Priority and Practicality: F or CC?


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Posted by Anthony Labelle on January 28, 2002 at 21:57:34:

A thread a ways down the board put this thought in my head a few days ago, and I've been thinking about it ever since.

Say you're in a position where you could definitely use two (new-ish)horns, and have a budget that will allow two horns, but not two 'expensive'horns. It seems to me that for all practical purposes, people tend to place more importance on ownership of a good CC before a good F tuba. I'm in the market right now to spend around 7k on a horn in the near future, which leaves me with a lot of options. The last six months I've been shopping around, I've tried a lot of C tubas, with the intention of purchasing one, and using the remainder of the $7k and the money I get from my current CC tuba to buy an inexpensive F or Eb tuba.. after reading a thread down the page, though, the thought occured to me that I might be better off spending the bulk of my money on a good large F tuba, and use the left-over to purchase a CC in the $2,500 - $3,000 range(which can still get me a much nicer CC than I'm currently playing).

Is that idea at all impractical? In my specific situation, the bulk of my tuba playing is in a brass quintet several times a week, medium-sized orchestra weekly, and a quasi-professional Wind Ensemble intermittantly(about 5 concerts a year), plus a good deal of teaching(or being taught), and a few misc. gigs here and there(but not many!). I could easily do 90% of that playing on a bass tuba, but at the same time could not do without a CC.

I'm not so much asking for advice, as I think I've already pretty much made up my mind, but I'd like feedback from others with more experience than myself, and to know if maybe there's some other factor that I might have overlooked(it seems too easy). Thanks.

Anthony "now accepting solicitations, too" Labelle


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