Parts of a Tuba

Video Transcript

"On behalf of expertvillage.com, I am Eric Williams and I am here to tell you about the Tuba. So the Tuba is actually the instrument that is the lowest instrument of the brass family, lowest in pitch. And it was invented in the 1840's roughly so actually it is one of the newer orchestral instruments. What it does is it provides the low bottom end range to concert bands, polka bands, Dixie Land bands, orchestra arrangements, concert bands, all of those above. What you need to do with the Tuba is understand that you vibrate sounds into the mouthpiece, this big old mouthpiece right here. And what you do is vibrate your air and your lips into this mouthpiece, and the vibrations go into the lead pipe and goes into all this tubing so your air has to propel through all this and gets adjusted as it goes through these 3 valves. As you go through these 3 valves, it all wraps around and keeps going and going and then it comes out the bell. So you have to have a lot of lung capacity and a lot of strong breathing to really make the Tuba function properly. What we are going to talk about really is just the basics mechanics of the Tuba and in the next segment, we will talk about oiling these valves and the oil to make them work properly. As long as you understand we have the Tuba, we have the mouthpiece, the lead pipe and 3 valves and the air has to resignate all the way through the belt and that is the anatomy of the Tuba. "