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Never underestimate the acoustics of a church! I got the audience jumping of their seats twice !
First time I was playing a piece of a Bach Cello Suite as a prelude before a church service. With the audience coming in I didn't want to tell everything in advance I just waited without playing any note (first time with the tuba in this church!). When I started with the piece it said FORTE (Bobo-Bach for tuba Vol.2 Nr.1) on a long C under the staff. And I played a FORTE (I still hear Roger Bobos voice saying FORTE!) and earned some quite terryfied looks!
Second time (different church) I knew the church but had the Eastman 853 Eb new. Same situation, audience started coming when I arrived so my first note was in the concert (all solo and chamber music). My first piece was a funky tune (Jon Sass-inspired), starting on the same low C. Other than my wife I had not realised how much more oomp the Eastman gives compared to the Besson 982 I played before. Even I was a bit shocked by the boom of the first note

bloke wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 1:43 pm Okay we're off to a side topic and that's fine.

The opposite of that what you describe are the echo chamber type of places which either are cathedrals or - for whatever reason - the sound echoes inside of them as it does in cathedrals. That can be really confusing.

Since this is a Bloke-approved diversion :-) … In the mid-1970’s Stuart Dempster was touring with the Martha Graham dance company. While walking about in Avignon he found a cathedral that had a 14 second reverberation. He got permission to record there and, after a bit of experimentation, this was the result. This is one guy, one trombone, and a tape recorder.

Late at night in the music building - when I was a college-age child, I would play a whole bunch of different arpeggios in the stairwell, and listen to the intonation. It helped me with tuning tendencies and helped me play fast moving passages - such as arpeggios. more accurately in tune. Of course when we play pitches that are moving at high velocity, we have little chance to correct their tuning.