Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article about a crime wave. The wave in question is the theft of tubas. Apparently, stealing them is quite in vogue at the moment.
So I ask our dear TubaDiva, have you ever had a problem with a runaway horn??? 
PS: I would link to the article, but sadly it is behind the WSJ paywall. 
I expect that they’re probably stolen just for their scrap value. I can’t imagine there’s a big black market for hot tubas, but there’s always a market for a few dozen pounds of brass.
A similar crime was described some decades ago by Flanders and Swann, although involving a French horn rather than a tuba.
In that case, the motive appears to have been a critical reaction to the owner’s playing.
Looks like scrap price around 50 buck, give or take. (Tuba weight 25 to 35 lb, scrap brass around $1.60 to $1.85 per ellb.)
I read about this 5 years ago and it was in California. In those cases, the apparent culprit was a form of Mexican music known as “banda” which prominently features the tuba, which is a significant chunk of brass costing anywhere between $2000-7000.
Damn those thieving genres. I was once mugged by scat.
Tuba player here. I managed to get to the WSJ story through Google News.
Tubas are expensive. Very. I imagine that there actually is a black market for them, especially if they’re moved out of the area. The big theft in LA in 2012 has been theorized to provide for the banda crowd. Here’s why I agree with that.
I have a friend that operated one of the largest instrument repair shops in the SF Bay Area. He told me several years ago that he had a Mexican gentleman come in once a year to buy as many used sousaphones as he could to resell in Mexico. There seems to be a big demand for them.
BTW- Banda music has some utterly insane tuba players. Fast, agile and LOUD!
Side note- to avoid the inevitable confusion, sousaphones are a kind of tuba. Same instrument, different shape. Sousaphones are the ones mostly being stolen.
Another side note- the player in the article that plays with the drum and bugle corps would be playing a contra bass bugle. shaped like a standard tuba, they’re usually pitched in G, not the Bb or C most tuba players are used to and is held like a bazooka on the shoulder. It’s a specialty instrument and wouldn’t be much use outside a bugle corps, so not a surprise it got found quickly.
Perhaps someone wants to be sure that he wins the tuba tryout.
I dunno Frank, this city is the tuba capital of the world. We’ve tried Acme Tuba, Tuba World, Tubas R Us, Tuba or Not Tuba, Tuba Ligation. Ah, we’ve come to a dead end, Frank.
Can tubas be marked without affecting the sound so that they can be identified after being stolen? Something like a hallmark?
Surely you’re joking.
It wouldn’t be too hard to engrave a serial number or something in them. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s already done at the factory, though it’s been a while since I’ve taken a good look up close.
Some people are calling this a hoax. Well, it’s not a big trick. It’s a series of tubas!
Just set the link. We can open it in “incognito” or “private” mode.
My Dad used to have his trumpets and cornets engraved.
I’m not having a problem reading it in regular mode.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/people-are-stealing-tubasno-one-knows-why-1520439297
Unless that particular instrument isn’t keeping up with some changes in DCI rules, they’re probably actually pitched in B flat. I’m not sure any corps use G bugles any more now that they’re not required.
But then again, I’ve been out of the loop a while and only gather information from the periphery.
I’m also a drummer, so WTF do I know
Every brass instrument I’ve ever seen has a serial number from the factory; usually on one of the valves or near the mouthpiece. Filing them off would be pretty obvious. I suppose it would be possible to alter them without it looking too blatant.
The serial number doesn’t do much good unless there’s some central registry where it can be checked and the buyer of the discount tuba is motivated to do that.
Hey man, how you doing? We haven’t talked in ages!
Thanks, you said mostly everything I would have.
For those who didn’t see the article, the “hook” it hangs on is the missing sousaphone of Preservation Hall Jazz Band bassist/sousaphonist Ben Jaffe. They were packing up from a gig the other night and someone stole it right out of the car. The horn is VERY distinctive and unmistakable. Ben is really attached to it and wants it back, he’s hopeful for a reunion.
This has been a problem for a while. These days Banda is probably the main cause of it, though the increasing popularity of Honk!-style street bands and Tuba Gooding Jr. may have something to do with it as well.
Worthwhile tubas and sousaphones are expensive instruments. You can easily drop thousands of dollars on a pro level horn.
But this is by no means a new thing. Like crews that steal cars to put them in shipping containers and take them to other parts of the world, this is often what happens to tubas that go missing. Tuba great Don Butterfield told me once he knew someone that had a tuba stolen from them on the East Coast and it wound up in Rio. Boston Brass pro Sam Pilafian once had a horn stolen from him at LaGuardia Airport when a gang hijacked an entire truckload of luggage. None of it ever surfaced anywhere again. In the 60s Walter Sear would import boatloads – literally – of horns from the Mahillon factory in Belgium; many of those shipments were hijacked off the docks.
As for me, yes, I have been a victim of crime. There used to be a music store in NYC that was notorious for selling stolen instruments. My practice room on West 53rd St. was burglarized on a Saturday night; on Monday morning, before I could even file a police report, the horn was sold out of that shop on West 48th. The horn surfaced about two years later; the guy that originally sold it to me walked into a rehearsal and sat next to this guy and Ray said to himself, “That looks … familiar.” The police lost my report and I was not successful in getting it back.
Yes, most all horns have serial numbers, though I have seen the occasional ancient horn that had no numbers at all.
Because the world is now a smaller place and people are more proactive and talking about this kind of thing, the odds of retrieving a stolen instrument are probably better than they’ve ever been. We are not the exception; you can read any number of listservs and message boards where people talk about stolen instruments, especially those axes owned by famous people. Google “Beano” sometime. 
If you see Ben’s horn, let him know, woudja? And you have my express permission to beat the brakes off the guy what took it.
Your humble TubaDiva
2nd Amenders and NRA may come out to oppose any database as a slippery slope for a firearm registry.