Re: Re: Re: Quintet Survey: Contrabass or Bass tuba


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Posted by Joe S. on April 18, 2001 at 19:31:35:

In Reply to: Re: Re: Quintet Survey: Contrabass or Bass tuba posted by I have a Question on April 18, 2001 at 11:59:49:

Obviously Rick Denney disagrees with my perspective regarding the specific instrument you ask about, and (I suspect) uses Helleburg-ish stuff on his Yamaha mini-F. I only toot on YFB621's for about 20-30 minutes at a time now and then. When I mess around with those (after repairing them, etc.), I frankly like to highlight their small size with small C4-ish mouthpieces. I enjoy the brightness - their natural tendency - and like to push that when monkeying around with YFB621's (obviously don't own an F621).

I think that something like an H4 (thin flat rim) or N4 (round medium Euro rim) Marc. mouthpiece is (to me) probably the large-size limit for good F tuba results, and perhaps you can "dull out" rather than "round out" an F tuba with a mis-matched (too deep) mouthpiece on an F. An "economy approximation" of the Marc. H4 or N4 would be a Bach 18 knock-off (Blessing, U.M.I., D.E.G.), I'd guess.

Frankly, last year when I was playing some pretty "serious" brass quintet concerts with the University of Mississippi quintet (regular concerts and a couple of recruiting tours) I just went ahead and USED A CC tuba on a couple of pieces on the "formal" concerts but "got by" (for obvious reasons) with the F on all of the pieces on the recruiting tours. I tended to use a CC (at the time, I was tootin' on an HB21 that I bought and kept for about three months) for quintet pieces where the tuba parts strictly sounded like "bass" parts...or (contra)bass parts, if you will...This (as we know from how most quintet music is written) wasn't very many pieces.

Joe "It's a real pain to drag two tubas, but on a few occasions its nice to have them both." S.


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