Re: Pedal BBb


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Posted by Fred Young on September 11, 2002 at 20:33:26:

In Reply to: Pedal BBb posted by Chester on September 09, 2002 at 22:15:58:

Perhaps you need a more funnel shaped deep cup mouthpiece. It could also be hard to get pedal BBb because your tuba has too small a bore. BBb is not really the pedal note on a BBb tuba, it is a preferred tone whilst Conn Engineering showed many years ago that the Eb above it is the true pedal. That being the case you can get the low BBb using the 4th valve. Start on the open low Eb and play down chromatically to BBb doing 0,2,1,12,23,13 or 4. If you do that often enough you may be able to get BBb open also. However, their is so little fundamental (about 0.01%) in that note it is of little real use. The same is true of the fundamental C on the C tuba. I have heard some of the best tubists alive end a beautiful Bach quintet with C below the staff, G below that and then they thought they were sounding like a pipe organ on the held pedal C ending the pieced with a note that would vibrate the floor at about 30 Hertz. Actually all the audience heard was the bottom dropping out of the quintet and being replaced with a tone one could get by banging a drumstick on a rock at 30 Hertz. A BBb tuba would have sounded much better on that note because it would have had only half as many harmonics!


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