How to Protect a Tuba Mouthpiece

Video Transcript

Hi everybody, Kevin Smith back, tuba love, talking about general maintenance of my horn. This has to do specifically with a mouth piece case. Let?s say that, as I talked about earlier, you wanted to get a little practice in, but you couldn't bring your tuba somewhere with you and you decided you were going to just buzz the mouth piece. Again, this is a delegate little part of the instrument, and I can show you furthermore what happened to mine. This should be perfectly circular here, and this is fairly recently that this happened, mine isn't perfectly circular. What happened to me was, when I was playing with a band this summer, and oddly enough it happened exactly two weeks in a row. When you are putting the mouth piece in, you want to put it in not jam it in, but just put it in, but then give it just a little turn, that will sort of just make it adhere just that much better. Two weeks in a row I neglected to do that, and then I just brought the horn down, and the mouth piece fell on a wooden floor. So, I wouldn't say again, that this is enough that is really going to affect the sound of the instrument negatively, but I certainly don't like it, and I'm going to be actually taking this to a music store. They've got a little tool that can just get it back so it's perfectly circular again. At any rate, if you're out and you just want to take your mouth piece with you, this is what's called just a mouth piece holder. This one happens to be rubber, rubber is a great protector. Sometimes they seem a little hard to get in, they go in, and the reason that they are hard to get in is because they are designed to go in there very, very snuggly. Once that thing's in there, you have to push a little bit, but that thing's in there. So if you've got this, the thing drops, it can actually withstand some pretty good pressure, and the rubber is going to protect it. If you don't, obviously you've got nothing to protect the mouth piece, and you are either going to chip this, or sometimes as I say, I am lucky considering this happened twice, fairly short order, that it wasn't that I didn't end up just completely making that inoperable. You can actually use a make-shift kind of case, if you've got a toiletry bag, or something like that, anything, just put the mouth piece in so you're not just walking it around on its own. The rubber, like I said, is more protective, but anything like that will work. Take good care of your mouth piece, it's your friend.

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