Posted by Rick Denney on December 20, 2002 at 10:07:36:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Mirafone 186 vs. Rudy Meinl 3/4 posted by Jay Bertolet on December 20, 2002 at 07:28:10:
Mike Sanders told me exactly the same thing 16 years ago in regards to his Alexander. He said that a good sound wasn't always pretty up close. When I listened to him in his practice room, the sound was large and loud, and in the hall, loud turned into commanding.
It seems to me one of the hallmarks of a symphony professional is having a really good sense of what is happening to the sound out in the hall. In fact, I would venture to say that it is the defining difference between top pros and the rest of us. While we are trying to fix the things we hear, top pros are shaping the sounds they know the audience is hearing. It is quite difficult for me to assess my own playing as I'm doing it, though it's much easier when listening to a recording. If I have trouble understanding what I'm hearing from the player's perspective, then I'm that much further from being able to understand what the audience is hearing.
When I play the YM in our resonant rehearsal space, I hear a lot of its sound coming back to me, and the differences between it and other sorts of tubas are much more apparent than in my living room. I have discovered a few things in that room. One of them is that my tiny little Yamaha F tuba, which most think is too small and vanilla for many applications, makes a huge sound that grows in complexity as the sound resonates.
In my Texas days, I had a good friend who is a pro-quality oboist (he and I played in the same community orchestra). He was studying with a symphony pro, and the gist of a whole series of lessons for him was understanding the connection between the sound at the instrument and the sound in the hall, based on the notion that a good sound in the hall does not necessarily come from a pretty sound at the instrument. His teacher described it as having the complexity to survive the hall to the back row, and that complexity was heard up close as stridency. He changed his approach as a result of those lessons.
Rick "who is working on his flawed feedback loop" Denney