I didn’t own the tuba I played in high school, and although the school’s were brand new when I was a freshman, they had a pretty bad halitosis smell by my second semester as a freshman.
They weren’t radiantly smelly devices. They just had a biofilm somewhere in the plumbing.
I took one home to wash it once, and deeply regretted it. It got some water in an indeterminable pipe, and made the bong sound for weeks. Eventually, by band instructor and I rigged up a rock tumbler motor and a big tripod with a swively joint and just continuously rotated the damn thing for an afternoon next to the pottery kilns until the water either dumped out, or evaporated. The setup worked, but the finish on the tuba started peeling in a couple of places. Should have just rotated it somewhere there wasn’t a heat source.
