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Center Stage with Philip Myers, page 2

Now I suppose it shouldn't have come as a big surprise that except for the guys in the horn section who are very cool and open and supportive, I wasn't getting much of a good feeling around New York about me playing something other than a Conn. And I had always been happy as part of the Conn fraternity. I mean, it felt like family. And it felt like a family that I was letting down by even thinking of playing another horn even though I bought the Schmid thinking I was probably only going to use it as a descant.

So I take it into work and it feels weird, I mean I feel like I can't get any volume out of the thing. So I go out and buy two decibel meters (which I admit aren't going to tell you the whole story, but I figured the guy holding them would tell me the rest). Warren Deck, the Philharmonic tuba player went out into the twentieth row of Avery Fisher Hall.

THE TEST IN AVERY FISHER HALL

So I sat there and played as loud as I could with what I considered to be a good sound (this opinion of mine as to what constitutes an acceptable loud sound is, I realize, entirely subjective on my part and has been questioned by others) on both horns. Warren, without watching the meter says the Conn was simply the louder horn.

Then I did it again and this time he watches his meter. It came out one decibel apart. He was surprised. He said he felt that there was more strain in the sound of the Conn and it therefore felt/sounded like I was playing louder on the Conn. I imagine it's like listening to a record where they turn the horns down but you can tell from the kind of sound they're getting that they really must have been putting out. For Warren, the Conn had that quality, that edge. Would a nonbrass player had thought this, someone who doesn't empathize with the stress in the sound? I don't know. Then I took out the other meter and played notes of identical volume (according to the meter on the stand in front of me) back and forth on each horn, but this time not just loud, rather all different dynamics. It never came out more than a decibel apart between horns at any given volume level on the meter in the twentieth row of Avery Fisher.

Okay. You couldn't publish it in a scientific journal but it quieted my fears. I felt the Schmid put me back in charge of the "razz" quotient of the sound, that I was maybe going to have a chance to be in control of when to put brassiness into the sound, not have the horn inflict it on me at some given dynamic. Now any horn is going to have brassiness and edge show up in the sound at some point of increasingly loud playing, but for me this unavoidable nature of the horn comes in much later with a Schmid. It means that if I want to play something very loud, I can choose whether I want it to be brassy or not. As Charles Schlueter once told me, it is quite easy to have a lot of intensity, edge, brassiness in the sound at a loud volume - the challenge is to be able to play just as loud without much intensity, edge or brassiness. Then you are in control of how much you want to add or not add.

So I had to get used to not determining my volume by 'brassiness' or 'edge'. That took about two months. Meanwhile, something weird happened.

I started enjoying playing this horn so much that I began not to want to go back to the Conn. In fact I started to enjoy this horn so much, that I didn't care anymore what anyone thought. Maybe I shouldn't have cared in the first place, but like I said it was a family thing. I felt like I was turning my back on the family.

But at that time I was still caught up in the world I had grown up in which said that playing a triple is copping out. So I ordered a regular double yellow brass from Schmid and when it came I played it for about two months during which time I made a recital record on it. I liked that horn, but I just wasn't having as much fun playing it as I had the triple, it seemed to work better with the B8 than with the M1, a switch I had promised myself I would no longer make but did for the record, so a couple of months later I sold the double and went back to the triple. (Easy sale Howard, the fourth horn, wanted it and this is still what he plays.)

So actually I had made two changes, not just one. Yes, I changed from the Conn to the Schmid but I also went from a double to a triple. All of the above basically has to do with going from the Conn to the Schmid. But what about the change from the double to the triple?

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