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This past weekend I attended a festival with my band and also sat in with another band. This is folk, bluegrass, and old time rock where I can I, V to my heart's content. With the bluegrass there are actual chord changes. When I can hear the vocals on the bluegrass band I can even throw in a lick or two. Two hour-long sets of continuous playing outdoors, sometimes with a cold wind, and it was a good time. No problems except the monitor feeding back into the dog-house bass. He had to move off the front line. (One advantage of a tuba.) Pit orchestra duty is similar. Whether trumpet or tuba I'm playing most of the time.

But then, consider:

There was the spring concert with the symphony... Other acts are part of the show too, and the orchestra sits and waits. Then we start off with a piece where the low brass is tacit for one movement and I have 4 easy bars in the next. The final movement is low for tuba, with complex intervals and rhythms. I have warmed up thoroughly three hours before the downbeat but by the time I actually start to play it's been quite a while and my brain has tuned out, my lip is cold. I'm faced with downward runs to a low G jumping to C and F and then into the staff. This is hard duty, and I'm not showing off my best playing at all. I recorded the orchestra part of the show and as they say, "Recordings don't lie." It wasn't good.

How do you full time symphony players cope with this scenario?

I sometimes practice without doing a daily routine to get used to this—come in on Bydlo first notes of a session.

Other things that help me is blowing air through it and keeping the mouthpiece warm or the mouthpiece on a few measures before I play while breathing air through.

I've discussed this before. I practice for this. It annoys some people (who believe it's harmful and stuff), but - so far - it hasn't harmed me.
The first thing I do when I sit down with my tuba is to start playing some music. It might be loud and fast, it might be low, it might be soft, it might be high.

If I work on a list of things that people refer to as "fundamentals", I'll work on those (and not all the same ones every time I sit down to practice) a few minutes into my practice session or maybe even towards the end of one.

Learning to play well without first playing a series of exercises - and without the mouthpiece being warm or the instrument being warm - is a skill set.

As far as sitting through three tacet pieces of a pops concert or church concert and coming in on a loud low D at the beginning of a fourth piece, there's a pretty simple tack for that: I take the mouthpiece off of my instrument and buzz low D with my finger over the end of the mouthpiece. It's nearly inaudible. (Trombone players sometimes take their F attachment slides off there instruments and play a double high F through their F attachment tubing (again: inaudibly) right before they have to play that pitch in well-known-to-trombone-players Beethoven symphony passage.

For me, a practice session might be etudes, it might be "pieces that I have to play on an upcoming job", it might be so-called "fundamentals" (and nothing else)...but I don't consider playing through "fundamentals" (first) as the key to the door of playing well, on a particular day.

One way to prepare for this would be to simulate this experience in the practice room. Start a practice session like you would warm up for a concert like this, walk away from the horn for a period of time, and then return and play the passages. If you have to opportunity to do this exercise for many practice sessions, “period of time” should be adjustable. Ideally you would want to find the largest break you can take to still be successful and then incrementally lengthen the break until you have consistent success. In general, start from a position of comfort, gradually introduce challenge to expand your comfort zone, and eventually expand beyond what is required of you. If your concert had 15 minutes tacet, strive to be comfortable playing it after 30 minutes tacet, for example.

Another layer you can add to those exercises is to incorporate auditory cues. If you listen to recordings of the piece that you are tacet for and then play the passage when it is called for in the recording, you condition yourself to play the passage in the context of the piece rather than out of the blue. It turns the passage into more of an automatic response.

It is still important to keep your health in mind while developing the skill to play cold. Always work from a position of comfort, listen to your body if something hurts or seems too uncomfortable, and maintain healthy warm-ups on days or practice sessions when you are not trying to develop this skill.

My warm-ups consist of scales, arpeggios, various chord progesions in keys I'm encountering. I do hour-long practice sessions of long tones, intervals, rhythm patterns, technical studies, etc.

They all help. That's why I'm able to sit in with a bluegrass band; bluegrass is not something I usually play. The leader tells me the key and the chord progression; and how many bars to the form, if I'm lucky. I know what I, IV, V is in G or C or because I've practiced those patterns. Somebody takes a solo and I drop out for 8, 12 or 16 bars.

This comes easy in these idioms because I practice fundamentals. I do the same thing on trumpet. When it comes to legit work, fundamentals is important but one has to add lip flexibleities and sight reading. OK, I'm commenting on what we already know... Maybe during those long tacit periods I forget my fundamentals. There's that old joke about why hard-hats only get a half hour for lunch -- because an hour increases retraining costs.

In the case of symphony musicians I think a big part of it is mental -- getting back in the groove. Even counting out 47 bars within a piece takes it's toll. Like I've been thinking about getting the car fixed when I hear the 1st trumpet come in. I know we're at 157. Mentally I scramble because I know my entrance is at 183 and I don't get a cue from the podium. There's being cold physically from 3 tacit pops pieces and then there's being cold mentally because one was making up a grocery list or reading a magazine. Another orchestra I played in the 2nd trumpet would balance her check book during those tacit periods, then put it back in her pocket 10 bars before our entrance. I can't do that.

1 Ton Tommy wrote: Thu May 21, 2026 4:16 pm
They all help. That's why I'm able to sit in with a bluegrass band; bluegrass is not something I usually play. The leader tells me the key and the chord progression; and how many bars to the form, if I'm lucky. I know what I, IV, V is in G or C or because I've practiced those patterns. Somebody takes a solo and I drop out for 8, 12 or 16 bars.

I've never played bluegrass... Is it common to drop out for the solos? in polka and trad jazz the tuba stays in and keeps outlining the chords under the solo... unless I've been doing it wrong one ever told me.

Learn the music. Not your part, but learn the music. Do that and you'll never have to count rests again. I recently played Brahms 2. I can think of nothing more miserable than counting 80 bars of rests or something, instead of just playing the tuba parts.

Wherever you re-enter, just make sure you know that spot in the music better than anything else.

Hear it in your head, and then just... Play it.

All this other stuff about being warm or cold or whatever, it's not so serious. It's not automatic, but just do it a bunch of times, and you'll be fine.

If a clod like me can nail a high B natural out of nowhere in the Brahms, you can too!

gocsick wrote: Thu May 21, 2026 4:52 pm

1 Ton Tommy wrote: Thu May 21, 2026 4:16 pm
They all help. That's why I'm able to sit in with a bluegrass band; bluegrass is not something I usually play. The leader tells me the key and the chord progression; and how many bars to the form, if I'm lucky. I know what I, IV, V is in G or C or because I've practiced those patterns. Somebody takes a solo and I drop out for 8, 12 or 16 bars.

I've never played bluegrass... Is it common to drop out for the solos? in polka and trad jazz the tuba stays in and keeps outlining the chords under the solo... unless I've been doing it wrong one ever told me.

In trad jazz, my experience is not to drop out for the solos unless we've agreed that the tune demands it. You'll hear Todd Burdick of Tuba Skinny drop out often, though that's almost dixieland. In the bluegrass situation last weekend, we also had a standup bass. We didn't discuss anything beforehand. I was playing with a core group that has played together for decades, and some of them I've known for decades. I watched a lot of eyes and listened for rhythm changes on bridges and the same on solos. I was a guest sitting in, so I was pretty conservative and deferential while still holding up my end of the band.

In my own band I keep the time and often have to push the beat, so I don't drop out on solos. There are a couple of tunes where I play trumpet or sing, and there the keyboard takes over the bass. It does make a difference; the band loses some of the drive. So I sing or play trumpet on tunes that don't need a lot of drive, like Ripple and House of the Rising Sun. We don't have a drummer right now so I try to make up for that. But then, Tuba Skinny has only the washboard these days and they do fine.