One of the things I picked up early in my tuba-playing journey was the information that it is important to put the valves in the proper order. I must have placed them down out of order after practising on Sunday afternoon because, yesterday, I got a demonstration of why.

The second valve seemed to be a tighter fit than normal. It went down without forcing but the valve press sat visibly lower than the other three. Most tellingly, it was impossible to blow through the instrument. What the valves do is contain slanted holes that connect different sets of pipes in the up and down positions. One wonders why they can’t all be interchangeable but, since they aren’t, the wrong valve is likely to lead the air flow to a dead end.

I couldn’t quite get my head round why only one obviously didn’t fit. What I had to resort to was blowing gently through the instruments and then dropping in the valves one by one, testing them in both up and down positions. If the valve fits, you don’t get a note but you do get air flow coming out of the next valve pipe and eventually I got it figured out.

That did chew up a little bit of my practise time but at least I learned more about the instrument. I wonder if I can mark something on each valve to make it easier to identify which is which rather than relying on putting them down in order, but without compromising their operation? Perhaps I could replace the felts with colour coded ones? Plenty to consider.