Posted by Rick Denney on October 07, 2001 at 20:22:17:
In Reply to: Which MP for YFB-621? posted by MG on October 05, 2001 at 16:55:00:
When I first got my 621, I tried the PT-9 (old numbering--replaced by PT-64?), which was the best mouthpiece for my previous rotary F tuba. It had been recommended to me by my teacher, who played a B&S Symphonie F using the same mouthpiece.
But it just didn't work at all. It bottled up the lower register and gave the horn a bright, thin sound. No self-respecting euphoniumiumist would have accepted that sound.
The mouthpiece that came with the horn was a Yamaha 67b4. I think Yamaha included it because they looked in the book, So You Want To Make Mouthpieces, in the chapter titled F Tubas And Hosephones.
Both of those turned me off of shallow, cup-shaped mouthpieces for that tuba. I have no doubt that players of greater ability could reveal things with those mouthpieces that were beyond me. Joe S, in particular, talked about bringing out that instruments special small-tuba qualities with a shallow mouthpiece. I've heard his playing (though not on that instrument), and was so impressed that I've decided to take his advice seriously, heh, heh. So I thought I'd revisit the shallower mouthpieces again. Nope; same result as before. Effie becomes a pig instead of an elephant.
I spent some considerable time at a Texas Bandmaster's Ass'n Conference expo some years ago looking for a mouthpiece that would give me a workable compromise between agility and sound. I ended up with a custom combination from Terry Warburton, which included mid-sized backbore coupled to a deep, semi-rounded cup (what he called an X30 at the time). It is definitely brighter than a full funnel, but much bigger than a typical F tuba mouthpiece. It was the best compromise for quartet and quintet playing, for which that tuba is wonderful (despite the acerbic comments of another poster recently). I also have used it in the Heritage Brass, playing the bottom part in a historical performance group of about a dozen players. That kept the tuba light enough to be a reasonable approximation of a Civil War-era saxhorn.
When I have played that instrument in a band, as on the upper part of Lincolnshire Posy, for example, I've used a regular Conn Helleberg. With that mouthpiece, the tuba sounds like an F tuba, with a dark voice matching the qualities of dark contrabass tubas and dark euphoniums, and right between them. I don't use that horn much anymore in that application, because I think that sort of instrument needs to be backed up by four or five contrabasses in a good-sized concert band, and my current band just doesn't have the forces.
One of the endearing qualities of the little Yamaha is that it gives you the agility and middle voice of an F tuba without having to bring specialized F tuba techniques to the instrument. But the F tuba mouthpieces, while they work well with the rotary F's, seem to interfere with that quality of the 621, bottling up the lower register but not providing that singing F tuba sound for which the better rotary F's are justifiable famous. It's the worst of both worlds, and I'm convinced the reason lots of folks who only spend five minutes with the Yamaha reject it.
Rick "Taking Scarecrow's warning seriously and explaining myself fully" Denney