Vessehune

I recenlty was discussing mouthpieces with my trumpet professor and found that his view on mouthpieces was one that I had never heard. He basically said that a shallow mouthpiece is not a cheater piece. It is actually more difficult to hit a note right in the middle of it on a shallow mouthpiece. He went on to say that one reason orchestral players play on the deeper mouthpieces is because the target for the note is much larger than on a mouthpiece with a shallower cup. Of course for tonal reasons he wants me to play a deeper cup for legit stuff. Darn no playing my jury on my GR 66Z**

I just had never heard it put that way before. Just thought I would share this little nugget of info.

trickg

In the book “The Balanced Embouchure” by Jeff Smiley, Jeff talks about a time where he took a small mouthpiece (I think it was a Schilke 6A4a) and played on nothing else for like 6 weeks. At first, he couldn’t play it at all, but after working on trying to be able to use it week after week, an extraordinary thing happened: he was able to use it like a regular, deeper, bigger mouthpiece and when he switched back to the bigger mouthpiece, he lost no range or endurance. He had employed the use of a small mouthpiece to gain tighter focus in his embouchure.

Not that this will work for everyone of course, but there was once a time where I couldn’t play on a small mouthpiece at all. When I started playing in a Latin band, SOMETHING had to change because I was working my tail off trying to get it to happen on my normal, bigger mouthpiece, which was a Marcinkiewicz #2 at the time. Taking the advice of the lead player and in spite of the fact that I sounded pretty bad for several gigs, I forced myself to play on a Schilke 14A4a. It took about 3 weeks before I was interchangeable between the two, and I’m still that way.

It is a different way to look at a mouthpiece, but it seems that your instructor knows what he’s talking about.

DCB

Have you ever herd Callet play? He plays on a small and shallow piece and his sound is big and fat in any range. It is how you control your chops. The depth of the cup will affect the tone (bright or mellow). But even that can be overcome with some work.

JoeCool

The sound is in your head. It will come out one way or another no matter what equipment you use.

Vessehune

I have a hard time totally buying into the the sound in your head thing. If I gave you a Bobby Shew 1 and had you play a tune, and then had you do that on your normal mouthpiece. There would be a noticeable change in the tone. Even if you were thinking about sounding the exact same.

No maybe if you only played on the shew 1 for several months you could possibly learn to control the mouthpiece better and then get a sound closer to your normal setup, but I think that there will always be that slight difference.

JoeCool

you have much to learn grasshopper.