Re: 4 Valve Sousaphones


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Posted by Frederick J. Young on March 27, 2001 at 23:11:42:

In Reply to: 4 Valve Sousaphones posted by Lance on March 24, 2001 at 22:54:02:

I had a very large Conn 4 valved sousaphone. It had a 35" bell and the tubing was about 0.84" in diameter. The fourth valve really did not help and the instrument was terribly out of tune. The so-called false tones are not at all false and a Conn engineer did tests on tubas that indicated the low Eb rather than the BBb is the true fundamental. This is true because of the overall taper of the instrument. Brass instruments are not simple strings which vibrate in integral multiples of the fundamental frequency. They all have their own characteristic set of open tones which may or may not correspond with any musical scale.

I would suggest you adjust your individual valve slides so that 12, 23 and 13 are pretty well in tune because you won't need 123 very much in a marching band. When you do just reach over and pull out one of the third valve slides. If you use the reasoning given in the spreadsheets on
http://plantrol.com/youngfj/tuba.html
you can figure optimum slide pulls to accomplish the aforementioned compromise.


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