Posted by Rick Denney on February 03, 2003 at 14:23:00:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Flogging a dead horse... posted by The Sock on February 02, 2003 at 22:12:49:
With all due respect to your teacher, I'm still not buying it. I'm willing to buy that they feel different. A 186 CC feels a little more responsive (crisper?) than a 186 BBb--my own experience will confirm that. But I can't hear any difference at all.
As to a conductor having a sound in his head that matches a CC better, I'm not buying that, either. I highly doubt that most conductors listen to sound the way tuba players do, though I'm quite willing to believe that they listen to musicianship in ways many tuba players don't. Even if there was a slight difference hearable by a few pros with hearing beyond that of the rest of us, I can't imagine that conductors would know it. It seems to me that the very best pros who play BBb have as much chance of winning a gig as those who play a CC. You see fewer of them (in the U.S.) because many fewer of them exist in the first place. I believe that this is because the champions of the instrument preferred instruments pitched in CC, for reasons that may no longer be relevant.
But what do I know? I'm just a community band tuba player.
A fair and objective test would require a nearly impossible approach. Double-blind testing would require that neither the tester nor the listener know which is which in the test, and that would be impossible--the player would always know. So, the biases of the tester would be prevalent. But I think you could control for that. For example, you could allow an orchestral player who uses BBb (e.g. James Jenkins) to test otherwise identical BBb and CC tubas in random order, from behind a screen, and then let a CC pro do the same. The listeners (the more the better) would make a guess as to which horn is which. I would offer the Willson 3100 and 3050 as one test pair, and the Miraphone 186 (of similar vintage) in BBb and CC as another test pair. Any tendency would be revealed by a trend in the responses, and the biases of the players would cancel each other out. Maybe such a test could feed an interesting research paper for a class.
Having a pro play both and render them different doesn't persuade me, because the player cannot fully disconnect how they feel with how they sound, even though I think the best pros do this better than any others.
Rick "a skeptic, but willing to consider convincing data" Denney