False tones . . .

[hup_d_dup]

Easy on a tuba, impossible (for me) on a euphonium.

How come?

Hup

[Donn]

I can't do false tones on any large bore rotary tuba I've ever owned

"Can't do" means really nothing like a note comes out, right? Not a matter of acceptable quality. Just to be extra fastidious with the semantics. In my brief experience with the bariphonium family, same story - best I remember, nothing there - and this was an unusual design, maybe more like a large bore saxhorn.

The trombone reportedly has its false tones in a different place. I wonder if that's what happens also with the baritone, we're just trying the wrong pitch.

[Art Hovey]

Tubas that have mostly conical shape (like Kings and most sousaphones) generally have pretty good false pedal notes. Tubas that are more like exponential horns (such as Bessons and many european instruments) generally don't. My new rotary-valve plastic Tiger has an amazing false pedal; one of the best I have ever found. So it's not the valve type that makes the difference.

[Donn]

Lacking a baritone of my own, I just tried out an oval alto (that doesn't exponential at all to me.) I got a fairly reliable though not too tasty Gb, open. With valves, couldn't find anything. That would be Db on a baritone, of course, but wouldn't really expect that, just thinking there might be something there other than the Eb we'd be looking for.

[humBell]

Good thread.

I've always wanted to figure out what false/pedal tones are.

My current not fully thought through concept is that the fundamental the octave down is not bound nearly as tightly as everything above it, and the Eb (on a BBb tuba) is the edge to which you can lip the note. If you have good lip control, you can glissando between the two without using valves. A euphonium player was telling me he could go all the way down to the bottom edge as well.

Yeah, as many have said, i speculate that the conical nature gives a wider range.
I'd add the speculation that the turns in the wrap with larger diameter perhaps are the contributing factor as it offers greater variation in air column length between the inside turn of each bow and the outside. That make sense? It does qualitatively to me, but thus far i'm too lazy to apply maths to it.

Fooling around with a king baritone, i could pull it up to D, but that was it.

Thanks for bringing it up.

[dwerden]

Keep working - you'll get there. On my old American-style euphonium in high school (bell-front King) I could easily move up from pedal Bb to a D, and if I worked at it I could get an Eb, all with no valves. Even though my King had 4 valves, I fooled around with playing the D open, then the C with 1st valve. My goal, for whatever non-reason, was to do a Bb scale without using my 4th valve. I never worked hard enough to make that happen without some bad-sounding tones, but I suspect I could have improved the tone with more work.

For me the epitome was when Bill Watrous (trombone) played with our Coast Guard jazz ensemble. In a cadenza he did a diatonic scale from the mid range down to a pedal Eb with a straight trombone. It seemed like a practical use, as opposed to a novelty.

But on my larger compensating euphoniums and larger mouthpiece it is much harder to move off the Bb, but I found I can do it. There isn't much reason to, so I have not honed the skill, but I think it is possible even on a large pro-style horn.

[Donn]

Keep working - you'll get there. On my old American-style euphonium in high school (bell-front King) I could easily move up from pedal Bb to a D, and if I worked at it I could get an Eb, all with no valves.

It seems to me, you confirm here that the baritone lacks the false tone register.

On a tuba, that Eb just pops out, along with the rest of the notes as you use the valves to get down to Bb. Your ability to play whatever note you want, is in a sense the opposite of a register, which is a series of notes that the instrument supports.

[timothy42b]

Keep working - you'll get there. On my old American-style euphonium in high school (bell-front King) I could easily move up from pedal Bb to a D, and if I worked at it I could get an Eb, all with no valves.

It seems to me, you confirm here that the baritone lacks the false tone register.

.

Some do, some don't. My Martin has the Eb in open just as clear as the F above it in 1-3. Compensating horns seem to lose them, I've never known why. Trombone false tones seem to take more effort but be more consistently available. I've not run into a trombone where I couldn't get at least something out, but some euphs seem impossible. But when the euph does have them they seem to slot pretty solidly.

[GC]

False tones on rotary horns are inconsistent, just like pistons. The MW 25 I played in college had a pretty good false tone register. The horn was severely stuffy, and I was unable to get it to speak the 1-2-3-4 low C most of the time, but the 1-2 C and 2-3 B were pretty decent.

Then I laid off tuba for 24 years. When I came back, I bought a Cerveny 601 CC. The false tones were unusably strange and out of tune. I expected a low F open false tone; what I got was a thin pitch between F# and G that was difficult to slot at all.

Then again, I tried a Cerveny 793 BBb compact-wrapped Kaiser tuba about 5 years ago that a local guy had up for sale, and the open false Eb popped out as easily as it does on a 20J. You just never know. I really wish I could have bought that 793; it was a really impressive BIG horn. Of course, they're considerably more expensive now. I'd be hard pressed to choose between it and the 6/4 BMB BBb.