." I said "Uhh...you can pay the guys up front, I've got got to go!"
Ha! Awkward....
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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by Uncle Markie »

During my freshman year (1967) at Yankton college in South Dakota I pulled a Lyon & Healy helicon down from the Music Conservatory's attic - and immediately took it to my dorm clean it out, prior to having Stan Fritts solder some loose joints back together. During the clean out (in the dorm shower) a dead bat came out with the rinse water.

The instrument was thereafter referred to as the "dead bat horn".

Once freed of the dead bat it honked out the Yankton college fight song pretty well.

I left it with the school when I transferred to New York University at the end of the spring term.

In 1985 the college was sold to the US Federal Prison system; maybe that horn is still used in the prison band - if they have one!

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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by ppalan »

Well...this isn't disgusting but it was pretty strange (and embarrassing :oops: ) I have a Yamaha 321 Eb. Several months ago, a few days after a gig (that went really well), I picked it up to practice. It played but I kept missing notes (way more than usual). I figured okay I didn't really warm up so let's just keep going. Nope didn't get better. I thought "it almost sounds like I've got a leak somewhere". ...checked spit valve, looked at all of the joints...nothing. OK, maybe something was in the bag and went in the bell after I packed up from the gig. ...start spinning the thing around nothing but some dust falls out....play some more. sounds like $**+ WTF is going on. Took valves, slides mouthpiece, everything off and took it outside to flush it out. Filled it up with water 'til it was pouring out....nearly broke my back trying to shake it and twist it.>>>nothing but a tiny bit of crud. I finally e-mailed Matt Walters and made an appointment so he could try to figure it out. I got there 1st thing in the AM. He toots on it for about 3.5 seconds and says with a bit of a grin "something's wrong with this" :shock: give me about a half hour and we'll see what's up. GREAT! At least I'll just get to sit here and toot on all of these other horns. Matt comes back, literally, in about 4 minutes and says play on it now. "Matt, what was the problem? " he says "just play it." BINGGGO it sounds great. What the heck was wrong? With another sly grin, he whips out a full, unopened container of SOUR CREAM. c. 2" in dia. and 1" high and tapered. He said it was jammed in sideways and seemed to be stuck right at a joint.
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WTF!!! An EPIPHANY At the gig (in a biergarten) I had a "word or two" with a guy who'd had a few too many pitchers of beer. I'm sure when we were packing up he tossed it in from a nearby table. Oh well... I'm pretty sure he got caught at the sobriety check down the road. Now I always stick my practice mute in when the horn's not in my lap.

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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by philtuba »

Not necessarily disgusting, but I found a book in a sousaphone I borrowed from the school when I was a kid. Played kind of stuffy before I found it.
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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by eupher61 »

There is a legend, which apparently has some truth but some dispute about what tuba it actually was, from Univ of Kansas, where a freshman student, later to be a very well-known player, pissed someone off, and that someone put an opened can of sardines into the case over a long weekend. The later-big-name left KU not long after, and the horn still stunk 30 years later. A friend told me he had bought that tuba, but his is not what I was told in the original story.
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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by dunelandmusic »

One time at community band, got the horn out, inserted mouthpiece, and a barely audible stuffy sound came out, took the mouthpiece out, emptied valves, same problem, took the mouthpiece out again, held it up to the light-and a very strategically placed jelly bean was in the throat of the mouthpiece. Not sure how it got there, but realized this could be an effective prank to drive other people crazy.

One night we took apart the jr high Yamaha 321s while waitingat a rehearsal, and discovered paperclips, pencils, erasers, springs, candy, and saxaphone reeds inside
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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by Master Sergeant Tuba »

Cheese wheel and a small potted plant. One in Berlin and one in Mainz during Fasching. Sousaphones make fantastic targets!
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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by EdFirth »

When I was in the 7th grade my stepmother HATED it when I played the sousaphone at home. In October the band leader came to me and said "Firth, you just don't get the sound on sousaphone. Mabye I'll let you try trombone". I had just begun to really like tuba and asked for some more time so he said we could wait until after the Christmas concert.I hit it really hard for a couple of weeks and in band one morning he stopped us and said there was something in my bell. It was my pajamas that I'd stuffed down there to appease my stepmother and forgotten about. And though embarasing, my sound was born.Ed
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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by saxophyte »

I just found 2 front teeth in a boosey sousa with a smashed lower mouthpipe.
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Re: Strangest thing you found in a tuba?

Post by opus37 »

Several years ago, our city band marched in a summer Minneapolis parade. It was hot and we knew it was going to be hot. A friend played an old Conn rain catcher. He sounded a little stuffy during the parade, but no one really cared much. At the end of the parade, he took off his sousa and pulled out a small pony keg. That was one of the most refreshing things ever found in a tuba!
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