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On behalf of expertvillage.com, I'm Eric Williams. I'm here to tell you about the tuba. So now
we're actually going to hook the mouth piece up and see what this thing really sounds like.
You need to remember you're going to be breathing very deep from down below. You're going to
be doing lip buzzing right here through the mouthpiece. Now let's see what happens. So
first of all you lift the tuba up. And you insert the mouthpiece into the lead pipe.
Ok. What I like to do is this slight little clockwise turn. You don't have to but I like
to just kind of go that way and then do that. Sometimes the young students will like wap
on it to make it go. Don't do that because it might get stuck that way. You just kind
of gingerly put the mouthpiece in give a little twist and you're good. Now you wanna get your
hand in position which is in this little ring here. And then you go one, two, three. These
are the three valves you're going to be using. Which will be the first finger, the middle
finger and the ring finger. Then, you get but don't even worry about pushing the valves
just yet but just kind of have them in position for future reference. Then you take your deep
breath. You get ready for your lip buzzing and you try to make a note. Hey it worked
the first time. So, you noticed I didn't use any valves. I just made the note, what they
call open. So whenever no valves are depressed in any way it's what they call an open note.
So you can get various different pitches from the open note. I think that one was probably
B flat which is the easiest one to hit and it goes something like that. Let me try it
again. Kind of sounds like a fog horn. Let me bring you up to date on one more thing.
There is what they call a tuning slide on the tuba. And there is a slide that you use
to tune the tuba. You can make it go higher in pitch by making the slide go in further.
And you can make the whole tuba go lower in pitch by pulling the slide out. So you need
to be aware that that's there for your tuning pleasure. Now this is also what they call
a water key. Some people like to call it a spit valve. And sometimes condensation, it's
not really spit, it's condensation will build up inside the tuba. And you hit the water
key and it will release that water.