the elephant wrote:
I have seen MANY kids at all state seeing one guy with his flipped outwards like that and then remove theirs and flip them so that they, too, were wicked cool dudes.
Would you prefer they wore their hats backwards and sagged their pants to their knees?
bloke wrote:In my experience, tuba players do not seek out "cool", but do tend to gravitate towards "dumb" (as do many other groups of people).
This, imo, follows the same law as the French horn slides that are all in the wrong places:
"If it is possible for something to be wrong, it will be."
I have seen a number of rotory tubas with the first and third slides pulled out almost a foot.
And they are oblivious as to how out of tune they are playing???
How interesting that this conversation came up. Yesterday, my probie class was doing philanthropy at a high school, and I had to borrow one of their tubas (i brought mine back after the bell got messed up). It turned out to be a 321, and it had the 3rd slide turned outward. When I switched it to put it back in, it actually hit the 2nd valve slide. I'm not sure if that's because of damage to the horn, or if it actually is meant to point outward.
The thing that struck me as really strange is how the horn responded. Obviously, it wasn't a professionaly taken care of horn, but it just felt and played like crap. I used a 321 at my high school sometimes, and it had the straight 3rd slide, which has been mentioned to be an older design. I don't quite know what it was, but the newer one was incredibly "woofy", intonation was a huge problem (much worse than anything else I've played), and it isn't something I would even reccomend as a school horn.
I don't know if it's something that's been happening to Yamahas over time, but it seems like their newer instruments are terrible. Last year, I used my school's brand new 321 euph, and it was always out of tune, never slotted right, and sounded pretty bad overall. This year, my band director lent me his...exact same model, just serial number in the 300's, and it feels perfect (same mouthpiece). I found the same thing with their bari saxes...the old one I used was a pretty good horn, but the new one that the school got to replace it blew. If you played a G in the upper register, then took off the octave key, nothing happened. Heh, maybe their quality control is just going downhill...
"We can avoid humanity's mistakes"
"Like the tuba!"
