Tuba Quartet setup

[twotrombones]

Our tuba quartet has tried many different setups for performance. We have a recital coming soon and the performance venue is fairly live making it difficult to hear all the members comfortably. Any suggestions on what seems to work best for a seating setup would be helpful.

[davewerden]

In our quartet, we had to euphoniums and two tubas. Both euphs had right-facing bells and both tubas had left-facing bells.

The biggest problem with a quartet performance in a typical performance situation is making the various lines audible to your audience. So from the audience's perspective, the euphoniums were on the left and the tubas on the right. We sat in parallel rows of 2 facing each other. So it was:

E2 T2
E1 T1

The other favorite alternative was to make a narrow V from that setting, which mellowed the sound a bit and made for better visibility to E2 and T2 for the audience. But doing so also made is a little harder to hear each other. So I mean something like:

E2 T2
E1 T1

For recording, or in a small room, a shallow semi-circle setup might be better. It makes for a mellower, better-blended sound, but also makes it harder to hear eacy other. This would only work well if you are very highly rehearsed on the music when you do it. But we got our best recorded sound this way. We used a large hall and had the mics out front, closer than they normally would be.