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Re: Pedals:'Where it matters

Note:- What I have written below may be complete junk. It's just my
personal theory/guess.


Excuse me if I'm being a bit dense, but what I meant was that if,
say, double pedal C (treble clef) is fingered 2nd valve, then surely the G
a 12th higher would also. However, on tuba, the false note responding to
this fingering would be an E, only a 10th higher. On Euph, it comes out as
a D# (although not very cleanly). The explanation about different
resistances for trombones makes sense, and can, I suppose also be applied
to Euphs, which (generally) have a slightly smaller number of bends in the
tube than Tubas do. Perhaps it is not that these notes are 3rd harmonics,
but that they are 5th harmonics, and that the double pedals are actually
2nd harmonics. This would concur with someone I heard who mentioned that
it is actually possible to hit triple pedals (!). This would then be the
1st harmonic. However these tones are so vague that the only way to tell
really would be to get a physics lab to measure it. Of course, this would
all have to be rather reworked if someone out there can play a quadruple
pedal (not very likely, I'd say!). As further evidence, there's a point in
the middle of the (single) pedal register where blowing on open (or 2nd
valve as we had above) becomes easier. This would be the 3rd harmonic of
the series. By the time we reach the stave, the higher (false) harmonics
are too close to actual harmonics to hit easily. Perhaps what's actually
happening is that any note can be expressed as an overtone of a (suitably
subterranean) octave below the pedals, and can be hit using any fingering
- the lower the fundamental, though, the harder the note is to hit. This
is pure speculation, though (even more so than the above!), and if anybody
knows it to be rubbish, please write back and tell me. It does seem to
(partially) explain why the Euph note is only a D# though, and hard to hit - it 
would be a 19th harmonic of the quintuple pedal. 

For those who have been mathematically trained, this uses two methods of
proof:-

1)Proof by blatant assertion; and
2)Proof by changing all the 2s to ns

So, basically, it's as logically consistent as anything I've been taught
over the last two-and-a-bit years.

Dave Taylor
Poor quality mathematician and trombonist


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