Posted by Rick Denney on February 04, 2002 at 15:00:53:
In Reply to: Re: Re: A Poll: Favorite Solo F Tuba posted by Robert on February 04, 2002 at 01:11:21:
The key requirement for a quintet horn (in addition to a sound that complements the group) is range. Some quintet music is written for contrabass, and many F tubas won't sound good on those low notes. Or, if they do sound good, it will be because you had to put lots of special effort into making them sound good. I prefer not to have to work that hard.
I used to own a Musica F tuba, which was quite similar to the Cerveny F tuba that receives generally good reviews. It was unusable in quintet, because it was too hard to manage in the lower register. It had quite a nice sound on high orchestra stuff, though--stuff that was written for F tuba back in the days before people expected a bass tuba to sound like a contrabass tuba.
When I switched to the Yamaha 621 F tuba, the low range came back (as long as I didn't bottle the tuba up with the terribly small Yamaha mouthpiece that came with it), without sounding like a contrabass tuba. The 621 is now my standard quintet tuba. It has more presence in the sound, as opposed to a more ethereal sound in tall-belled F tubas, but that works for the stuff that I do. I just switched to a Doug Elliott 2N132/R4, which has the same rim as my big tuba mouthpiece, but with a smaller cup and backbore. It has added back some of the smoothness lost with the mouthpiece I had been using (a custom Warburton). With a good player, it would be fine for solo work.
Rick "who is the limiting factor in all his horns" Denney