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Had a really interesting day as I got to meet Tim Sullivan who was visiting back home in CT from Switzerland. I sold him a CC frankenhorn last October but he hadn't been able to pick it up until now, what with being in Europe. Very interesting hearing his stories of moving from the US to Switzerland about 20 years ago, the gig scene there, paths to citizenship (hard!), what being a professional is like in Switzerland, and what tuba is expected of you (Willsons, obviously).

From there, having offloaded the CC, I drove up to Albany to meet a seller to get a 4v Conn Eb sousaphone. Another nice chat, super great guy who made a trip out of the way to meet me, a beautiful day for a drive, and that sousaphone ended up being a great player, too. I'm considering using it on an outdoor gig coming up, but people tend to really like the Flower Power 36K, so we'll see.

All in all a great tuba day, and I was able to work on that big Kruspe a bit when I got home, removing the rotten string linkage, unsticking the mouthpiece, and getting three out of five slides unstuck on it.

I ended up getting one of those four valve Conn E-flat sousaphones playing really well in tune with itself, but I had to change the circuit lengths.

I seriously thought about buying that one - in spite of the valves thing that the seller kept mentioning. The thing that made me decide against it was that - whenever I need a sousaphone, these days - it's usually to play with a New Orleans Brass Band type of group, and they want really really loud playing, and I probably need to stick with B-flat for the sousaphone.
Right now, I have a stencil Conn 14K that I got for (about) free that's needs to be fixed up and put together (with a Secrist valveset to go with it), and there's a brass King up in the attic that is very thick metal, because it is H N White...I don't know how the valves are on that one. Everything else I have are Conn 20K's, those are all probably sold, and I wouldn't have one of those for myself anyway, as they are too much work to play, and too difficult to get a really gritty sound out of them...Without that kind of sound, it's difficult to be heard outdoors.

Just as always, I typed too much.

I do hope you enjoy those new instruments, and enjoy and getting them working.