4/4 Tubas in Professional Symphony Recordings

[poomshanka]

Bit of an obscure one, but this recording features Bjarni Guðmundsson playing a Hirsbrunner HB2 with the Iceland Symphony:



There's something cold about it that might be appealing for the hot days we've been having.

[UncleBeer]

Also obscure: A piece by NY Philharmonic composer in residence David del Tredici called "Tattoo", using two tubas. Some nice writing for the tubas. Believe it or not, I'm playing first on my HB2P, and Warren plays second on the Yorkbrunner he had at the time. Only reason he wanted to play second is because his horn was bigger; ie: because it wasn't a 4/4 horn.

Humble brag: pretty nice getting to put "1st tuba, NY Phil under Bernstein" on the ol' résumé.

[tubatodd]

Thank you!!! Keep the recordings coming.

[tubatodd]

Alan Baer has been using his Miraphone 188CC with the NYPO, not for everything, but he has been using it while teaching as well.

One of my Youtube suggested shorts was NYPO and sure enough....he's playing the 188.

[bloke]

I may have already posted this in this thread, but this is the 32-inch tall Holton B flat tuba with a 19 inch bell and the .687" bore that I stuck together.

This was shortly after I first stuck it together and wasn't intimately familiar with its intonation and other characteristics, I've altered the mouth pipe since and it plays better in tune than it did then, but it was pretty darn good then.

This was a freeway philharmonic concert, Mrs bloke was in the mezzanine, and turned on my Apple 5 phone and recorded whenever she saw me lift up the tuba.



defending myself
To my ears, the penultimate E natural in the brass chorale section (tuba) sounds flat, but I've gone back and sort of checked that pitch and (though this is a characteristic of paranoid schizophrenics: believing that it's everyone else and not themselves) I'm sort of convinced that I was "right". I sound a little bit flatter than most of the predominant sounding pitch on that chord, and I doubt that there are many of us whose sixth partial E naturals on our B-flat tubas are intrinsically flat.

but bloke, you're supposed to tune to the corporate tuning

Yeah... In another thread you would be insisting that the rest of the brass section is supposed to tune to the tuba.
FINALLY, when are trumpets NOT sharp? (and - I decided to check - my tuner reads the trumpet "concert" g-sharp in the penultimate chord as - yup - sharp. Has a major third of an E major chord, it should be slightly flat, correct?)

...the "over the top" B naturals below the staff (yet NOT 17 miles sharp...??) yeah, that's precisely why this BB-flat instrument is equipped with an F SEMItone 5th valve, rather than an F whole tone 5th valve.

[catgrowlB]

^ The only thing I sorta noticed was the second low/loud B natural was a little flatter in pitch than the first B. But overall, great
I'm pretty sure I like that squat 4/4 Holton BBb best of the tubas you have

I've heard other Bartok recordings, including the LA Phil/Mehta/Bobo, and BSO/Ozawa/Schmitz. I really like Schmitz on his Yorkbrunner on the BSO/Ozawa recording
And about a week ago I listened to the Chicago/Solti/Jacobs recording from the 1980s. Usually I like the CSO with Jacobs, but (honestly) he sounded horrible on the low/loud B naturals -- very uncentered and shaky sound. It's like he was trying to play louder than his embouchure could handle. Would have been better had he backed off a bit to better center and stabilize his pitch and sound.

[bloke]

It's hard to really get any sort of a fist type of sound on C and B natural below the staff with a C instrument because there's almost no cylindrical tubing involved.
... The blue haired lady wake up note in Tchaik 5 (after the bassoon descending arpeggio)... When I was still using C instruments, I always played that with 5-1-3, to achieve the amount of "fist" (via all of that cylindrical tubing) that particular resonance at that particular moment requires.

yeah bloke, but what about the open BB-flat and A natural with a BB-flat tuba?... the same issue, yes?

That's a good question.
Comparing the same size BB-flat and C instruments, the BB-flat instrument is 2 feet longer and thus overall more cylindrical.

I trust your ears @catgrowlB when comparing the two B-naturals. If you saw my thread about altering the mouth pipe recently, I added some more downward taper (as well as some overall length to the instrument) in an extra long mouth pipe receiver whereby I used the back half of the receiver itself as more downward taper in the mouth pipe before it reached the choke point. The choke point is now about .525" versus something like .540" - .550" and it's noticeably easier to control...but I would still wager that those two crazy-loud B naturals wouldn't quite be in tune with each other, with me as operator.
I'm sure I mentioned in the thread about this recent alteration that (unexpectedly and serendipitously) the so-called "tuning" B-flat (which was flat previously compared to the overall tuning of the instrument) crept up to just about pitch. I've gone back and played the instrument over and over to make sure I wasn't imagining it.
People credit mouth pipe tubes with more than I believe they should, but something tells me that the size of the choke point has quite an epic effect (if based on nothing more than this experience), but I'm just not sure about much of the rest of the mouth pipe when it gets past the capillary portion.
Thanks for listening to the video.

final comment about the squat Holton tuba...
It's sitting in a safe corner of my work room out in the shop.
There are some things that might take an entire work day (far superior routing of 5th valve linkage and a couple of things that don't really matter) but I can't seem to get past my customer demands. I'm kind of (particularly with the really closer to in tune middle range B-flat and A) desiring to use it a lot more often.

one other Holton comment:
There's a big 345 B-flat out in the shop that I nearly got to the finish line (the OLD "twin-spin" thread"), but the upper loop of the fourth circuit was bent too wide at the factory which prevents me from mounting the valve section lined up nicely with the body (the dogleg down to the main slide is badly crowded) without smushing tubing in (just as the factory did when they were building it, and I've already un-smushed the tubing that they smushed). I would really like to get that one playing and see what it's like...
Roughly a year ago, Mrs. bloke and I went on a day trip over into Arkansas (I believe it was Forrest City - right off of Interstate 40, if you want to look on a map) and met these two guys that bought and sold upper middle grade and high grade used golf clubs on their website and on eBay... but somehow they ended up with this European-made Jakob Winter hard case (with no cracks or anything) that they sold to me for a hundred bucks. When I got there to meet them, I discovered it was a six quarter case. (Those things are going for $1XXX ). When I realized I was going to have to do some surgery on the 345 tuba's fourth circuit, I was forced to put it away and I stuffed it in that case which didn't shut very easily.
Hey... Today, I opened it up to measure one of its parts for someone else and the padding inside has compressed and conformed to the instrument, and now it shuts easily, so this case is going to be THE case for this instrument.

bloke "life's little pleasures"

[dp]

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[tubatodd]

Here's a nice live recording of Fanfare for the Common Man. I don't know who the tuba player is but it looks like he's on a 4/4 horn of some variety. Some nice tone and clearly heard. Nice job!

[cktuba]

After a little internet sluething...

https://oslmusic.org/bios/kyle-turner/

[tubatodd]

Great Gate of Kiev on a 4/4 (?) B&S. I don't think it's a PT6P. Looks smaller to my eyeballs. In any case, very nice playing.