Re: Re: Re: PT mouthpiece size comparison....


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Posted by Sean Chisham on October 27, 2000 at 22:45:34:

In Reply to: Re: Re: PT mouthpiece size comparison.... posted by Todd on October 27, 2000 at 18:10:04:

Hmm... Do you, by chance, sometimes have difficulty making long phrases. Just curious of a theory.

If you are looking into the Perantucci line, then they have two basic styles. The funnel and the bowl. The funnel is like the Helleburg. These are the PT-48 and PT-50 type mouthpieces. The bowl types are the PT-88 and the PT-90 for example. Seems the most popular in recent past has been the PT-88. It is a very large mouthpiece. There are a couple of newer variations on the PT-88 like the PT-90 which is not as large in inner diameter, but retains the other similiar dimensions. This is guess work in part by what their literature states in the latest TUBA Journal.

The Helleburg II was designed with the assistance of Rex Martin, who is the opposite of an aggressive player. Don't get me wrong. He can be an aggressive musician when appropriate, but he is never an aggressive player.

I like the PT-88 on 4/4 CC's, but it seems to be too muddy on the larger horns, for me. The Helleburg II was a good big tuba mouthpiece for me and several others. I just always missed the more easily achieved meatier low end of the PT-88 when using it. The Laskey series seem to have addressed this issue.

These really are personal tastes though. Today there are many choices from Dillon, Perantucci, Doug Elliott, Warburton, and others. Equipment is a compromise though. Boring out a mouthpiece may make you feel better when playing through Fountains of Rome, but what did it do to Die Meistersinger.

This may not be an issue of equipment. As younger tubists we are tought to blow more air. Blow more air. Blow more air. More often the problem is not to blow out more air, but to instead inhale more air to begin with. Exhalation of full lungs is simple. You just relax and the positive pressures in the lungs cause them to naturally deflate. This will cause wind. Teaching one to blow more air, when the lungs are past the point of positive pressure and nearing neutral or even negative pressures due to poor inhalation, forces them to incorporate musculartures which become overly relyed upon. We start to have to activelly squeeze out the air instead of being able to more passively allow a natural and also more relaxed sighing type of exhalation to reach neutral pressure.

Where am I try to go with this? You may be blowing too much air. How could this be? Well, the voice your tuba makes is not made by air. It is made by vibration. Sound is caused by a vibration. Now this vibration can be made in many ways, such as striking a drum or plucking a piano string. Rarely is the quantity of sound related soley to the quantity of energy exherted to produce it. Take for instance a cheap bass drum. You can beat the $*%(AT) out of it and get one dynamic and tonal color. Take a much higher quality drum and a more skillful technique in striking it and it can easily drown out the first attempt in quality and quantity. Think of your buzz as the drum and your mind as the musician causing it to vibrate.

If you are after a bigger sound, then equipment is one avenue to take, but it will yield only a minority percentage of the desired results. The quality of the buzz and mental imagery will yield more gains. That is why you can watch someone you admire play the instrument with soo little effort and seem to cause the entire hall to ring with sound. It is their efficiency in musical production that allows this. They don't have to flow 20 liters/second to blow a strong forte. They instead input 100 decibels of efficient buzz right on pitch and right in time.

Try relaxing and allowing the instrument to respond to your mental inputs instead of allowing it to beat you into a frezy. Do this with a tape recorder running. You will probably be very surprised when the results improve in direct correlation to your mental and physical relaxation level. Do a little A/B comparison. The "aggressive" way vs the "relaxed" way.

"We don't play by air, we play by sound." - AJ

sean



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