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Tear out the interiors of their Rubank Advanced Method books, and staple these in there:

Too many?

Where is this?

prodigal wrote: Sat Sep 12, 2026 7:03 pm Too many?

Where is this?

bloke wrote: Sat Sep 12, 2026 6:29 pm Tear out the interiors of their Rubank Advanced Method books, and staple these in there:

Unfortunately, where I live, we are more likely to tear out the pages of the Rubank Advanced Method and insert in their place the pages out of the Rubank Elementary method, just to get players.

prodigal wrote: Sat Sep 12, 2026 7:03 pm Too many?

Where is this?

Seriously. I think we had *maybe* 5 tuba majors, in a school of 40,000 students.

bort2.0 wrote: Sun Sep 13, 2026 8:45 am

prodigal wrote: Sat Sep 12, 2026 7:03 pm Too many?

Where is this?

Seriously. I think we had *maybe* 5 tuba majors, in a school of 40,000 students.

How many of them today are working tuba players?

UncleBeer wrote: Sun Sep 13, 2026 4:15 am

prodigal wrote: Sat Sep 12, 2026 7:03 pm Too many?

Where is this?

UNT 1.jpg

Ok, duly noted. There's too many people at Band University, er UNT.

iiipopes wrote: Sun Sep 13, 2026 8:23 am

bloke wrote: Sat Sep 12, 2026 6:29 pm Tear out the interiors of their Rubank Advanced Method books, and staple these in there:

Unfortunately, where I live, we are more likely to tear out the pages of the Rubank Advanced Method and insert in their place the pages out of the Rubank Elementary method, just to get players.

Truth!

If @bloke’s idea doesn't work, you could always try this.

bloke wrote: Sun Sep 13, 2026 12:10 pm

bort2.0 wrote: Sun Sep 13, 2026 8:45 am

prodigal wrote: Sat Sep 12, 2026 7:03 pm Too many?

Where is this?

Seriously. I think we had *maybe* 5 tuba majors, in a school of 40,000 students.

How many of them today are working tuba players?

Two of them are retired from their upper-echelon DC military band jobs. One of them teaches at a University now. The other...?

Another guy (a close friend during college) is still playing with an Army band out west somewhere, but I think his primary active duty role on base is something else.

I think another guy became an air traffic controller.

The other, I think, changed majors.

This was almost 25 years ago, so I don't remember all that well and have lost touch. Not like they know what I do now, LOL.

... so even five were two more than the taxpayers really should have been asked to subsidize, even though -in my view - 60% is a remarkably high percentage.

bloke wrote: Sun Sep 13, 2026 3:01 pm ... so even five were two more than the taxpayers really should have been asked to subsidize, even though -in my view - 60% is a remarkably high percentage.

Taxpayers may not be subsidizing those students (or at least all of them), but someone is. They may think of themselves as self-subsidizing if they've been able to get loans that they actually intend to honor and repay. Maybe some of them are in fact working to subsidize their own educations (at least in part), and perhaps have part-time jobs and summer jobs to do that.

My concern in circumstances like this (which are not nearly unique to tuba players or music majors, etc.) is in wondering how many of them have back-up plans for when they learn that the original plan won't be working out. Everybody (even -- or especially -- at that age) should have a back-up plan -- whether your plan is to become a tuba player or a doctor or Navy SEAL -- and a back-up plan for the backup-plan.

... Tuition covers 100% the cost of public and private higher education?

We are 40 trillion in debt from a combination of allowing our government to fight other countries' wars (perhaps that our own government started?), waste, fraud, abuse, stunts pulled by the Fed, paying people to not work, and other reasons. The federal government heavily subsidizes higher education. None of us have any power to stop it from doing it. I wouldn't feel so bad about it were it that the federal government only subsidized the acquisition of skill sets that all of us need, rather than skill sets that none of us need and only the individuals acquiring them desire.

Are my opinions controversial? Yes I know they are, but they shouldn't be.

Let's steer back out of this sidebar. This thread was meant to be a joke.

bloke wrote: Sat Sep 12, 2026 6:29 pm Tear out the interiors of their Rubank Advanced Method books, and staple these in there:

Cool idea. Post a clip of you playing it first

When I master the clarinet, I will.

I understand this is a joke post, but what is that piece?

arpthark wrote: Mon Sep 14, 2026 8:09 am I understand this is a joke post, but what is that piece?

Weber - Clarinet Concertino.

The assistant band director (Art Theil, Memphis State University)...

(...remember I told y'all in another thread that the head band director, Tom Ferguson - who was the pianist on the Matteson Phillips tuba Jazz consort album - was really mostly interested in the jazz program.....??... I believe it's defunct now or has morphed into something else, but he was the founder of N.A.J.E.)

...took the concert band on a recruiting tour when I was a freshman, and his (yes) sophomore daughter played the stew out of this in the middle of each of those concerts.

Thanks, link here.

Now I want to mess around with it on F tuba reading it at concert pitch/C treble clef.

I've said it before, but the standards we hold young brass players to vs young string players is stunning. I get that they are vastly different instruments and what is easy on one is hard on the other, etc... However, the standards for 10-year-old violin players, taking into account note accuracy, velocity, intonation, articulation, tone, and the nuanced bow holds and left hand finger positioning is eons higher than what 10yo brass players are expected to do (just...play the note without cracking it?)

I wonder if we accelerated brass playing the way string playing is accelerated, we might not have people so worried about 16th notes later on.

When I was starting out on tuba in 6th grade, we all got the same lesson books for band class. My goal was to beat every other person in the room through the books, including the flute and trumpet players. It didn't occur to me that the size of my instrument should be a hinderance, and it wasn't. So after 3 years of that, I was pretty confident I could play as well as anyone else in the room, and that mentality has been very useful through my musical life.