How to Oil Tuba Valves

Video Transcript

"Hi everybody, Kevin Smith here, Tuba Love. And doing general cleaning, maintenance of my instrument. And I'm going to talk about oiling the valves of the horn right now. Just one of the most fundamental things and necessary things that we do on the tuba. Like any other thing, got pistons in these valves and all these mechanisms and they need oil to run. Just like the pistons in your car need oil to run and your car in general needs oil to run. So you might find that after you play them, they're fine now because I actually just oiled them a couple of days ago, but they start getting a little slower, a little more sluggish. What you want to do is you need, you need valve oil first of all. This is just one kind, just called valve oil. These all have, all these valves have these little rotor cups at the top and you just spin it off so that this comes out. What you do, I should have had the cap off the oil before I started, but you see where these little these areas, these open areas are, most people would think, well I want to douse the thing, you don't need to douse it. You just put like a drop, two in these areas where the hole is, you'll see a little bit it will drop out as you go. But then you just put it down and there's an area, I just happened to find it by just blind luck, but there's that little stem there. And if you find it doesn't hit there, it's not going down. Do not force it, or you will break it, okay? You will do irreparable damage. If it doesn't go in there, you just find where that point connects, that little, that little opening right there. Find where that point connects, and then the piston valve can go down and then just turn it around clockwise and there you go. One final thing, this is called synthetic oil. It's a fairly new creation in the world of valve oil. It's pretty amazing stuff, in as much as I don't need to use it nearly as much as I use my older valve oil. Which usually at the rate I play, was pretty much like every other day, sometimes I'd be putting it on. This stuff last a lot longer. However, if you have an instrument where you've used standard oil, do not, I repeat, do not use synthetic oil on that instrument. The combination of the two types of oil is very very bad, it'll jam up the valves in your horn and your begging for a lot trouble. So if you've got a new horn, never used oil, I recommend synthetic, but if not, stay with the same oil that you have."