Necessary Stupidities…

[the elephant]

WARNING: Long post with lots of words. It could be painful for some of you to read. Proceed with caution.
__________

So I have two concerts back to back (more or less) that use a big horn and a small one. It is a 100% obvious call as to which, so there is no question about it.

I have a Pops program tomorrow that the orchestra has trotted out around the state for our various Autumnal runouts. Our CBA requires that if a repeated program has more than a specific amount of time between performances or a certain percentage of players are different at later performances, then we are required to have an interim "touch-up" rehearsal.

We played this program on two rehearsals and then like five performances, then a break, and now the final concert will be tomorrow, and we had the touch-up rehearsal last night.

This is squarely in the large contrabass rep, with the Ride, Romeo and Juliet, Superman, and a very low and technical version of God Bless America that *needs* not only a contrabass, but a hefty one. I have loud pedal Ds to knock out, and lots of loud, low playing, with me probably having 300 or more ow Gs and Fs through the folder.

Starting the next night, we start rehearsals for Fantastique, with me being tacet on the two other pieces, so a program squarely in the F tuba's world.

I have not played my F in the orchestra much since I completely reworked the pitch and low range. It is really great now, but I have only used it in quintet and on some freelance stuff, so I am worried about how it will fly in the orchestra, both in projection and intonation. There are too many questions to just walk in and play Fantastique without some idea of what to expect.

So last night's rehearsal of low, heavy, physical music was done on the F. It was like a slow suicide, heh, heh… but it came off okay for the most part. The super-low lick in the Ride (w/ bass bone, rest, w/bass bone, rest) near the end was problematic, but the rest was pretty solid. Superman was a chore due to the amount of sound needed, Tchaikovsky was great, the God Bless was not rehearsed, just run once as a reminder, we did not play S&S (thankfully, as it is in D and the soloistic line in the first strain was awkward to finger). Everything else was a cinch.

What a physical drain, though. Many really large F tubas (mine in particular) can put out enough sound on this stuff, but do so at the expense of being genuine air hogs. I think I put out enough air for three rehearsals! OMG…

Upshot of all this:

Intonation: super good for a bass tuba, with the keys of B and Gb posing absolutely no issues to me. No slide pulls, no alternates, just press and blow.

Openness/response/resonance: Okay, a mixed bag. The openness is excellent, now that I have choked down the leadpipe and am on a slightly smaller mouthpiece. However, this causes the resonance to suffer some, so that the "air hog" issue raises its head. When it takes a LOT of air to make a loud enough sound, it is because the resonance is not as good as it needs to be, and that is not something I can fix; it is in the overall design of the horn. I suspect that the taper of the valve section (which I fiddled with and improved somewhat) expands too fast to get the bugle large enough to make Herr Kurath happy. If it were to use that bell with a slower taper, the intonation would likely be very bad. So my compromises seemed to have made this tuba "usable" as a small CC tuba if that need ever arises. But it takes Herculean amounts of air to do so. If you can fill it up to meet the need, the sound is there.

The funky response of the low Bb is much better now, but is still funky, in line with the funky low Bb on the two Yamaha F tubas. It has an unpleasant edge and pinch to it that requires great care, but it is playable with some force, if you need it. ALL surrounding notes are just fine, with a freedom to hammer them that is hard to find on a large F tuba, being much more like a good Eb tuba in this regard. But in tune.

When I articulate in the register from low Bb down into the pedal range (to pedal Bb), it speaks just fine now. I used to be sluggish. I suspect this is due to my luck with this leadpipe design and also (largely) to my mouthpiece choice. Only low Bb is slow to speak, with low A also being a little recalcitrant. But the A is solid AF in all other ways.

I have determined that my 5th slide is too long and needs to be cut by about .75" to make the low Bb in tune. The funny thing, in the opinion of *this* crackpot, is that F tubas (probably all tubas/brass instruments) have two distinct slide positions for the funky register notes, if those notes are indeed of the funky variety.

On my first F tuba (a 1977 Mirafone 180 that I bought in 1996), the low C was so bad as to make the horn unplayable. But it was very good in every other category. I discovered that the low C could be very clear and open if the very long 4th slide was pulled all the way out. It was about 20¢ sharp, though. I replaced the inner slide legs with some that were about six inches longer et voila! I had a baller low C. However, EVERYTHING ELSE using the 4th valve was more or less ruined.

The low C flaw lies in the bugle itself and not the 4th slide. No finagling the bore will fix it. Nothing will fix it save for a redesign of the bugle wrap. ( I can offer up various models as evidence of this, as they all seem to incorporate the same couple of changes that give a horn a good low C. Though, as with my method, this can be at the expense of other things.)

Due to my lifelong rampant curiosity, I happened to accidentally "discover" one of the main wrap corrections made to F tubas that help with the low register when I was farting around with this little 180 F at the shop. I got it in my head to try and duplicate the wrap of the Yamaha 621 F that I also owned. It seemed to me that they were very similar in wrap dimensions and locations, so that I might be able to duplicate the 621's great low C.

It worked, too, so I was then able to shorten the 4th slide back to its original length. Now all of 4th was okay again, but the low C was actually a bit flat.

Next stop on the modification train to SHORTEN the 4th slide. This gave me the OTHER setting that I believe all these funky horns have in that slide. If you get them to be in tune with that bugle wrap, everything is great *except* for the low C. If you give it enough pull, you can fix the error in the bugle and get a really nice low C, but it drives everything else grotesquely flat. If you can get it short enough, there is ANOTHER good setting with a thinner sound but more core/focus, but then everything is sort of sharp in a warm I-pissed-in-my-pants sort of way.

The answer for me was the bugle rewrap, a shortened 4th slide, and then an adjustable slide stop and a pull ring. This set of compromises (and lots of work) gave me a small, rotary F with a solid low register. There were further experiments and mods, and some helped. Some were just a waste of my time.

In the end, some of this education was applied to my big Kurath, and most of it worked and was consistent with my experiences. And in the end, I discovered that the 5th valve (low Bb) is just like the 4th valve (low C) on that little Mirafone. There are two distinct settings, with one being very far out and sort of ruining the valve for any notes other than low Bb, and there is one that is shorter than the math describes and the factory builds, whereby the low Bb has a narrower sound but a very solid (and brighter) tone with very clear core. The difference in length between the two is about six inches of pull. They both work well, but the shorter one is close enough that all the other affected notes on the 5th can be adjusted out with other slides or some new fingerings.

So I cut my 2nd and 6th slides the other day, and it was a fantastic choice. Lots of lipping was removed from my life. Now the 5th is much more clearly shown to be out a bit, and after the Berlioz this next week, I will cut the slide.

Heck, I might do it today.

Or maybe I will sit on my butt and pet my cats.

There's no telling…

Sorry for the disorganized ramble. I thought I would toss some of these ideas out there for discussion. Please don't hurt me.

[Three Valves]

What did you have for lunch?

[bloke]

I like my F tuba.
I'm currently not involved in any quintets (whereby I would like to use it), we're eight years away from a major Brahms birth anniversary, and the last time I used it in a symphony orchestra was to play Pomp and Circumstance #1.
I like grilled cheese sandwiches and homemade minestrone more than I like any of my tubas. As I have access both to those foods and to tubas, I can speak with confidence.

[the elephant]

The trimming work did the trick. I fixed the response issue and then had to clean up the lengths of all these new slides.

Tonight I finished the 5th slide trimming, and for the first time since I bought this tuba in 2016, I can play a major scale from bottom line G up one octave quickly and then without a break or a face reset, hammer a low G, in tune, with a good, centered sound, and do this same exercise on Ab, A, and Bb. The idea of doing this on the Bb when I bought the tuba was ridiculous. I could, of course, do the second line Bb up to the high Bb without any issue, but then the low Bb would in no way speak when I wanted it to, and it would have a pinched, out-of-center tone that was not fixable with the 5th slide in ANY position available with its too-short pull.

Once I had fully rebuilt this tuba (discovering its many construction horrors), and I had "redneck blueprinted" it, everything that had been so "very-good-but-not-quite-excellent" (enough so that I wanted to buy the tuba) became much better. It is now an excellent instrument, though far from perfect. The list of things to look at has become much shorter over the past five years, but the last BIG one was getting the low Bb to play more like the rest of the tuba. I would say that I can now cross that off the list.

The fingerings for a six-valved tuba that Joe suggested to me now all seem to work, with very decent pitch and response. That it played well enough in tune with the less commonly used fingerings I came up with told me that something was still not right, and now I have a fingering system that makes sense to me enough that I can sightread with it.

Or so it seems. I will list it so Joe can tell me it is still wonky, heh, heh…

Starting at low C and descending…

C - 4
B - 64
Bb - 54
A - 564
Ab - 5614 (a tad sharp) or 5124 (dead on, but out of the pattern)
G - 5634 (loud) or 56124 (soft)
Gb - 56234
F - 561234 (better than open, which is a little sharp…
Pedals are all "normal" fingerings.

Joe, is that system a little less odd than what I had been using?

[the elephant]

The last thing on the acoustic end of things is the E in the staff, which has a different tone and always *feels* flat, though it really isn't. I can't really explain it, save for a leak, but it does not leak anywhere within the valve or the slide circuit.

I suspect one of the major body joints I opened up years ago and was not happy with how it went back together, but had no way to test for leaks on something that large *may* be the culprit.

This tuba is so open-wrapped that it has a bell, bottom and top bows, and a long dogleg to the tuning slide.

That is it.

It is like a big-a$$ flugelhorn in this regard.

And the joint between the dogleg and the top bow is very poorly fit, being far too loose for its connecting ferrule. (That ferrule fits the top bow just fine.) I had to dump in a lot of solder to fill the factory gap, which pissed me off at the time. I figure that it will have to come off eventually, so I can expand the end a tiny bit to make for a proper joint.

I have a feeling that there is a leak in that connection and that a node for that E is right on the joint. At that point in the wrap, a leak could affect a single pitch.

So maybe that's the answer.

[York-aholic]

Remembering that I have no repair training…

Could you put the horn on its bell, pull the main slide out and fill that area with water up to that suspect joint and see if water leaks out?

[the elephant]

I have thought of that. I need to clean out my old 100-gallon horse trough that I used as a washout basin for tubas.

And time. I need some of that, too…

[bloke]

The low a flat works best for me with six combined with the slightly flat fingering for A that five valve systems have to resort to, which is 234...so I go 6234 for low A-flat, personally.

For low F sharp, i depress everything other than the 6th valve.

========
This stuff has nothing to do with anything:
I've said it before.
My F cimbasso is set up as a five valve system with a very comfortable to reach second slide trigger (as a substitute for a 6th valve). I'm pretty good jumping from one fingering system to another to another, but jumping over to this one with fast low range passages (after well over 40 years of using a six valve system on an F instrument) requires quite a few run throughs prior to the first rehearsals of such passages.
=========

pitches that feel out of tune and even sound out of tune (to me when playing them) when they are not:
To me, one is the B natural when encountered in the Bydlo solo passage. It probably has something to do with the implied chord and not jiving with equal temperament very well...(??)
... but I play it on the baritone horn instead of the tuba, so who knows...??

[rudysan]

If the low C is very sharp even with an extended fourth slide, maybe 5-3 (or 5-1-2) can work?