My Tuba Foundation
My Tuba Foundation
Despite a prelude of time playing sousaphone in college pep band and marching band, the beginning of my tuba journey took off with the purchase of my first C tuba in November 2019. I had the privilege of studying with Dr. Andy Rummel during my bachelors degree at Illinois State University so, despite my lackluster tuba playing background, I had a great foundation of the pedagogy.
Low C
Nine days before I found my Czerveny “Piggy” C tuba for sale online I got the chance to have a euphonium lesson downtown at Orchestra Hall with the amazing tubist Sergio Carolino. I had been looking for a tuba for a few months at that point, but Sergio’s insistence that tuba be another pursuit of mine was one of the things that pushed me to make finding an instrument more of a priority. During my lesson we had a discussion about the foundational areas of our instruments. He said to me, “Tuba is the bass. I see too many young players trying to play all over the horn—higher than some euphonium players—but they can’t play a good low C. There is no excuse!“
I took this to heart. When my tuba arrived in the mail, I wrote down a structure of exercises that I wanted to spend my time with—all of them (aside from the Arban long tone studies) were from “The Brass Gym“ by Sam Pilafian and Pat Sheridan. I chose Chromatics, Soft Touch, Smooth Air Movement, Beautiful Sounds, and Bugles. All of these decisions were made around allowing me to develop a solid attack, release, and depth/core of sound before stretching my range downward. In the early days it was exciting to see such rapid progress. Having played Euphonium for 12 years, I had developed some great practicing habits, and they helped facilitate becoming tuba acclimated. At that time “acclimated“ meant just getting comfortable on C2. It took me 3 months to get my first Low C (C1) that I was happy with, and now I try to sit there for a few minutes every morning.
I keep thinking about what Sergio had said to me about the importance of low C. I have a hard time thinking of how to develop a deep, energy filled C tuba sound without it, and the nice part about those Brass Gym exercises is that you can get through all of them in a tight 20 minutes.
What do you use set set the foundations of your playing?