Somewhere in late 2016 or early 2017 I stopped playing tuba and devoted all my energies to the bass trombone. I felt that I couldn't devote the required time to both, and I really wanted to learn the trombone -- which I did, playing the double valve bass in a (reasonably) local community band for about three years. Then COVID struck and I didn't play either one over that period, or even practicing at home very often, and then only the trombone.
A couple of months ago (with the semi-resurrection of community bands in the area) I decided that I should go back to playing, and again in the direction of the tuba. So I rejoined one of the bands that I've had an on/off relationship with for over 30 years, and managed to play in their Holiday Concerts -- after about only a week of dusting the tuba off! At best, I was "adequate," though then only relative to community band expectations. Pitch and tone quality were seriously sub-par, and there was a distressing degree of flubbing fingerings at times -- on Grade 2 or 3 Christmas music! Yikes. Yuck. Embarrassing.
So over the past couple of weeks I've buckled down to come up to a reasonable level of competence. That's been interesting. It's taken (and is still taking) longer than I thought it would. But it's been an interesting experience.
First ... What am I shooting for? Well, I think a decent criterion is to be able to play at least some of the Sear duets (both the high and the low parts) at tempo and with appropriate intonation. I'll settle for even a couple of the simpler ones.
At this point (a couple of weeks into the task) things are finally improving and moving in a forward direction -- as opposed to simply spinning around in trying to get my embouchure back and play at something resembling A=440 instead of rambling all over the pitch landscape. To accomplish this, I repaired to my large library of tuba learning literature, and started with some of the old reliable Rubank stuff. Yeah, I know that Arban is the "received view" of where to go, but -- although I HAVE Arban -- I've never LIKED Arban, and have never used it much except for a small handful of exercises, and the "songs" at the end of it. So I spent some time primarily with things like Rubank's Supplementary Studies, Eb or BBb Bass by Endresen, the Pares Scales for Eb Bass, and the one for BBb Bass as well. That got me closer to where I wanted to be, but not quite. The intonation still wasn't there.
(Interlude:
I'm not getting any younger, and a lot of the problem with playing wind instruments is the embouchure. I basically threw mine away by not playing for several years, and so I deserve what I got. But it's frustrating. I know it will take time. A lot of that is muscle tone and muscle memory, and if you just practice by playing stuff the wrong way, then you keep playing the wrong way. But I do think that age affects us all in circumstances like this, and I think I'm facing some of that -- as evidenced by ...)
One thing that I find helpful in "coming back" from a "layoff" in playing is to try different mouthpieces. This is less an attempt to find "the right one" (I presumably had done that at some point), and more because my experience is that switching mouthpieces can often highlight something I'm doing wrong. For my Wessex Eb "Champion" (Besson 981/982 clone) horn, my mouthpiece collection is down to (1) Wick (Classic) 3XL, (2) Wick (Heritage) 2XL, (3) Miraphone TU-17, (4) Schilke 66, and (5) Perantucci PT-63. At the point that I'd stopped playing, I was using the Wick 3XL most of the time and the Wick 2XL on occasions where more contra bass work was required. The Schilke 66 is my long-time goto mouthpiece (certainly for BBb horns), but for the compensating Eb horn, it just doesn't work so well for me. The TU-17 works a little better, but is a bit small. So while I played with those a bit, they were pretty much dismissed at the outset. The PT-63 had never quite worked for me (always seemed a bit big/sloppy to me). So I focused on the two Wicks. They came close to working, but not quite. Not at all what I remembered.
After a week of basically just fumbling around and feeling depressed about my loss, I decided that I really needed to focus specifically on tone quality and pitch (duh!), and went back to my library, where I ultimately came across H. W. Tyrell's 40 Advanced Studies for Bb Bass. For those who aren't familiar with this little book ... It was published in 1948 and is 40 pages long. One "study" per page. Some are slow and simple. Some are fast and not simple. They are all a bit weird, although they don't appear that way until you actually play them. I've just been working on the first five over the past week, and the improvement to my playing has been dramatic. These studies really force you to pay attention to articulation, fingering, and pitch -- like no others I've encountered. You'll be playing a particularly mundane passage, and suddenly "Hey where did that B-natural come from?" or "Should there really be an A-natural there?" or "An F#? REALLY?" The interval changes are also challenging. All of that forces you out of any kind of uniformity or complacency and makes you pay attention to your pitch and fingerings. I think this is particularly true for a compensating Eb tuba in the lower registers. I know that this little book has a certain following among tuba players, but I do think it's quite remarkable. There is also its legendary and semi-mythical companion, 40 Advanced Studies for Eb Bass, which I THINK is just a transposition. It's basically unobtainium, but it appears it may be available from nkoda.
After beginning work on Tyrell, things are going much better. My embouchure has not fully returned, but at least I have the feeling that it's circling central NC and may land within the next week. The big surprise is that the mouthpiece I've settled on is the PT-63!! It's really working for me -- in terms of range, articulation, and intonation -- better than any of the others. I may keep the Wick 2XL in reserve for pesky and lengthy contra bass work where a bit more "gravitas" and "smoothness" may be required, but at this point I'm not entirely sure of that.