Posted by Rick Denney on March 02, 2004 at 18:02:48:
In Reply to: play testing posted by Kenneth Sloan on March 02, 2004 at 17:31:07:
This sounds like advice, but I'm not sure it's more than just what I did, and I'm too busy at the moment to reword it.
1.) Go in knowing what you are looking for. When I auditioned F tubas at the Army conference, I knew I wanted an F with much more projection than my Yamaha. A secondary concern was getting one with a characteristic German F tuba sound that I had in my head.
2.) Go in with a piece of music that you have played so much on your current instrument that you know exactly how it plays and what it sounds like. It need not be technical. The tune I made you listen to is the sort of thing that works for me. It was simple, committed to memory, and allowed me the time to assess sound and the ability of the instrument to bend pitches and other control issues. It also went low into the danger territory for F tubas.
3.) Play around on the instruments for a bit, and then stack the ones in your price range around where you are sitting. Play your test tune on all of them.
4.) Listen for the sound reflecting back from the room.
5.) Don't worry about intonation, unless notes sound noticeably wrong and you can't fix it. You can check it later. So much of intonation is knowing the tendencies of the instrument and working with them. If the third partial is 40 cents flat, then that will sound noticeably wrong. If it's 10 cents flat, you may not notice it, but it's in the range of fixable.
6.) Get someone else to listen, too. Ask them specific questions, such as to describe the sound. You did that for me in two ways when I bought the B&S, by describing it as having more character in the sound, and by standing off in the distance of the Elephant Room to see how the choices projected. The notion of "that one sounds better" isn't helpful to me, unless it's backed up by "it sounds like a CC" or "the sound is bland and vanilla" or "the sound is fuzzy and unfocused".
7.) Make sure your current instrument (or one just like it) is in the short list. Any instrument you buy has to be different in some useful way than the one you already own or use. When I went to play the Holton, I took the York Master with me. When I played the F's, I brought a Yamaha very similar to mine along for comparison. Those are reality checks that protect you from an infatuation that won't turn into love.
Rick "fresh from recent experience" Denney