It's a tuba! Sheesh!!!!

[Paulver]

I understand that many times instrumentalists are asked questions by people who may not have any idea what that instrument is that's in the case on their back, or in the case that they're carrying. HOWEVER.......... when I ask a tuba player (from junior high school thru grad school) specifically what brand of tuba they are playing, I invariably get.... It's a tuba! They all answer the same way!!!!!!!!

DUH!!!!!!

If I don't know the player personally, I never ask, "What are you playing?" (Inferring.... what brand are you playing?) The other evening, I was at a concert at the Chautauqua Institute in Chautauqua, NY, and a kid walking toward me had an immense gig bag on his back. I asked him what brand it was. And I got....... again.... It's a tuba!

Are they not listening to the question? Do they think nobody knows what a tuba case looks like? Do they think that everyone is totally ignorant or totally devoid of musical knowledge? Are they the best that the next generation of musicians has to offer?

In reply, I said, "Oh, I know quite well what instrument it is. I asked you what brand/make it is." He finally spit out, "It's an Eastman 6/4 CC"."I asked what size bell?" His response..... "I don't know." I asked, "How does it play?? His response.... "Okay, I guess."

Granted, these are younger players, maybe 21, 22, 23 years old, but shouldn't they be able to converse intelligently regarding their instrument? They are all majoring, or have majored on their instrument and or working on Masters Degrees. Shouldn't they be able to produce some sort of coherent info about those instruments when asked by a concertgoer, right outside the venue?

Anyway, that's my contribution for any discussion this might conjure up this evening.

[bloke]

I've told this countless times, but in my second semester of 7th grade beginner band - when I had just turned 12 years old, I volunteered to switch to the bass horn, because I didn't like asking my Dad to buy me things, and I would have eventually had to ask him to buy me a trumpet. For at least another year, they were all bass horns - yet there was one King 1240 tuba - which the band director referred to as a bass horn also, which sort of confused me. The others were all brown sousaphones that were a couple of brands - King and Conn, but I didn't know that, and I think there was one or maybe two fiberglass Conns that arrived around that time as well as a couple of used fiberglass Holtons. All I knew is that they were fiberglass bass horns - though I did notice that the fifth partial pitches on the Holton fiberglass sousaphones were horribly flat, even though I didn't know anything about fifth partial. When my junior high band director sort of coerced me into being in this thing called the All City Junior High Band (which rehearsed a couple of days prior to a concert in the corner of the cafeteria in some other school that smelled like a dirty wet mop) this kid next to me had a Martin fiberglass tuba like Rick Denney's, and - for some reason I noticed that it said Martin on it....probably because I had a first cousin once removed up in Wisconsin named Martin, and I thought that was sort of an unusual name. By then, I think a couple of years later, I knew that my fiberglass sousaphone was made by Conn... but I had no idea that there were fancier ones that were fatter and had short action valves until I was in the 11th grade and someone who sat next to me in the West Tennessee honor band thing had one.

I suspect (??) what you are not realizing is that kids don't buy those instruments, and - early on - aren't particularly interested in their nomenclature, because they have nothing invested in them ( which might also be part of the reason why they are careless with them). I'm sure we used some really really expensive microscopes in 9th grade biology class, but I had no idea who made them.

I knew all about my guitars, because I bought them, and with money that I either earned throwing papers, mowing commercial properties, or from selling cigarettes, counterfeit pep rally tickets, and other stuff like that at school.

[Grumpikins]

The devil is in the details.

I always loved playing in that amphitheatre.

Did you go to the CCMTA all county concert a couple weeks ago? Really fantastic to see / hear the kids play and sing.

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[Grumpikins]

Chautauqua amphitheater. CCMTA all county music festival 2023.

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[jtm]

The one semester that I was in a university ensemble with a sit-down tuba, they issued me a great Bb Miraphone (Mirafone?) 186. I didn't bother to know what it was (and only know now because I asked the music school many years later). I didn't even know that Bb wasn't the serious tuba size. I knew a lot more about woodwinds because I was a woodwind player. If you'd asked me what kind of tuba I had, we could have looked at the label together.

People can be extremely knowledgeable about some things and completely ignorant of things that aren't interesting or don't matter to them. If they're playing a school tuba and not thinking about buying one of their own, they might just not bother to care about the make and model.

[Paulver]

I can understand the junior high school obliviousness to what brand of instrument they're playing. But, most of the people I'm running into recently are music school students and grads........ young adults. The kid I spoke to the other day was a college kid..... tuba major. His own tuba. I was stunned.

When I was teaching high school band, I made sure my students knew what they had in their hands. I didn't normally buy the typical school quality instruments, especially in my later years. I bought good, quality instruments. And, my last instruction to them was..... if you drop it, you'd better hit the floor before it does!!!

Anytime my students wanted to buy their own instruments, I offered to help them and their parents select brands and models. Actually, I almost insisted on that. One of my trombone players knew everything. Way more than I did. His opinion of himself was way higher than anyone else's. He went out with a handful of money and bought an absolute piece of crap. He was so proud....... right up to the time where he listened to a recording of himself. He asked me what he should do. I simply told him that he should have asked me that question before he went shopping.

Granted, I taught many years ago, and things always change. But Sweet Jesus...... if you're gonna invest $10,000 to $15,000 for a tuba. Know what you bought, and know why you bought it....... even if it's simply what your prof told you to buy!!

[arpthark]

No tuba player expects to be noticed, much less talked to.

[bloke]

Old guys come up to tuba players...

"Back in 1965, I was the National Sousaphone Champion"...etc...

Most of us - who grew up pre-www - probably remember when we thought all rotary valves tubas were Miraphone tubas.

I learned about Miraphone, Meinl-Weston, B/M Symphonic, and B&S (Gerhard Schneider) around the 11th grade, due to brochures and All-State displays.
I had not yet heard of Alexander.

By the 12th grade, I learned that some tubas were made in Czechoslovakia, and it took until I was in kolij to learn about Holton 345 tubas.

I laid eyes on the first Martin 6/4 I ever saw when I was in my late 20's (early 1980's). I was in coastal California playing tuba and bass at some jazz festival...
It was one of those 2-cornet bands that read (note-for-note) out of those Lu Watters books and played with a "choppy" beat (much "choppier" than King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, or Bix)..."odd"-sounding (to me).

[York-aholic]

Granted, these are younger players, maybe 21, 22, 23 years old, but shouldn't they be able to converse intelligently?

You mean verbally, as in out loud, person to person?

Next time, maybe, type your question on your phone and show them the screen?

[Paulver]

Regarding the Chautauqua Amphitheater.....

Prior to last week, the last time I was in that amphitheater was around 1963 or 1964. My sister was employed for the summer as a beautician at Chautauqua. My family would drive up occasionally to visit her. We attended church services and concerts in the old amphitheater.

It was totally torn down and rebuilt sometime around 2007. Much larger and greatly improved. We were a bit puzzled when we first saw it last week, as it didn't look anything like we had remembered it. Then, someone explained how it was demolished and totally rebuilt. Not sure if I remember the exact price correctly, but we were told the cost of the rebuild was something like $147 million dollars. It seats 4,000 people. The acoustics are very good. The wooden benches however........ a total PITA!! Literally!

[YorkNumber3.0]

.

[DonO.]

When I was in high school, I used to day dream constantly about having my own tuba. I read The Instrumentalist magazine ads from Meinl Weston and Mirafone in excruciating detail. I had all the model numbers and their specs memorized. I have to admit I didn’t pay much attention to Conn, King, etc. because everyone knew that REAL tuba players played German tubas with rotary valves. When my band director finally replaced our beat to death, literally falling apart Sousaphones (I didn’t know or care what kind they were) with Meinl Weston model 11 marching to concert convertible tubas, I was in heaven! I mean, they were only three valves, and pistons, but hey! They were GERMAN! I didn’t realize my dream of owning my own horn until college. Bought a used MW model 25. I knew everything about it and loved talking about it with other tuba players. It had idiosyncrasies, and I knew just how to work around them. Ultimately those idiosyncrasies lead me to sell it in favor of an Amati 481, but still I sometimes miss that horn and regret selling it. It’s like falling in love. The first time is just special. All of the above occurred in my youth, the 70’s, and I was a tuba super nerd deluxe. At the time, I didn’t think there was anything odd about being like that regarding my chosen instrument. I was just being enthusiastic.

Not too long ago I participated in an event that included a young tuba player. I heard him play and he was quite good. Others told me he was a high school senior and was going to be a tuba major for the upcoming year. He was playing an Eastman. It looked like the one that’s basically a copy of the King 2341, which is what I play now. While his group was on break, I tried to engage him in a conversation. I was curious about the Eastman and what he thought of it (pretty sure it was a school horn, not his own). I got a very rude brush off. My first thought was, well, this young generation just doesn’t want to engage with us old people. But my second thought was, when I was his age, if someone had wanted to talk to me about my horn, I would have been ecstatic!

[Grumpikins]

To the topic.

As a student attending the summer music program at chautauqua, they are probably pretty stressed/ worn out as it is a short intense program. And secondly, I remember being asked many times what that bag I was carrying contained by people who had no clue. However, I never responded in that way. I love my horn and playing it. Answering was fun.

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[bloke]

When I was in the 12th grade we got two new cheap tubas to go along with that really badly worn out King 1240. I ended up taking the King to All-State, because it still sounded better - even though the valves rattled in the casings. One of the new ones was one of those Reynolds that's the same as an Olds O-99, and the other one was one of those littte Miraphone 1270 tubas - like the mile Weston 10. My 11th grade buddy owned a nice recording bell King 1241 that his parents bought for him used, but he played on the Reynolds at school, because he seemed to like it okay and he didn't have to lug his own tuba back and forth or risk having it damaged at school. Unlike Don, I wasn't real impressed with the small budget Miraphone (German tuba), but my band director wanted me to play that silly little theme and variations tuba solo with the band at the end of the year called "A Touch of Tuba", so I used the Miraphone on that, because it was a little bit more nimble, and had a clearer sound than the King with the leaky valves... the same reason that college children and their teachers play recitals on F tubas, I suppose. There was a really talented and clever/smart 10th grade trumpet player in our band who played lead trumpet, and he kind of made fun of the sound of the Miraphone when I was playing that solo , imitating one of the lines of the solo and going "ho ho ho....ho ho ho ho..." Probably, the best sounding things that we still had at the school were the Conn 36K fiberglass sousaphones... decent intonation, large bore, large four quarter size, etc.

I wish spending on schools and school equipment was still kept under control and modest. I liked the 1% sales tax rate that we had when I was growing up.

[arpthark]

As the topic strays more towards our own cognizance (when/what/where) of different types of toobahs, I'm of the younger generation compared to most of you lot. (early 30s).

I was the only tuba player in my band from sixth grade until 10th grade, so I didn't know much of anything. I played a Yamaha 201 in middle school (had to sit on a textbook to reach the mouthpiece) and then I played on Cerveny 681 and 686s throughout high school, and marched big silver Conn 20Ks. I went to Stephen Collins Foster Music Camp at Eastern Kentucky University the summers after 8th, 9th, and 10th grade and studied there with Jim Willett, where I took lessons for the first time. He was playing a big Yamaha 822 F tuba, so I thought that the most professional tubas were Yamahas, and I fantasized about owning my own YFB-822. I would browse the Yamaha website and look at the full-size pics of all the silver models with five valves. Later I took lessons with a teacher who played a PT-4 and so of course I wanted my own PT model.

If you asked me in high school what sort of tuba I played, I might have said Sir Vinny, because that's how I pronounced Cerveny.

[bloke]

I remember back when - via advertising - a Swiss manufacturer's importer convinced many of us that their tubas were absolutely the best. My friend - who I've spoken of many times and has recently passed away - ended up being in Pershing's Own when he was about 20 years old or so. He lived in a fairly modest apartment in Arlington, and bought himself a Miraphone 186 B flat. That was the best tuba he knew of. I asked him about having bought that tuba (handmade and early 1970s) he said that he loved it. He also told me that the tuba that he was expected to play in the Band was a Swiss C tuba. He didn't have any problem figuring out how to play a C tuba, but he told me he hated playing it. I bought one of those same Swiss instruments myself a couple of decades ago or so. After a very short time, I hated playing it as well, and actually sold it for about a thousand more than I paid for it, which made me feel quite fortunate. The day I decided that I was going to sell it was the day that a college student of mine at Ole Miss received his new 186 C tuba which I had suggested to him. I played his tuba and realized how badly my Swiss tuba sucked compared to the 186 Miraphone.

[Rick Denney]

I knew in junior high that my plastic sousaphone was A.) a sousaphone, B.) pitched in Bb, and C .) was made by King. I also know that the other sousaphones we had were made by Conn. I didn’t have a preference—they all sucked when I played them.

I knew that the tuba loaned to me by the all-city band was a Besson, and that another one they loaned me was a Bach (top-action, so not an O-99). The Besson was better. That was when I was in the 8th grade.

I did not know model numbers.

In high school, I became aware of Miraphone tubas but I had little awareness of other brands of rotary tubas. I was allowed to keep a junked Besson Stratford when I left high school, but I was not aware of any distinction between it and compensating models. I had it repaired and that became my comeback instrument after college.

During the first year of that comeback, in my late 20’s, I joined TUBA. The ads in that journal quickly ended my ignorance of models and makes.

But here’s a different take. When Carol Jansch was asked at the Army Workshop about equipment, she expressed general ignorance. I do not believe she was that ignorant, but that it simply wasn’t what she wanted to talk about. It occurred to me that it was like the old joke that photographers tell:

“That’s a great picture, what kind of camera did you use?” sounds a like asking the cook, after enjoying a gourmet meal, “That was delicious! What kind of pots do you use?”

Or to a painter, “Beautiful painting! What kind of brushes do you use?”

But maybe it takes someone like Carol Jansch to earn the right not to care about equipment.

Also, the younger generations today signal virtue by professing little regard for possessions. They don’t care about the antique heirlooms they will inherit and would prefer flat-pack furniture from IKEA, as long as it fits their 65” TV or gaming computer. They don’t buy art.

They are immensely brand-conscious, of course, but they want to be perceived as uncaring about brand. So, your question might have sounded to them like a veiled accusation of materialism, because that is the accusation they make (usually silently) to people the age of their parents and grandparents. And not always without justification.

Rick “runs into this frequently” Denney

[Mary Ann]

Weellll --- the question could be asked as, "What brand of TUBA is that?"

I was not that long ago jokingly asked sort of backstage when I was leaving the green room area hauling the 183 in its bag on a cart, "Is that a tuba?" And replied, "No, it's a piccolo." And did get a good laugh, but those were music students getting ready for the next concert.

And after yet another concert (the oompah band last October) someone came up from the audience who wanted to know "What is that," but what he was actually asking was what key was it. But the answer he got was, "That's a tuba." Then he asked if it was a double, I said they don't make double tubas, but what he really wanted to know was the nomenclature of was it a BBb, a CC, or an Eb or F. People don't always know how to ask questions. Enthusiastic audience members are always smiled at, and he found out it was a non-double Eb tuba (the 183, which really works well as an oom pah.)

[Paulver]

To the topic.

As a student attending the summer music program at chautauqua, they are probably pretty stressed/ worn out as it is a short intense program.

My daughter is used to the top tier summer festivals. She decided to take it easy this summer and chose Chautauqua. (It's also much closer to home.) Not that it's a bad program by any means, but it's anything but stressful..... according to her. It seems to be rather laid back. The most stressful part is the hot, humid weather, with no air conditioning in the dorms!!

[bloke]

I'm surprised to hear that Boulder is that hot/humid in the summer...

OK...I see that one day next week is predicted 92 degrees but only 25% humidity...

I wouldn't choose it, but I'd take it.
My granddaughter and I have only been to Interlochen (daughter: several others including Round Top, TX - probably an oven), but I remember a few days up at Interlochen in the 90's.

Over 88 degrees or so (Interlochen) most of us were in the basement (prac'cin').

Also - when separated from their sweetie for a month and a half - it's amazing how much prac'cin' a person can get done.