What are Tuba Valves?

Video Transcript

"Hi, Kevin Smith here again a.k.a. Tuba Love, and I'm going to talk to you briefly about the valves of the tuba; a very, very critical part of the instrument. The combination of the valves are what produces the various pitches on the instrument. Tubas come in two varieties of valves. These, as you will notice similar to if you see a trumpet; these valves are called piston valves they actually have pistons that go up and down like that. I don't have a picture with me today, but another type of common valve on a tuba is called the rotary valve. If you know a French Horn or see a picture of a French Horn where you see instead of these pistons--they go up down--they are longer, they are rounder, they come closer to the surface of the instrument. There are arguments--I mean every tuba player has their own likes, their own dislikes--there are arguments are about which are better, personally I like piston valves. I do a lot of technical playing which requires some faster movement; I find in my experience that these piston valves are considerably faster than rotaries. On the other hand, for people doing orchestral stuff, that kind of thing, the rotaries being closer to the base, there's not as much of a distance for them to go down. So when you're pressing the valves up and down a lot, they do have--they tend to have--a smoother motion. Again, it's apples and oranges; but I got the pistons here and I'm a pistons guy all the way."