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a wonderful gift from York-aholic

Posted: Thu Aug 10, 2023 4:38 pm
by bloke
I dunno where he got it...
- came with something he bought...??
- had it for a long time, and tired of stepping over it...??

We had one of these at my spartanly-equipment-supplied (ie. poor) high school, for a very old King 1240, which (likely) was given to our school (from another school's band director, who knew it was hopelessly worn out - ie. valves) when our school was first opened in the late 1950's. (I attended from the end of late 60's to the mid-'70's.) I used that (yes) worn-out King 1240 (patched bell rim, and pistons rattled in the casings) to play in the youth orchestra and the all-state band, and it sat on a stand just like this one (when not being played)...so it's nice to have this stand - for sentimental reasons. (We also had some same-make/same-style "butterfly"-shaped stands in the band room.)
...I'll probably put my big 24" recording bell (a work-in-progress) Besson compensating B-flat on it.

As Mike Wolfe would say on his not-reality show:
Just look at that beautiful rust.


Image

The two photobombing items on the coffee table:

(left) a vintage Peterson transistor (set for each individual pitch, but extremely accurate) electronic strobe tuner...good enough for tuning a piano.
(right) Peterson's first-ever product: a vacuum-tube powered tone generator (for tuning organ pipes)...very rare.

Re: a wonderful gift from York-aholic

Posted: Thu Aug 10, 2023 8:30 pm
by Heavy_Metal
And a blokepiece to the right of the vacuum-tube unit?

Re: a wonderful gift from York-aholic

Posted: Thu Aug 10, 2023 8:39 pm
by bloke
Heavy_Metal wrote: Thu Aug 10, 2023 8:30 pm And a blokepiece to the right of the vacuum-tube unit?
I believe that's one of the two prototypes that are in queue for production (hopefully next week or so...)

I personally go back-and-forth re: the Helleberg II variant.
- I'm not a Helleberg 120 nor Helleberg II/Laskey 30H/Conn 7B/Jacobs Helleberg/original Helleberg fan.
- I'm not really sure that I "like" this mouthpiece, YET...
- I like it better than any other "Helleberg", and
- it works darn well on my compact Holton B-flat, PLUS -
- if I want my nice clear/focused-sounding F tuba to sound like those wide-belled out-of-tune bland-sounding piston F tubas...It does a good job of imitating that sound :thumbsup: , except
- it's not out-of-tune, so I guess I won't be fooling anyone. :tuba:

Helleberg II-style mouthpieces: They have a large following, and - even through they are fairly deep-cupped - they seem to play at a slightly higher pitch level that some other deep-cupped tuba mouthpiece styles...(??)