HoboTrumpet

Greetings all,

I was poking around on eBay at work today (on company-approved break time, of course) and noticed that someone had three Stork mouthpieces for sale, two of which Stork had “re-shanked” to fit C and Eb trumpets, respectively. The item listing says, “the shanks are all short-shanked to achieve the proper pitch center for the key instrument your playing on.”

Anyone ever heard of this? I seem to remember my trumpet teacher in college mentioning something about this as well, but I can’t say for sure if he was talking about the same thing.

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Bb: Yamaha 8335G
C:Yamaha 6445H

Sterling

All Monette mouthpieces are pitch specific. You need a seperate mouthpiece for your B flat, C, D, E flat, F,G,A and B flat pic! Not to mention your cornets and flugels.

Saucony Triumph 4 for running? I like Ascics Gel Cumulus.

rowuk

Hobo,
whether ot not it is possible to "reshank" a mouthpiece depends on what it was before. A large backbored mouthpiece probably cannot be successfully shortened.
Whether or not it really helps depends on a lot more than the shank. I am ALWAYS suspicious of modifications. Solely changing the length of a mouthpiece shank will not automatically give you any pitch center worth talking about. Mouthpieces specifically designed with this in mind do play differently and in my opinion better.

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Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.

Vulgano Brother

The standard mouthpiece test involves the following:
Play an open note "neutral," not lipping up or down and play a crescendo.
Observe what happens to the pitch.
Do the same on some other open notes.
If the pitch stays the same during the crescendo, the mouthpiece is balanced for that particular horn.
If the pitch goes down, the backbore is too small.
If the pitch goes up, the backbore is too large.
In most cases, the backbores used are too large. By shortening the shank, the overall volume of the backbore can be reduced, while keeping the same shape. This is kind of tricky to do, since shortening the shank requires that the mouthpiece be turned on a lathe so that the outside diameter of the shank end matches the original mouthpiece: otherwise the gap will be affected.

The results can be amazing when a mouthpiece and horn compliment each other. Monette mouthpieces compliment Monette trumpets, of course, and seem to work very well with Yamaha trumpets as well. Other brands may produce different results: it is possible that an excellent trumpet and an excellent mouthpiece simply do not compliment each other.

Good luck!

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