Playing Low Loudly vs. Sounding Like a Bass Trombone

[horto008]

We've all heard Gene Pokorny do it, but when you guys are playing, say, a pedal Eb at FFF is it really even possible to maintain a nice smooth sound? Or does the nature of the instrument, etc. cause the sound to change around (for me) low F.

Just as an example, I can play a nice smooth, rather full, pedal Eb at what I would call MP...but turning it up to FF it shreds my poor tuba (the PT6 I've yapped about on here) and gets me the eye from the bass trombonist -- the "oh-so-you-think-you-sound-like-me eye" -- and that's scary.

Any comments?

[pulseczar]

I think that's the nature of the instrument.

[Bove]

Try increasing the quantity of air you are using for that note, without necessarily increasing the speed of the air. That’s one thing you could look at.

Also, observe what you are doing the next time you “turn it up to ffâ€

[Jobey Wilson]

yes...CC tuba guy is absolutely correct. Simply "sigh" into the instrument. I think "hot air" on my Alexander down there to keep round. There definitely is a time & place for both styles (and numerous other colors). For example, first page of Prokofiev 5...some guys really try to rip the low Eb with a metallic quality. I personally do not believe that sound is appropriate there...I try to emulate the biggest, roundest bass sound imaginable, filling the hall with lush, gorgeous sound. Listen to Warren Deck on the NY/Masur 1997 Teldec live recording (orange cover). Fountains of Rome is the first example that pops into my mind where you should push a little more to cut through (e.g. Gene Pokorney's excerpt CD...damn, what a sound!)...otherwise, the bass trombone can easily leave you in the dust.

[Ryan_Beucke]

Since noone really answered your question the way you asked it, I'll chime in.

There are definitly ways to get the sound CLOSER to a nice warm fat tone, as the above people have mentioned, but I think that when you're playing pedals at fff like that, you're never going to get them as warm as you can with the same note at mp. The idea is to get them good enough so that they don't offend anyone.

[Leland]

To boil it down to its most basic mechanics, its a matter of being able to control the vibration of the lips with the teeth being open as much as is actually required to produce these frequencies.

Exactly -- and that's only as much as required; too open, and your face will actually try to play lower than you're supposed to be playing. You hear average-skilled trumpet players do this on low C's and such, making their sound go "uwaaaa" as the instrument corrects their buzz.

Center it, don't play any higher or lower than is necessary, and focus on stability. If you overdo it, the sound will get this unstable "ooaaaoaeeaaawaaa" type of noise as your embouchure and the horn argue with each other. Make it stable first, then start adding decibels.

[Shockwave]

When the tuba sounds like a bass trombone, it just means there isn't enough fundamental to balance the upper harmonics. When the lips open and close abruptly, there isnt a nice long air pulse to reinforce the fundamental. You dont want your lips to smack together flat, you want them to have some shape so that the air flow is valved more gently. In practice this means tensing the corners and relaxing the middle.

-Eric

[Shockwave]

Your advice is right on imo, but I would suspect that the analysis of which frequencies are doing what may not be completely on target. Rick Denney's posts about electronically-generated sound could enlighten: "Pure fundamental" is not-at-all a pretty sound, and it could be said that it resembles the worst version of the sound of a bass trombone more so than it does a tuba. A very "round" tuba sound, in fact, contains a very strong and complex bundle of harmonics/overtones. In particular, in a "very good" tuba sound, the 12th partial is often so strong as to be clearly audible.

Have spent many years studying physics, designing loudspeakers, and making electronic music, Im pretty sure what I'm saying about harmonics is accurate. If you'd like to experiment with harmonics, there's a nifty demo of a synthesizer program the lets you create waveforms from harmonics and play music with them.

http://files1.sonicspot.com/probe/probe.zip

Choose the oscillator waveform that looks like a staircase and it gives you 20 volume control sliders to play with, one per harmonic.

-Eric

[SplatterTone]

I wonder if this is a difference in the use of nomenclature: one person meaning the 12th harmonic, another person meaning the 12th (i.e. an octave + a 5th) as one would hear with a quintaton stop.

[SplatterTone]

Now I'm completely confused. Which partial should I keep out of the tuba??

[Kevin Hendrick]

Now I'm completely confused. Which partial should I keep out of the tuba??

Both of them!

[Rick Denney]

Have spent many years studying physics, designing loudspeakers, and making electronic music, Im pretty sure what I'm saying about harmonics is accurate.

A pure 58-Hz (aka, low Bb) sine wave sounds like a nearly subsonic hum even at high listening levels. It's the harmonics that give the sound its characteristic color.

When I measured tuba sound, I found that the fundamental was weaker than the three or four harmonics above it, and that tubas with a "deeeper" sound were no stronger in the fundamental than tubas with a "edgier" sound. So, Bloke's statement is true: It ain't all about the fundamental. In fact, I'm convinced that the fundamental is audible as much as a difference tone between well-tuned upper harmonics than as an original tone, and the waveforms I've measured seem to show that.

The best players seem to demonstrate a complex sound that shows depth, rather than a dark sound devoid of the brilliance of upper harmonics. What makes those upper harmonics contribute to the depth of the sound, it seems to me, is that they are well-tuned and create a resonant stack of difference tones to reinforce the fundamental.

Buzzy, airy, and flatulent tuba sounds seem to occur because those upper harmonics are not well tuned and create strong noise components.

So, good sound is characterized by a range of well-tuned harmonics that reinforce and color the fundamental. That color is what makes a tuba a tuba. I think that was Bloke's point.

But I agree that the lips smacking together flat will create sharp transients that will produce unmusical harmonics. Fred Young described bass trombones in the tuba register as a hammer on a frying pan.

Try as I might (and "might" is severely limited by the demands of life), I have not made a lot of progress firming up the corners of my embouchure will leaving the middle relaxed, especially with the teeth as widely separated as possible. But I do think that's what it takes.

Rick "who does not want a 'dark' sound but rather a 'deep' sound" Denney

Edit: After spending some time playing with that software, I have to say that my previous conclusions are supported. When I ented the frequency response of the sound I measured, I get what sounds (on this tinny computer speaker) like a tuba sound. When I drop out the fundamental altogether, the sound hardly changes. I have to drop out a specific range of frequencies to begin to approach the bass trombone sound, but I still can't produce that trombone blat sound using any smooth waveform. That reinforces the point that the sound comprises sharp transients--steps and corners in the waveform rather than smooth curves. When I increased the waveform impedance to the point where the peaks clipped (an impedance mismatch that can be fixed by adjusting a few of the overtones), I got the bass trombone effect if not the specific sound.

And the effect of Bloke's 12th partial depending strongly on the other overtones in the sound. There were some mixes of harmonics where the stronger 12th partial reinforced a solid sound, and others where it stuck out annoyingly with the nasal character previously mentioned.

I also tried this: I picked any two adjacent overtones to turn up, with all the others zeroed out. Even the 31st and 32nd harmonic created a clearly audible fundamental in my ear. So, the fundamental is strenghened when we have a good range of in-tune overtones in our sound.

Rick "thinking tuba sound is important at least to the 16th harmonic for low notes" Denney

[Mark]

What makes those upper harmonics contribute to the depth of the sound, it seems to me, is that they are well-tuned and create a resonant stack of difference tones to reinforce the fundamental.

Don't you wish these things http://www.wwbw.com/Peterson-SC5000-Tuner-i15519.music were cheaper?

[Jeff Miller]

I think a lot of it depends on the nature of the tuba you're playing. Obviously, you can alter the tone colour by altering your airspeed/embouchure/concept, but it's always going to be constrained to some extent by the characteristics of your horn.

I normally wouldn't add to the board clutter to respond to a post like this (since there are already so many good replies) but tonight a friend and I were comparing his Nirschl and my Yorkbrunner. I was quite suprised by the difference. Both sounded great, but different. The Nirschl had a very woolly, fuzzy sound that was pretty consistent from the low CC down to the pedal. The Yorkbrunner has a more focused and (to my ear) vibrant sound, and these tendencies definitely were intensified from the low G to the low Db just above the pedal range.

Both sounded great, but just like two different actors playing the same role, they had different nuances of character.

[Shockwave]

The best players seem to demonstrate a complex sound that shows depth, rather than a dark sound devoid of the brilliance of upper harmonics. What makes those upper harmonics contribute to the depth of the sound, it seems to me, is that they are well-tuned and create a resonant stack of difference tones to reinforce the fundamental.

Buzzy, airy, and flatulent tuba sounds seem to occur because those upper harmonics are not well tuned and create strong noise components.

So, good sound is characterized by a range of well-tuned harmonics that reinforce and color the fundamental. That color is what makes a tuba a tuba. I think that was Bloke's point.

I also tried this: I picked any two adjacent overtones to turn up, with all the others zeroed out. Even the 31st and 32nd harmonic created a clearly audible fundamental in my ear. So, the fundamental is strenghened when we have a good range of in-tune overtones in our sound.

Rick "thinking tuba sound is important at least to the 16th harmonic for low notes" Denney

If you are talking about 58Hz fundamental, that means just a pure sine wave that repeats 58 times per second. If you combine any harmonics of that 58Hz wave, say the 31st and 32nd harmonics at 1798Hz and 1856Hz, the sum is a wave that repeats 58 times per second but contains none of the 58Hz fundamental. The only way to get fundamental from harmonics is to transmit the harmonics through a transducer or medium with nonlinear properties.

There is a big difference between the tuning of the harmonics of the horn and the tuning of the harmonics in the sound. There is no such thing as an out of tune harmonic in the sound. If it's not in tune, it's not a harmonic. Fourier discovered that any repeating waveform could be considered a sum of many harmonics, all of which are whole multiples of the fundamental. Tubas create repeating waveforms via resonance, and are driven by pulses of air from flapping lips. By the nature of the processes and mathematics at work, all the harmonics must be perfectly in tune.

On the other hand, the tuning of resonances in tubas is not perfect. The tuba is designed to resonate at certain pitches, roughly but not exactly forming a harmonic series. Some notes that sound horribly out of tune in a perfect harmonic series are actually tuned much better on tubas, and other notes that sound fine in a harmonic series and are out of tune on some tubas. The tuba is designed to resonate and reinforce the perfectly tuned harmonics generated by the lips, so when a particular harmonic on a tuba is not in tune with a perfect harmonic series, the tuba does not resonate and reinforce that harmonic and it ends up weaker than another harmonic that is in tune with the horn. The intonation tendencies of a horn influence its characteristic sound by selecting which harmonics will stand out and which will not. The tuba can not independently change the frequency of a particular harmonic generated by the lips, and the lips can not generate an out of tune harmonic.

I'm not suggesting that the ideal sound is all fundamental, or even mostly fundamental, but the main difference between tuba tone and bass trombone tone is in the lowest harmonics. Remember that low frequencies spread much more broadly than the high frequencies that shoot out of the horn in a beam toward the ceiling. From a distance, the sound balance shifts toward the low frequencies because of air absorption of highs and the radiation pattern, so anything you can add to the lows makes a lot more difference out in the audience than anything you subtract from the highs.

The best example of this I know of regards two sousaphone players I know. Up close when the band is playing they sound almost identical, with extreme sousaphone blat. From a distance, though, they sound quite different. One has a thin bass trombone sound, while the other has a huge, fat tuba sound that seems to carry for miles. The difference is in the lowest harmonics.

-Eric

[Donn]

There is a big difference between the tuning of the harmonics of the horn and the tuning of the harmonics in the sound. There is no such thing as an out of tune harmonic in the sound. If it's not in tune, it's not a harmonic. Fourier discovered that any repeating waveform could be considered a sum of many harmonics, all of which are whole multiples of the fundamental. Tubas create repeating waveforms via resonance, and are driven by pulses of air from flapping lips. By the nature of the processes and mathematics at work, all the harmonics must be perfectly in tune.

Could you elaborate on this? It seems like you might be saying that component tones that are out of tune with the fundamental can't occur - not just fail to meet the rigorous definition of a harmonic, but can't be produced. Like they would cancel out or something.

I'm not suggesting that the ideal sound is all fundamental, or even mostly fundamental, but the main difference between tuba tone and bass trombone tone is in the lowest harmonics.

I thought the "clipped waveform" explanation made sense to me, but I wonder if we're all thinking of the same thing when we say "bass trombone". I mean, no doubt they can actually be played sweet and clear, but that isn't their special sound.

[Shockwave]

Could you elaborate on this? It seems like you might be saying that component tones that are out of tune with the fundamental can't occur - not just fail to meet the rigorous definition of a harmonic, but can't be produced. Like they would cancel out or something.

I thought the "clipped waveform" explanation made sense to me, but I wonder if we're all thinking of the same thing when we say "bass trombone". I mean, no doubt they can actually be played sweet and clear, but that isn't their special sound.

Yes, that is correct, out of tune harmonics can not occur in the sound when you are playing a tuba (properly). There's only one way I know to hear the out of tune resonances of a tuba all at the same time, and I'll get to that.

Pianos and guitars produce out of tune harmonics because they are played by plucking and hammering, exciting the strings with transients and letting the vibrations decay. Transients are pulses containing all frequencies within a certain band limited by the attack and release speed of the pulse, so any resonance frequency within that band can be excited whether it is harmonically in tune or not. During decay, the energy stored in the resonator makes the resonator vibrate at its natural frequencies whether they are in tune or not. The stiffness of a piano string is what produces all those brilliant out of tune harmonics when it is hammered, however a bowed piano string has a very dull sound. The drawing of the bow across the string produces only in tune harmonics, and since the frequencies don't match, the upper resonances are weak. If you smack the mouthpiece of a tuba, you will hear the out of tune resonances as they decay. However, when playing a tuba, all the harmonics in the sound are in tune because the tuba is being driven by only one pair of lips flapping at one frequency with harmonic components only at whole multiples of that frequency.

For example, a lot of Bb tubas play flat on the Bb on top of the staff compared to Bb at the bottom of the staff. If you record and play back the two pitches together, you will hear a warbling sound because the high pitch is not exactly twice the frequency of the low pitch. However, when the tuba is playing low Bb, the same resonance of the horn that is the fundamental when you are playing high Bb is also being excited. There is no warbling sound when you play just the low Bb because your lips can not produce those two non harmonic frequencies at the same time.

Clear as mud?

I just thought of one more easy way to make the tuba sound like a bass trombone. Stab the attacks and taper the notes. So many people play "loud" by sticking a fortississississimo attack on a forte note. That's guaranteed to give you a nice, big, ugly nasal blat that echoes around the concert hall for the entire duration of the note...and then some.

-Eric

[MaryAnn]

When the tuba sounds like a bass trombone, it just means there isn't enough fundamental to balance the upper harmonics. When the lips open and close abruptly, there isnt a nice long air pulse to reinforce the fundamental. You dont want your lips to smack together flat, you want them to have some shape so that the air flow is valved more gently. In practice this means tensing the corners and relaxing the middle.
-Eric

This topic is way past this advice already...but this is true on all brass instruments. It took me years to develop a horn embouchure that was relaxed in the middle, and during those years I had a blatty, thin sound. The vibrating tissue needs to be soft, not tense. For people struggling with basic embouchure development, that can be a huge hurdle. On horn, I had to learn how to close / open the aperture by squeezing / not squeezing towards the middle; and I have to change the oral cavity shape differently for high, low, and middle range. On tuba...it seems to be more lip curl for me, but for you normal-sized people it might be different. I have lip curl on horn, but the emphasis is more on the squeeze ratio.
MA

[Lew]

I think a lot of it depends on the nature of the tuba you're playing. Obviously, you can alter the tone colour by altering your airspeed/embouchure/concept, but it's always going to be constrained to some extent by the characteristics of your horn.

I normally wouldn't add to the board clutter to respond to a post like this (since there are already so many good replies) but tonight a friend and I were comparing his Nirschl and my Yorkbrunner. I was quite suprised by the difference. Both sounded great, but different. The Nirschl had a very woolly, fuzzy sound that was pretty consistent from the low CC down to the pedal. The Yorkbrunner has a more focused and (to my ear) vibrant sound, and these tendencies definitely were intensified from the low G to the low Db just above the pedal range.

Both sounded great, but just like two different actors playing the same role, they had different nuances of character.

I tend to agree. I have 4 tubas that I use regularly, 2 BBb and 2 Eb, and the only one on which I can make that note, and below, sound good is the Besson 983. I have tried different mouthpieces and it makes very little difference. Although I can play the notes from low F down to pedal Bb easily and with a good sound on the Besson, I can't get the same projection on the Bb above that down to the G. If it weren't for that the Besson might be the only horn I play.