miraphone 5th valve question

[rodgeman]

If you had a miraphone with a Major third 5th valve, would you ever consider having it shortened to a flat whole step, and if not, why?

[bort2.0]

No -- because I learned how to play CC tuba on a 5-valve CC with the minor 3rd fifth valve.

One thing I really like though, is the convertible fifth slide on the older B&S CC tubas, so you can choose which configuration you want. On my old PT6, I thought I'd really like the minor 3rd... and for my brain/muscle memory, it was great. However, the tuba resonated far better with the shorter slide (nearly 1 pound lighter). I'm not sure the Miraphone wrap is supportive of something like this, but I do like how it worked out for B&S.

[C J]

No -- because I learned how to play CC tuba on a 5-valve CC with the minor 3rd fifth valve.

I am with Bort on this one.

[LeMark]

I'm the opposite, my muscle memory is on a flat whole step but I'm looking at buying a mirror phone so I'm not sure if there is a reason to relearn what I know or just get used to the 2 whole step valve

[bloke]

All that you're going to get is people with old Miraphone tubas championing one and people with newer 5-valve tubas championing the other...

...oh yeah: and people who have left-hand 5th valves championing those.

No one, though, will likely champion the 4+2 system, which fixes all problems - other than an individual instrument's bugle's acoustical quirks (and still manages to leave BOTH thumbs available for possible triggers - to address quirks).

Any 5 valve system has shortcomings. With the currently-popular circuit length, it's worse weakness is the pitch that is one whole step above the fundamental (ie. no viable fingering - one which is really sharp...OK...sure, some slide can be pulled for that, as long as it's pulled REALLY far) and another fingering that is really flat).

The old Miraphone long-length 5-valve system runs into problems on other pitches.

Neither of those two 5th valve circuit lengths offers a perfect solution for the "sharp 2-4" problem (which is a far more serious problem than a friggin crazy-sharp double low D on a C tuba...or a crazy-sharp low G on an F tuba, as the 4+2 system offers a spot-on fingering (5-6-3-4) for those pitches. Some view the Rudy "second slide trigger" thing as a solution, but - with a contrabass tuba - it still involves frantic (and far) slide manipulation. (I resorted to this system on the F cimbasso that I built, because I figured out a remarkably comfortable place for it to meet up with my left-hand thumb, and - with an F instrument - the slide doesn't have to be thrown out as far...and I was particularly delighted with myself (regarding the installation of that #2 slide trigger on my F cimbasso) when I found this on my stand, at a rehearsal for a concert a couple of years ago:

[Casca Grossa]

I have owned both styles on Mirafone tubas. I recently became the proud owner of a 184 with the major 3rd configuration. I learned 5 valve CC on a 185 with the same set up. For years I played a flat whole step. Both have their pluses and minuses. I am happy with the old style configuration. I can play the low pitches better in tune with less slide manipulation. I like having a pedal C that can be played two different ways. Your mileage may differ though. Maybe one day, I will make the pilgrimage to Blokeplace and have one of those magic 6th valves put on it like he has on his MW. For now I am very happy with both the horn and the 5th valve set up.

[Phil Dawson]

The Miraphone 1293 has both 5th valve slides available. I have both and don't remember which one was stock.

[bloke]

yeah...WAY too much yatter (from me) about the 4+2 system...

...but (at the risk of piling more yatter on top of yatter), I view it as important with F tubas, as their pitch level is so high that the badly-out-of-tune "double low" range is HIGH enough in pitch that most anyone (not just music directors and colleagues, but PATRONS as well) can easily hear that it's out of tune (with only 5 valves, and if no slide-pulling).

In the past, 5 was considered to be "plenty" for tubas pitched in C, because:
- It supplies an on-the-fly often-written-in-music/essential "low F"
- The horribly-sharp "double-low D" (probably requiring about six inches of additional tubing, pulled out from somewhere) is a pitch that was almost never found in written (orchestral/quintet/solo/etc.) sheet music.

Well...That pitch is now found in music quite often (particularly with composers using electronic keyboards - etc. - to compose).

The 4+2 system ENHANCES the "long whole step 5th valve" system but offering that but by ALSO offering a "long half step 6th valve", which BOTH fixes the suck/compromise 2-4 pitches situation, and ALSO fixes the (if C tuba) "horribly-sharp-double-low-D" situation, by providing a spot-on fingering for that pitch (again: 5-6-3-4). ...and it also pulls several other pitches much closer to "spot-on" than a 5-valve systems allows).

Some ask: "...but what about pulling slides for micro-tuning, if the LEFT hand is permanently parked over the 5th and 6th valves' spatulas?"
The solution being that BOTH thumbs are still available for operating slide triggers.
...with the rebuttal being: "but I'm not accustomed to that".
...with the response to that being, "yup".

[the elephant]

All that thumb action sounds like playing the bassoon.

[bloke]

...which is the pat response, and - yet - their orchestral, chamber, and solo passages are routinely more complex and require considerably more routine mastery of velocity than the vast majority of ours...and - when they finish executing their routine flurries of notes - they pack up their stuff and leave quietly, yet - when we play one-or-a-handful of really loud sounds (ex: "WOW...That NOTE in Uranus...!!!"), we receive compliments and congratulatory/encouraging comments.

...and actually: no. Bassoonists' thumbs are each responsible for several things, not just one lever.

Organists and pianists use all ten fingers, and don't even keep them anchored over the same levers or sets of levers...oh yeah: and their feet.

I REALLY liked Harvey Phillips pep talks about "respecting the tuba", but that's a thing that's earned, yes?


I go back to my now: decades old comment about orchestral tuba jobs being the hardest orchestral jobs to get (as actual musicians listen to the candidates), and - yet - the easiest orchestral jobs to keep (because it's so easy for us to "get by", if we individually choose to do so).

I'm just offering the possibility that - EVEN AS INTEREST IN REAL MUSIC IS DIMINISHING, AND MUSICAL TASTES ARE BECOMING MORE AND MORE PRIMITIVE - the ears of those who DO continue to listen to real music are becoming more-and-more discerning/discriminating (as recordings are now able to be digitally recorded and made "perfect", and pitch/frequency range - again - via using "midi" keyboards to compose music - continues to expand) that our instruments probably need to continue to evolve. Fifty years ago, the "1-2-4 for low F is good enough" mentality prevailed, but - a decade or so later - that solution was widely considered primitive and unsatisfactory. Now, it may (??) be time for (yes, a system invented many decades ago - the 4+2 system) to begin to rule the day - as well as some of these "wow, this horn feels great!" wildly out-of-tune tubas to be set aside...perhaps hanging on a wall in a room in Carolina...(??)

...and I'm not putting out a blanket-accusation of tuba players as "slackers"...quite the opposite:
I sit in with community bands - from time-to-time, and the overall playing ability - arguably - is BETTER than the abilities of many studio teachers and performers (again) fifty-or-so years ago...I'm just suggesting that more of the equipment might need to step up to meet the needs (as well as the playing prowess) of the players.

[kingrob76]

I presently own a "long 5th" 188. I also own a "short 5th" 6/4 CC that really is my "main" horn. I'm not going to play enough on both over the course of the rest of my life to have both sets of fingering systems be fluent in my head. I can get close, but, practice alone isn't going to do it for me and *quality* playing opportunities in the DC area are tough with so many professional / military players here per capita.

I don't feel either system is better than the other. I could *maybe* make a case the longer 5th offers "better" combinations but again, there are positives and negatives to either system. I am exploring converting the 188 to a flat whole step and working to acquire the parts which in the worst case scenario sit in a box on a shelf for later installation. I'm also going to look at having a longer 5th slide built for my Wessex to bring it in alignment with the 188 as it exists today. That is clearly the "less invasive" option of the two and completely reversible.

For me, there's value in having my two CC horns use a similar set of fingerings. Should I acquire an Eb or F I will want the patterns to match, but, that will be easier to adapt a new pattern if I decide to and have a need to do that.

[the elephant]

To all here: This is a long post. There are many words in it. If this upsets you, I recommend that you skip it. Thanks.
_____________

Bassoonists, and any melodic instrument with a massive rep of difficult music with correspondingly high expectations by both teachers and players, tend to do well at this sort of music because once past the beginner level they are asked to do it from very early on. Little, tiny eleven-year-old girls who blow across the embouchure holes of flutes have no idea that when learning to focus the air that they are using as much or more than the little goobers in the back row spitting into tubas. They do not complain. It is expected of them, the instrument is tiny, and the mind adapts. The tuba player is asked to play ridiculously easy music for most of his musical life, with much lower expectations from both teachers and players (with rare and notable exceptions) and that is why we cannot wrap our heads around how easy most orchestral excerpts are to play.

My comment was aimed at how difficult playing a six-valved tuba appears to be to most tuba players. As a species, we grow up with low technical and musical expectations placed upon us, learn that this is "how it is" and we fall for it.

Also, we tend to spend enough money to purchase a nice, used car on a horn with the acoustical R&D and quality of build of a middle school trumpet. It is a small market and it is difficult to make tubas, and designing them? Well, just look at how low our expectations are regarding what we will put up with, intonation-wise, and we back up our low expectations with our hard-earned money.

Despite this, I still love playing the tuba, acoustic warts and all, cope with things to the best of my abilities, try to strive to make trumpet etudes be "easy" and struggle to make string transcriptions "accessible" enough that I can perform them for people who are willing to pay to hear me do this. I figured out how to do this in 1983, at a low level, and have continued to try to both do this *and* enjoy myself, knowing full well that most string players consider me to be a musical dipstick simply because I have a tuba on my lap. My expectations were very high as an accomplished trumpeter, but have never really risen above that, again, because as a kid this expectation of achievement or proficiency was slammed into my brain every day via outstanding band music that, nonetheless, pigeonholed the tuba as a background, less important voice in the only real group I was able to play with on a regular basis. School band programs and the music they provide kids are responsible for most of us not being able to imagine playing like a bassoonist.

We could do this, too, if we were asked to play unison exercises with bassoonists after beginning band. But by and large, we are pushed along as equals until we are completely left behind by the woodwinds to play "bass lines".

What a shame. I see why this is. The nature of our voice's function in the band pretty much dooms us to these expectations, because no one in their right mind would try to publish a piece where everyone played the melody and there were no background instruments. I see this. I understand this. I still chafe at it, however.

Providing adequate air/vibration is produced, there is no reason we could not play a two-handed tuba with very flashy, accurate, and good-sounding results. It is just that no one ever asks us to do this when we are learning to play in the school band.

I am *this close* to adding a 6th valve to my homemade CC 186 because I am intrigued by your ideas and think I could make a good player that is well made, and the horn is ostensibly my "warm-up/daily drill" tuba. If it were to turn out to be a bowser I could just undo the work.

So why not? I am very curious about this. See, when I first learned to use the 5th valve it was the M3 length. I was taught that it was just an extender to the low register, pretty much never used in the staff. The interval was just something you had to learn, like new fingerings, rather than the current trend of discussion and application, which with the flat whole step length is that the 5th is a replacement for 1st with 4th down. It is sort of like the corrected 3rd handslide position on a trombone with the F attachment in use. This gives the valve a completely different "identity" to the player and changed the whole idea of using it. By extension, adding an "F attachment" half-step valve makes 100% sense.

G bugles in the 1970s and 1980s got by amazingly well with just two valves. An alternate was used in the upper register for one note, and then you had four of five pitches in the low register that could not be played. Most of the middle register of the horn was just fine, so it is possible to play most of the range of a horn with just two valves. So, if we want to put the tuba down a 4th in pitch, having access to two valves that have been tuned to be functional in the new, lower, key center is a brilliant idea.

The issue is that some horns do very poorly if you add a valve to them. They just do. However, some horns you could probably install eight valves on and still have a bugle with a blow that is not terribly restrictive. (Some like resistance, some do not. Resistance is not a universal "good" but more of a preference, if we are being honest, here.)

Anyway, the 186 has proven to work well with little difference in the horn whether there are four or five valves. I know as I have two I recently added 5th valves to. There was a difference, but it was not very much and was merely "different" and neither good nor bad. There is space for a 6th valve, but it would require shifting the entire valve section up or down a little to use the available space in the valve stack while also leaving room for both a slide and for a lever and linkage system.

Scheming to commence in five, four, three, two…

[Ace]

Good post, Wade.

Ace

[bloke]

We all base things on our experiences.
I’ve never added a valve to a tuba, and had it to play worse afterward. (Having heard others play GG and even EE-flat Instruments – which seem to otherwise be built to the same dimensions as CC or BB-flat instruments, I could imagine that those things would/could get pretty darn stuffy - with a whole bunch of cylindrical tubing added to them, and - having heard people attempting to play CCC and BBB-flat instruments, those recordings of attempts tend to convince me that those lengths are beyond those which most all humans can properly manage.)
Even those Conn/King 5th valves on those so-so C instruments built a couple of decades ago seem to work fine to me - even though they were built crappy and the mechanical leverage was goofy.
Though poor tactile designs drive me nuts, I’ve always tried to separate the tactile from the sonic, and tactile (“feel”) includes more than just the hands.
Six valves - on an instrument that is 16 or 18 feet long - is not a bunch of valves, particularly considering that six are more commonly found (and not uncommon) on tubas six feet shorter.
My own F tuba was brought to me - brand new, and with no input from me - by an American who was working in a busy orchestra in Germany. It ended up being a six valve instrument, because those were and are more commonly used (in the F length) by German orchestra musicians, and it is what they could find easily available to buy for me. Had I been brought a five valve instrument, I would probably - to this day - be on the side of those who argue that six valves is “overkill“, and too many valves for a tuba.
Six valves (C tuba) does not make for a better double-low C-sharp (still considered by many to be “a pitch not needed out in the land of gigs”), but it sure makes for a better (not-so-low) F-sharp, C-sharp, but makes for an immeasurably better “low D” (again: which I tend to find myself encountering more and more often in gig-land).
Just about everyone who I told about the length of fifth valve (basically a six valve length) that I was planning on putting on my Holton B-flat tuba made a funny face when I told them. Having done it, I’m delighted with it, and would’ve found any other length to have been of little used to me on a B-flat tuba. Of course, the long whole step thing on a C tuba provides a reliable low F, but it still leaves F-sharp and C-sharp with stinky compromise situations as the only alternatives, and those are the tubas (the very silly “play better in sharp keys“ adage) that fancy-schmancy players tend to use, while telling everyone - out of the other sides of their mouths - that it doesn’t matter what length of tuba anyone chooses to play.
It’s human nature to cling to that (whether some alternative could easily improve things) with which one is accustomed. I know that it’s my nature, and I see it in most everyone else.
With only - literally - a handful of buttons to mash on a tuba, I just don’t see “changing things around a little bit after the fourth valve” to be something that would cognitively debilitate any player. Some pretty unremarkable 11-year-olds have been handed requires-ten-fingers clarinets, and most of them managed to master the instrument well enough to sit in the third clarinet section (still: usually more to play than is given to the “bass horn” players). The human mind is pretty amazing. It is able to distinguish differences that are very subtle, and to make all sorts of distinctions and exceptions. The human mind can even allow its operator to speak several languages - and even write them...and - contrary to the beliefs of many musicians, seemingly (who seem to love to pigeonhole other musicians) – even play different styles of music competently, or even expertly.
Anticipating the arrival of some tubing that I’m going to use to have some fun experimenting with on my C tuba, I spent a little bit of time yesterday running through several low tessitura sharp keys excerpts while reading them and playing them “by ear” a half step higher. It wasn’t all that hard, and (knowing some people who truly are quite smart) I will assure anyone that I’m just not all that smart.
I realize that this is more than redundant, but – again – tuning has just become way more critical in the past couple of decades. Anyone with decent ears who has listened to older recordings of “top five“ orchestras knows this. Long ago, even beginner trumpets solved some of the problems that most tubas still do not solve, as even beginner trumpets all feature move-on-the-fly #3 slides (which completely fix the still-not-fixed 2–4-isn’t-good-enough-and-neither-is-245 issue with most tubas)...the difference being a matter of “scale” (size), as this problem can be fixed with a trumpet valve trumpet third slide movement that is little longer than the length of a typical tuba valve stroke.

[bloke]

My posts in this thread were too long.

[Doc]

@the elephant and @bloke
Your posts are not too long. Not redundant blather or boring internet fodder. They are thoughtful and informative. And dead-straight on the money.

Tangentally...
Wade, I'm glad to hear you lament beginners being left behind because of basslines (the steady diet of oompahs). This is one of the topics in an upcoming video on playing tunes and songs as it relates to helping develop musicianship and artistry in young players when they aren't not given a chance in band and for adults who never really got that kind of experience (so-called "music education" ). I'm trying to connect a bunch of dots with this series with the hope it helps someone, and the lack of development due to low expectations is an important dot along the way. Will it change the status quo everywhere? That's likely laughable, but it might help a few folks, and I'm fine with that. Thanks for speaking out about that and telling it like it is.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming...

[kingrob76]

tangentially related: what is the actual length of the M3 "long" 5th valve on a CC tuba? Dr. Google seems content on providing me 2 different numbers, but we all know the experts are here and Google is for porn.

[bloke]

...?? I'd guess (without measuring or doing math) under 4' - roughly 46" - 47".

[Snake Charmer]

Slightly off-topic:

So, if we want to put the tuba down a 4th in pitch, having access to two valves that have been tuned to be functional in the new, lower, key center is a brilliant idea.

that way Moritz invented it in 1835!!

[bloke]

yes...As I said, it's nothing new...
It does cost more money to build though (ex: compared to only three valves, with the 1st and 3rd circuits too long for some pitches and too short for other pitches).