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I played bass lines on a plastic pBone as my son marched around the yard on his cornet.

Typical Easter gig earlier today. Brass quartet, with choir and organ. We usually play out of those Douglas Smith 4-plus books for preludes and postlude with me (tuba) on the trombone 2 part, much of it down an octave where musically appropriate. It's a little more involved part than the ('plus'/extra) tuba sub-bass 5th part. You could say the trombone 2 part (especially if some is played down an octave) is a baritone-bass part.

Absolutely nothing. The tuba has been worked to death over the last month and a rebellion would have ensued had any attempts been made to play it. National Hockey League playoffs are now underway and a fair bit of horizontal rehabilitation has taken place. The tuba and Blazhevich will meet again tomorrow morning at the band hall with my stand partner joining as well.

I played "try to get a Martin Mammoth in the van" and failed.

I mostly played a huge euphonium with a really huge mouthpiece...

...but - for the few pieces whereby I needed a "big" tuba - I brought THIS,



because I was afraid that one of the portly and/or elderly choristers would step on the bell, had I brought this:




proportions:
These two instruments' bell diameters are only about an inch different.

I played Easter tunes.

Lots of Easter tunes.

And I was mentioned in the Easter Sunday church bulletin. You know you've made it small-time when you're mentioned in the church bulletin. And they got two of the composers' names and the name of the conductor wrong, as well as the time of the downbeat.

This was epic.

Well, I'm famous now, boy.


Some folks have an Easter bonnet. I have an Easter tuba.

Easter service. We played the Gregor "Hosanna Anthem" arranged by Craig Garner, and the Marcello "Psalm 19 (The Heavens Declare the Glory of God)" arranged by Michael Allen. And we used the John Rutter brass/organ arrangement of the Easter Hymn that @bloke introduced us to some years ago, which I've developed the habit of "bumping" every year.

We didn't record it- no way can we compete with @bloke , @the elephant et al- but it went well, and the congregation enjoyed it.

bloke wrote: Mon Apr 07, 2025 3:18 pm I've got some "Jedi"...blah-blah band (not arrangement, but) original-keys transcription of some movie music (that's probably the note-y-ist piece in the folder...lots of runs of notes with double flags, etc...), along with some other John Williams transcriptions, a set of J.P. Sousa pieces (four movements of a suite - not technically "marches", but very much march-ish), some "Hobbit" thing (treble clef "bass" part, but that's OK), an orchestration of a Gershwin piano prelude, transcriptions of several numbers from the Candide operetta...

...This is for that (Wade calls it) "ringer band" that asked me to play with them.

Their first rehearsal for a concert at the end of the month is tonight...I believe I've met c. handful of the people involved...

Was the "Hobbit thing" from Johann DeMeij's "Lord of the Rings Symphony"?

I'm too ignorant to be able to answer the question about the Lord of the Rings Symphony, but it well could be from that. There's a B flat treble clef part and a C string base octave bass clef tuba part. Of course, I'm reading off the latter.

I shouldn't be talking about my mouthpiece, but Wade showed a picture of it graciously. Not to talk about the mouthpiece really, but reminding me about the thing that I've described before in regards to receivers with the terminology "fake euro"...

This small but full-sized Holton B flat tuba that I pictured so many times features an old King mouthpiece receiver from the 1950s or '60s with one of these types of receivers on it. It just about buries the mouthpiece, and the end of the shank of the mouthpiece that I use - identical to Wade's - just about ends up being swallowed... But the small end of the mouthpiece is still away from the choke point where the receiver meets the mouth pipe tube.

I'm going to do a little work on the mouth pipe on this instrument sometime in the future, and - when I do - I'm going to pull that receiver off, take a look at it, and see if the fancy receiving end is solid or whether it solders in place. If it's solders in place, I think I'm going to slide it down about an eighth of an inch and cut off the large end of the receiver. ... All of my own mouthpieces feature long shanks, but just in case I or someone else wanted to stick a Bach-style mouthpiece in there, cutting this receiver off shorter would allow for one of those shorter mouthpiece shanks.

I really do love the Holton tuba I put together for crowded stages, quintet jobs - where a contrabass instrument is better suited versus an instrument in F, and where a contrabass instrument with more "punch" and "front" in the sound is called for... And it's just perfectly sized: A 3/4 sized contrabass tuba would be too small to accomplish what this instrument accomplishes.

bloke wrote: Mon Apr 21, 2025 7:32 am I'm too ignorant to be able to answer the question about the Lord of the Rings Symphony, but it well could be from that. There's a B flat treble clef part and a C string base octave bass clef tuba part. Of course, I'm reading off the latter.

If it's the last part of this, at 30:05, it is indeed the deMeij:



(shameless plug- I was part of the tuba section on this)

The first 16 bars to Movement 1 Gandalf has a nice euphonium soli and it is one of my warmups for euphonium - such a fun little bit to play.

Today got frustrated at my complete and utter inability to play through Bordogni #1 (Chester Roberts - King Music edition)... I don't know why I was struggling with those quarter notes tied to triplets so much. Then when I finally got them I would invariable turn the dotted 8th 16th patterns into bastardized triplet figures as well (despite the warning from the editor about just that). I spent about an hour before I got the first half of the etude not completely sucky.

Heavy_Metal wrote: Mon Apr 21, 2025 3:09 pm

bloke wrote: Mon Apr 21, 2025 7:32 am I'm too ignorant to be able to answer the question about the Lord of the Rings Symphony, but it well could be from that. There's a B flat treble clef part and a C string base octave bass clef tuba part. Of course, I'm reading off the latter.

If it's the last part of this, at 30:05, it is indeed the deMeij:



(shameless plug- I was part of the tuba section on this)

It looks like we're playing the last movement of this.

Working up Carnival of Venice again to play with my band this summer. The fingers are there; the tongue is not!

Last time I did this piece was in 2019. At that point, I was still teaching music theory at the big university up here with the dog mascot that has a good women's basketball team. I decided to do a recital for fun with my colleague, a really excellent Juilliard-trained pianist. She rocked it on the Hindemith sonata.

Tucked into my Carnival part was the program for that concert, if anyone's interested:

===================

Rumanian Dance No. 2 (1946) Dumitru Ionel (1915–1997)

Three Miniatures for tuba and piano (1990) Anthony Plog (b. 1947)

Vocalise, Op. 34, No. 14 (1912) Sergey Rakhmaninov (1873–1943) arr. Virginia Allen (b. 1953)

Encounters II (1966, rev. 2009) William Kraft (b. 1923)

Intermission

Sonata for Bass Tuba and Piano (1955) Paul Hindemith (1895–1963)

Concerto in F minor for Bass Tuba (1954) Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)
II. Romanza: Andante sostenuto

Fantaisie and Variations on The Carnival of Venice (ca. 1865) Jean-Baptiste Arban (1825–1889) arr. Richard Domek (b. 1945)

Fnugg (2004) Øystein Baadsvik (b. 1966)

====================

I played most of the program on the little Meinl-Weston 46 F that I owned at the time, but did the Hindemith and Fnugg on a big/tall VMI/Musica CC. Multiphonics are easier for me on a bigger tuba.

bloke wrote: Tue Apr 22, 2025 7:08 am It looks like we're playing the last movement of this.

We're playing the whole thing for our Summer concerts. It's mostly not terribly difficult aside from counting and trying not to lose my place in 400 bars of rests. But there are a couple passages giving me some grief. In short, my fingers don't move fast enough. I'm getting there, though. This is one example from Mvt 4. It's what I'll be working on tonight. And tomorrow. And the day after that...

I'm not a teacher, so only consider this as friend advice - to be considered or ignored.

First of all, I'm hoping that you're playing a B flat tuba, because it's an easier pattern on a B-flat instrument. Also, it's just an effect, but we all like for everything written - whether it's a bass line, a melody, or an effect - to be executed nicely.

Secondly, I'm sure you've pulled out your metronome and set it on 100 or 120 for the quarter note and worked on those as triplets, rather than as sextets..

As soon as you master a certain speed, I know that you're cranking the metronome up a click until you get it up to 144, and then you're there. It will probably take a couple of weeks of working the speed up to 144 for the quarter note up from a lower speed to be able to play at that speed right off the bat.

Sextets always look more daunting on a piece of paper than triplets.

--------------------------
Wondering off on tangents:

fairly recently-composed movie music...
A good bit of it is okay, I suppose. I suspect that people who watch movies (released in the past 20 or 30 years) enjoy it more, because they can visualize scenes from the movies when they hear the music. I was taken with some family members to see one Hobbit movie (none of the music was memorable to me) and I've only seen the very first Star Wars movie - when it was shown on network television for free, one time. It seems to me that the music from the first Star Wars movie is far-and-above the most popular music from that series. When I get paid to play along with movies and play along at those bizarre video game concerts, I'm glad to be working, but the music doesn't really do anything for me. However, the bizarre behavior of the concert-goers at the video game concerts is always fascinating. I'm convinced that - to those people - the video game thing (for them) is reality, whereby actual reality - to them - is the false world that they consider themselves having to live in in order to be able to live in their "real" video game reality. ...I know for a fact that the Society For Creative Anachronism people view those annual retreat experiences as their "actual" reality.

bloke wrote: Tue Apr 22, 2025 8:08 am I'm not a teacher, so only consider this as friend advice - to be considered or ignored.

Danke.

First of all, I'm hoping that you're playing a B flat tuba...

Yep. I only have BBb tubas. Well, there's an old Eb helicon, but it's a wall hanger.

Secondly, I'm sure you've pulled out your metronome and set it on 100 or 120 for the quarter note and worked on those as triplets, rather than as sextets..

As soon as you master a certain speed, I know that you're cranking the metronome up a click until you get it up to 144, and then you're there. It will probably take a couple of weeks of working the speed up to 144 for the quarter note up from a lower speed to be able to play at that speed right off the bat.

I started at half tempo. I'd say I'm up to about 110 or so right now. But at tempo, at rehearsals, I'll flub it every time.

Thanks again!

Once it's up to tempo at home, you might consider tapping your foot twice as fast as the director is waving their stick and thinking of those as just "circus march speed" triplets.

That deMeij symphony is a great piece, and was a lot of fun to play. It's one of two symphonies I know of that the composer scored for concert band- the other being James Barnes' third, which I've also played. Anyone know of any others?

Heavy_Metal wrote: Tue Apr 22, 2025 9:27 am That deMeij symphony is a great piece, and was a lot of fun to play. It's one of two symphonies I know of that the composer scored for concert band- the other being James Barnes' third, which I've also played. Anyone know of any others?

Hindemith Symphony in B-flat.

James Barnes wrote nine symphonies, and I believe that they are all for wind band.

.