The Curse of the tuba player

I've been feeling very music majorish the past several days, and was talking with other students in my class about your typical stuff. I was mentioning the fact that I had a theory teacher who showed us the overtone series and was able to hold a pitch and position his mouth in such a way that he could get whatever note from the overtone series he wanted. He had started with the fundamental then went up and down, then pointed to which number in the overtone series he was singing.

I was over at a friend's house and when we were discussing it, he pulled out Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, and guest soloist, who sang in that type of fasion. He would drone one note and then arrange his mouth in ways to get the overtones out and did a melody over his drone that way.

In these two experiences, I've finally found a weakness in my aural theory skills. It is almost impossible for me to hear the overtones. After about a minute of listening, I could finally tune in on it and once I found it, I could stick with it through the end of the song, yet when another was played, I couldn't find the overtones at all, although it was a shorter passage.

I blame it on the tuba. I've played and focussed so much on the fundamental sound and getting the best results that I can with the fundamental that I've ignored everything else in the overtone series. While I usually joke around about how I can't sing the melody of the national anthem because the bass part is so ingrained into my head, but with concentration I can. But this goes even farther. I absolutely could not identify anything in the overtone series for over a minute, and that's just completely wrong for me. Looks like I'm going to have to focus on this at some point and learn how to hear the overtones to some degree of satisfaction.