My Mouthpiece; Requested by Klaus


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Posted by Ellis Wean on September 08, 2002 at 23:32:25:

Hi All,
(Thanks to all who've visited the York-For-Sale web site. Would anyone like to buy it?)

Klaus (see messages down below) requested a description of my "special design I evolved over time (very different from anything you've seen)" mouthpiece. Here it is. I tried to cover all the bases.

For those not familiar, I’m the guy responsible for TRU-VU TRANSPARENT MOUTHPIECES. I’ve spent much of my professional life WATCHING what the lips do while playing. I’ve used a strobe light, showing the lips in slow-motion, for much of the studying. The strobe shows, among other things, how much the lips flap open, how much lip relaxation is required (i.e., what happens with even a little lip-muscle contraction) and how mouthpiece RIM placement is much more critical than we’d previously recognized. It also allowed me to understand what we all must do (in common) to make our horns speak and how different we can look (and why) doing this to achieve our individual best-results. (There’s no way to make these observations with a visualizer. With a transparent mouthpiece, you’re actually playing; if it’s slightly off, it sounds it.)

Many of these observations have led to my experimenting with mouthpiece design, for myself, mainly. One observation is in my low register (and ff near the low register and lower) my lips open WIDER than the rim’s inner-edge diameter. (I measure rim diameter across the inner edge because that’s where the lips’ vibrations start - or stop - depending on how you see it.) My rim is a separate piece from the cup.

The cup’s diameter is much wider than the rim’s. This rim-cup combo has been called an undercut and its purpose is allowing clearance when the lips would otherwise beat against the cup.

Such a wide cup diameter adds lots of air volume. I measured the air volume inside a large number of cups (to the .0001 cubic inch). To match conventional cup volumes, I had to reduce the depth of mine. My first experiments had amazing low registers and lots of problems above 2nd space C. So I reduced the cup depth. It worked. Depth is based on making sure my lips don’t hit the bottom of the cup. Further adjustments were made to improve tone and still control the instrument. (With these mouthpieces, a little depth change goes a long way.) Therefore, my mouthpiece cup LOOKS very shallow, but has a larger air capacity than most.

I then worked out a funnel-shape between the cup’s bottom and the beginning of the shank. The wider cup dissipates the air a surprising amount. The funnel helps re-accelerate it into the horn. From the side, my mouthpiece’s cup looks like a tornado.

For this horn (York) I used an aluminum shank. I experimented with different diameters for the throat. (To me, the throat is the smallest diameter in a mouthpiece.) I found one particular diameter good for low e (and lower) without sacrificing the upper register.

Mouthpiece/player/horn matching will, I believe, always be more art than science because such a dizzying array of components is involved for experimenting and tweaking. (When was the last time 2 players using the same mouthpiece and instrument sounded the same?) That’s my story. Hope it’s not too long-winded, but thought you’d want to know the why’s, also.

Sincerely,
Ellis Wean



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