Mouthpiece Full Circle

[royjohn]

Being fairly new to tuba, I must be at the beginning of the circle and in a fairly peculiar place at that...on trumpet I finally found that a very large mpc (~18mm ID) worked better than anything else, but on tuba, I can't see that much difference. I have about 9 or 10 tuba mouthpieces, from a Yamaha 65 (small) to a PT-50 (large), and a Benge 24W, a couple of Hellebergs, a Bobo Symphonique, etc., etc. The largest ones do give a slightly darker tone, but aside from that, I can't tell much difference...I can play them all equally well...or badly. I don't know what to think about this...
royjohn, tuba newbie

[sdloveless]

Yes. I started on a Conn 15j with a Conn-Helleberg. 5 CC tubas, an F tuba and 2 BBb tubas with at least twice as many mouthpieces later, I own a Conn 15j with a Conn-Helleberg. And actually, someone gave me my current 15j with a newer Helleberg that’s not stamped Conn-Helleberg and I didn’t like it. So I went and dug up the old one with the Conn-Helleberg stamp and it was just right.

I also have a "Conn-Helleberg" given to me during high school by a teacher. It's one of the two-tone models, if that's indicative of anything at all. I recall trying a few mouthpieces during HS, but always coming back to this one. Even after not playing at all for 27 years, I managed to hold on to it. Since I started playing again I've tried maybe a half dozen others and it's the same old story.

I should probably track down a couple more before they become unobtainium and/or stupid expensive.

[Mary Ann]

I've concluded that some are more mouthpiece sensitive than others. I had a horn friend who was rim sensitive, to the point of appearing silly to me, but it made a difference for him. And on horn, I did acquire, a long time ago, a rim that is better for me than any others; it very slightly slants inward, which is quite comfortable compared to one that doesn't, and it's also a flat rim. Also a cup that works extremely well, and just never looked back.

I had my NStar friend over here a week or two ago, to try out my tuba, and he brought mouthpieces with him that he has settled on. Fancy expensive ones (Marcinkiewitz however that is spelled) and nothing that made much difference at my level. With the polka band I'm sticking with the 7B, and don't even know how "big" that is compared to everything else, but can say the Jim Self is too big for me and the PT64 is now a bit too barky. Still fiddle with the Melton 150 if I want to play high. Full circle would be coming back to the PT64 but I don't think that will happen. Newbies and amateurs I think tend to switch a whole lot more than after they become really solid players (the exception being my horn friend and his rims; he was 2nd horn for the traveling Phantom show for ten years, hardly either a newbie or an amateur.) So I don't switch on horn and do on tuba, being a pretty solid player on the former and definitely an amateur on the latter, especially after five years of no playing. I do have a "box o' pieces" for the horn and should just get rid of them, but acquiring that box seems pretty standard when someone takes up a brass and hasn't really developed yet.