The fully-restored Harvard tuba!

My son and I had the rare privilege of seeing - and playing - the Harvard tuba this morning out at Dillon Music. Matt Walters and his team did a fantastic job on this historic beast! Here are a few shots from our time, starting with a before and after comparison:

That's Steve Dillon on the left and me on the right. Hmmm, we haven't changed a bit!

The team that did the work at Dillon Music (and that's Matt hiding behind the horn)

Me and Matt with the monster - and notice that the mouthpiece now points 90 degrees inward toward the horn, thanks to a special lead pipe extension that Matt created. That really fixed the ergonomics!

My son, Jonathan Detwiler, giving it a test run!

Matt and me again, but check out that new mouthpiece (without the lead pipe extension)!

Yeah, just for fun, Vladimir made a proportionally-correct mouthpiece, although, as you can imagine, it's pretty much impossible to play!

Man, that ancient horn is shiny now! And after measuring it, at 6 feet 11 inches tall, I believe that makes it the world's largest fully-functional tuba that can be played by just one person! How cool is that?!

And, okay, as I said up front, I did toot around on this 130-year-old monster while we were there - I'm just woefully out of playing shape at present. And keep in mind that playing a tuba this size with a regular tuba mouthpiece, which I did, is like trying to play a regular tuba with a trumpet mouthpiece! But here's what I could get out of this restored giant:

For my posts talking about some of the history behind this giant tuba, click here, and here, and here.