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I've played all except the F. And I am at peace with that.

I've never owned an F tuba and would need a few months to adapt to one. I've owned BBb, CC, and currently play Eb all the time. CC would not be my strong point since I sold my only one in 2002.

F tubas are pretty weird beasts. The good ones are something truly in between a euphonium and a good playing E flat tuba. The typical ones sold these days are more like those 1920s "monster" E-flat tubas - in that didn't offer (or didn't easily offer) a usable scale, except the difference being that the bore is so large on the typical F tubas sold today that they are sort of foghornish - which is a word I just made up, meaning that they are not particularly resonant.

When I first purchased my good and only one 42 years ago, I really don't think I was totally understanding it for at least a year, though I briefly borrowed a similar one before I own that one and judge myself (sure: chalk it up to overrating myself or bragging) to have done quite well at an audition out west around 1978 or so (which involved quite a few higher pitched excerpts).

C - This last weekend, I discovered that I have truly moved over to the dark side, as - when reading some things and playing a C tuba, and even some things that I had played many times on a C tuba - I was often accidentally mashing B-flat tuba buttons.

I've played BBb tuba exactly 2 times since 1990 (aside from elephant rooms shenanigans) and I've never owned one. Even in college BBb was sousaphone only, but easy enough to keep under my fingers at the time. Now? Forget it.

I just spent some time with a really pretty-sounding C...compared with most other C instruments out there...
...but (same as the last REALLY FINE C instrument that I owned...)
I still had to "concentrate" on the sound to get the really pretty-sounding resonance out of that C (vs. the - actually - "naturally-occurring" type of sound that I get out of the B-flat that I now have (having hoped to find one of these particular ones for sale "used" for nearly a decade).

I'm the one who harps on MOSTLY focusing on an instrument's intonation characteristics..."Make the SOUND pretty via what you put into it"...etc.

YET...(A decade or so - when I first test-drove the model I now own - in one of the IU/International Shindig elephant rooms) I found THIS model, which just "does" THE sound (and also offers THE easy intonation).

As much as I felt the "walk-away-from-C"-aphobia as would any other (particularly: nearly-FIVE-decades) C player, the "resonance upgrade" was just too much to ignore.

...and I also sold (possibly...??) THE BEST 186 C that exists anywhere (tuning/resonance - the whole package...plus some "bling", and which - at that time - was an "in-addition-to" C tuba)...but (well...) the sound/intonation mostly seemed to be an "also" for my bought-new-over-four-decades-ago F tuba, so it's now being appreciated by someone else....and YET I have also put together (from an old 4/4 19" bell Holton - same as the 19" bell 4/4 York) sort of a B-flat version of the Getzen G-50 (yet without that fifthvalvus-interruptus, and the 5th valve - instead - located later in the instrument)...so I have yet another "contrabass" (B-flat) that offers the "growl" and "punch" of a 186.

My contrabass of choice has always been Bb. I've never been presented with the need to switch to C tubas. I studied architecture and engineering at a college that didn't even have a music program, so there was no professor imposing his pro-wannabe standards on me. No teacher since then has expressed even the slightest issue with playing Bb tubas.

When it came time to add a bass tuba capability, I went with F, simply because that's what was available at a range of price points for decent instruments. In those days, Eb tubas were either ancient and difficult (or three-valve) or they were Bessons and unobtainable on the cheap market where I lived. Modern Eb offerings have come a long way since then, but I've never felt I needed an alternative to F tubas.

When I'm playing both Bb and F at a gig, I pay attention more when playing the F, simply because I've been playing the Bb more recently. But I'm pretty comfortable on both. There was a time when I played more on F and it went the other way.

I think I could pick something out on C by ear better than I could pick something out on Eb, so Eb got my vote.

I played for years in an amateur orchestra. We only had one string-bass player, and though she was a retired symphony pro and much better than me, she arm-twisted me into playing the bass parts whenever possible to beef up the section. Plus, I played valve trombone in a swing band for a while. So, I'm pretty comfortable transposing down an octave, and that makes playing euphonium relatively easy. At least, for about five minutes. After that, all that blood just gets messy.

When I became fluent on the F and was spending a lot of time at the top of the staff, I actually had more difficulty with octave transpositions, because my brain wanted to play them as written with F fingerings.

Rick "but would be terrified by all the technical note density in typical euphonium parts" Denney