Posted by Mike Sanders on September 22, 1999 at 10:14:25:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Mouthpieces posted by Chuck on September 22, 1999 at 08:40:13:
I will chime in here with my take on the mouthpieces. I play in a 100 piece orchestra all the time with 4 very strong trombones sitting to my right. We have a very live acoustic in our hall which can be very tuba friendly but also can turn low frequency sounds into mud. I play a Yorkbrunner, and have never felt like I needed to make a particularly dark sound with it, it puts out so much sound with relative ease. I do like to be able to change my sound a bit depending on the piece and find that the heavy MPs tend to limit this. I use a PT-88 a lot and a Dillon M 1 C, a PT-70 and a PT-50 on occaision. These help make some colors available. I can only imagine a heavy MP on a 2165 not being a very interesting or beautiful sound to listen to in most cases. Big and dark is not the be-all and end-all 100% of the time. How about core, bouyancy, and vitality? Listen to the CSO/Reiner recording of Lt. Kije, or the Slatkin/SLSO recording of Prokofiev 5th (with Gene sounding very lively and energetic). To my ears this is very musical and exciting tuba performance and it projects like crazy. In the end, how big and heavy does it realy need to be?