Originally Posted by trumpetherald.com

Had the pleasure a couple of weeks ago of meeting Josh Landress, brass repairman/trumpet designer/builder extraordinaire at his shop in the Sam Ash store on 48th St NYC. Great fun trying his design trumpets as well as superb vintage Martin Committes, original French Bessons, and intelligently modified Bach Strads.

The best was his Wooden Sleeve Sound Enhancement System. This brass and wood collar attaches to the mouthpiece stem by means of a set screw. Don't ask me how or why it works. The effect was like turning your trumpet from a $300 student horn into a $3500 custom model. The problem here was that I was already playing my $4500 Thein custom sliding gold brass bell Bb! The tone centered even better, the accurate intonation locked into place more easily, and the articulation, especially in the high register, was just easier to make.

After practicing for an hour, I experienced a near shutdown of my high register above high D. I'm a "legit" player with decent high F's and G's which became unavailable with this attachment, but I patiently practiced my standard exercise routine, and every day, I gained back a semitone. After around a week the F's and G's were back, stronger, louder and more in tune than ever!

Overall volume of tone increased as I played louder, so I did my warmups at FFF. Normally, 45 minutes of this kind of blasting would have given me swollen chops. The only problem I had was that my tone became somewhat fuzzy and soft. Not unfocused, just a little flugelhorn like. Ten minutes rest, and my chops were back to normal. As my chops became more accustomed to not working as hard, my endurance playing long passages in Charlier, Walter Smith, etc, increased.

Two more areas of improvement were ability to play softly, and reduced warmup time. I normally warm up for 20-45 minutes, and still do, but when time is short, I can pick up the horn cold and I'm up to speed in a few minutes of pedal tones and flexibility slurs. Playing very quiet passages after very loud is no problem with this attachment. No more tendency to go sharp holding a note in the high register.

I tried removing the attachment. This is not recommended. At first, everything gets worse, kind of like missing a step on a staircase. After around a half hour of warmup, things get back to "normal", but "normal" is just unacceptable.

Pictures and contact info are at JLANDRESSBRASS.COM

Arthur Grudko