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Behn Epic Bass Clarinet Mouthpiece

Author: cgarza
Date: 2018-09-10 18:25

I’ve owned a Behn Epic bass clarinet mouthpiece now for about a month, and I wanted to share my experience with it so far.

First of all, definitely take the time to visit Brad to pick out a mouthpiece if you can. I’m fortunate enough to live just about twenty minutes from him (that’s the only time I’ll say it’s fortunate that I live in Oklahoma now), and spent some good time with him trying mouthpieces and finding what was just right for me. I also had the pleasure of some wonderful conversation, and Brad’s help with refining my setup to work with the mouthpiece I chose.
A few thoughts about the Epic mouthpiece:
It is extremely resonant, especially at the bottom notes of my bass clarinet. It is also extremely flexible and lends a little extra homogeneity to the different registers.

I played my first concert with the mouthpiece last night, and it sounds just as good in the hall as it does at home (if not better). I’m working a lot less to be heard, and even at the softest pianissimo I can be heard easily. It also responds very easily in all registers, for which I was grateful while playing an all-Bernstein concert.

It did require a major change to my reed choices - while I’ve been using 3.5 V12’s on my old mouthpiece (Redwine), I have moved to V12 2-2.5 reeds at Brad’s suggestion. It was a bit uncomfortable for me at first since I’m used to more resistance, but I made for a major improvement in my sound. I went back and listened to old recording and found that my sound was somewhat covered before, and now it is full and free and resonant.

Cris

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