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Re: Mouthpieces and reeds by the numbers

Author: Bob Bernardo
Date: 2017-08-16 11:23

I know some of the past players measurements. The greats that have died. The feeler gauge .0015" was that magic gauge. Still is actually. I now have gauges that go down to .0005". But we can get a bit crazy here. The reason is the reeds warp more than .0015".

I personally find that the tip openings really don't matter, because every mouth formation is different.

I know that Julian Bliss uses something around a 1.15" and a very short length curve of only 30. Or 15mm's. With a 5 strength reed.

A lot of pros are going more open. 1.15 to 1.20 and more. Yet we have Eddie Daniels that went from 1.10 or so to just 1.03. Very weird for a jazz player, but hearing him play he sounds amazing.

For some reason, I think it is due to the rails being very thin are Kaspar's. Very few are under 1.07. Chedeville's are most often on the closer side. They have wider rails. 1.05 is very common and less.

There is also a trend of longer facings now. Instead of 34 to 36 I'm seeing 40 and more. This is entering the long German facings with hard reeds. This I strongly feel is wrong unless you are putting a lot of mouthpiece into your mouth. French reeds are cut to perform like German made reeds, so the vibrations and sound will suffer. Exceptions of course are your personal embouchure.

Marcellus had an overbite. So he used more mouthpiece and his tip opening was about 1.10mm's with a 36 curve. Kaspar's bought Chedeville's and redid them. Bob bought lots of 8 asking for tip openings of 1.10 to 1.11. However the few I measured were 1.09. So maybe Kaspar's gauges were off.

In the early years most of the players used tip openings around 1.03 to 1.05.

It's totally different now.

Some idiot trademarked the names Kaspar and Chedeville. His name is Omar Henderson. He did harm to himself not the clarinet world. The clarinet sound has changed, so who cares about trademarks! I won't use his bore oil because it has a perfumed smell to it and you don't know if the oil is bad. Oil does go bad. Anyway, the Kaspar and Chedeville mouthpieces all sounded different. This is why Bob Marcellus ordered so many. Remember he ordered lots of 8 and gave most of them away. He had about 100 maybe all of the time. Because of this Omar didn't help the clarinet world at all. He hurt himself because his mouthpieces are horrible and the clarinet sound is all over the place from tip openings under .95 to 1.25.

Designer of - Vintage 1940 Cicero Mouthpieces and the La Vecchia mouthpieces

Yamaha Artist 2015

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