To all here: This is a long post. There are many words in it. If this upsets you, I recommend that you skip it. Thanks.
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Bassoonists, and any melodic instrument with a massive rep of difficult music with correspondingly high expectations by both teachers and players, tend to do well at this sort of music because once past the beginner level they are asked to do it from very early on. Little, tiny eleven-year-old girls who blow across the embouchure holes of flutes have no idea that when learning to focus the air that they are using as much or more than the little goobers in the back row spitting into tubas. They do not complain. It is expected of them, the instrument is tiny, and the mind adapts. The tuba player is asked to play ridiculously easy music for most of his musical life, with much lower expectations from both teachers and players (with rare and notable exceptions) and that is why we cannot wrap our heads around how easy most orchestral excerpts are to play.
My comment was aimed at how difficult playing a six-valved tuba appears to be to most tuba players. As a species, we grow up with low technical and musical expectations placed upon us, learn that this is "how it is" and we fall for it.
Also, we tend to spend enough money to purchase a nice, used car on a horn with the acoustical R&D and quality of build of a middle school trumpet. It is a small market and it is difficult to make tubas, and designing them? Well, just look at how low our expectations are regarding what we will put up with, intonation-wise, and we back up our low expectations with our hard-earned money.
Despite this, I still love playing the tuba, acoustic warts and all, cope with things to the best of my abilities, try to strive to make trumpet etudes be "easy" and struggle to make string transcriptions "accessible" enough that I can perform them for people who are willing to pay to hear me do this. I figured out how to do this in 1983, at a low level, and have continued to try to both do this *and* enjoy myself, knowing full well that most string players consider me to be a musical dipstick simply because I have a tuba on my lap. My expectations were very high as an accomplished trumpeter, but have never really risen above that, again, because as a kid this expectation of achievement or proficiency was slammed into my brain every day via outstanding band music that, nonetheless, pigeonholed the tuba as a background, less important voice in the only real group I was able to play with on a regular basis. School band programs and the music they provide kids are responsible for most of us not being able to imagine playing like a bassoonist.
We could do this, too, if we were asked to play unison exercises with bassoonists after beginning band. But by and large, we are pushed along as equals until we are completely left behind by the woodwinds to play "bass lines".
What a shame. I see why this is. The nature of our voice's function in the band pretty much dooms us to these expectations, because no one in their right mind would try to publish a piece where everyone played the melody and there were no background instruments. I see this. I understand this. I still chafe at it, however.
Providing adequate air/vibration is produced, there is no reason we could not play a two-handed tuba with very flashy, accurate, and good-sounding results. It is just that no one ever asks us to do this when we are learning to play in the school band.
I am *this close* to adding a 6th valve to my homemade CC 186 because I am intrigued by your ideas and think I could make a good player that is well made, and the horn is ostensibly my "warm-up/daily drill" tuba. If it were to turn out to be a bowser I could just undo the work.
So why not? I am very curious about this. See, when I first learned to use the 5th valve it was the M3 length. I was taught that it was just an extender to the low register, pretty much never used in the staff. The interval was just something you had to learn, like new fingerings, rather than the current trend of discussion and application, which with the flat whole step length is that the 5th is a replacement for 1st with 4th down. It is sort of like the corrected 3rd handslide position on a trombone with the F attachment in use. This gives the valve a completely different "identity" to the player and changed the whole idea of using it. By extension, adding an "F attachment" half-step valve makes 100% sense.
G bugles in the 1970s and 1980s got by amazingly well with just two valves. An alternate was used in the upper register for one note, and then you had four of five pitches in the low register that could not be played. Most of the middle register of the horn was just fine, so it is possible to play most of the range of a horn with just two valves. So, if we want to put the tuba down a 4th in pitch, having access to two valves that have been tuned to be functional in the new, lower, key center is a brilliant idea.
The issue is that some horns do very poorly if you add a valve to them. They just do. However, some horns you could probably install eight valves on and still have a bugle with a blow that is not terribly restrictive. (Some like resistance, some do not. Resistance is not a universal "good" but more of a preference, if we are being honest, here.)
Anyway, the 186 has proven to work well with little difference in the horn whether there are four or five valves. I know as I have two I recently added 5th valves to. There was a difference, but it was not very much and was merely "different" and neither good nor bad. There is space for a 6th valve, but it would require shifting the entire valve section up or down a little to use the available space in the valve stack while also leaving room for both a slide and for a lever and linkage system.
Scheming to commence in five, four, three, two…
