Posted by Art H on February 03, 2003 at 23:55:36:
In Reply to: Making mutes posted by Sore Dean on February 03, 2003 at 13:44:35:
I did some experimenting with home-made mutes many years ago and learned a few things:
1. You need a lot of volume inside the mute to avoid making the instrument go sharp. If you try different trombone mutes you quickly find that the straight cardboard conical ones give a very stuffy low register, and the bigger ones work better. Scaling them up to tuba size leads to a really big mute. Compromising on the size leads to pitch problems. You can make a pretty good-sounding mute resembling a bucket with a top instead of a bottom, sized so that it hardly protrudes from the bell at all, but you have to transpose one semitone when you use it.
2. If the end plate is thin and flat so it can vibrate like a drum head you get serious problems near its resonant frequency; notes there become unplayable until you reach up and stop the sympathetic vibration by hand. One solution is to use a thick wooden end plate. Another solution is to make it domed or conical.
3. Instead of corks, use soft plastic foam strips. They allow you to adjust the fit to get various degrees of muting.
4. Mutes are very effective on trumpets and trombones but just plain ugly-sounding on euphoniums and tubas. A friend of mine made something out of construction paper and used it in a symphony orchestra. Nobody knew what it was supposed to sound like; it just had to look like a mute. His next one was made out of a plastic flower pot.
5. The ideal material for tuba mutes is cheap linoleum floor covering. It has just the right density and stiffness.