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Re: crystal mouthpieces

Author: Bob Bernardo
Date: 2019-07-15 11:07

To be honest here I have no trouble with glass or steel as I use a diamond wheel I designed and diamond dust cuts anything as diamonds are the hardest material on earth.

The difficulty was designing the wheel to cut the facing as we are cutting facings even and within about 0.0001". The hardest part is not the rails being even but making a flat table; the area where the reed rests on the mouthpiece and almost all mouthpieces do not have flat tables. Therefore almost all mouthpieces you buy really need to be adjusted. Look at it this way, you spend 1000's of hours practicing you should practice on a great mouthpiece. A mouthpiece with a flat table and even rails and the correct tip opening.

This is why I use 10,000 grit paper to achieve these goals. Then I use a polishing agent and squares to make sure the table is flat. Now you can adjust a mouthpiece, glass, plastic, metal, doesn't matter, to adjust the rails evenly.

Good mouthpiece refacers can do this correctly and in this order. You just need the right tools and some experience. It's not that hard, just takes time to learn the correct way without wrecking a clients mouthpiece. As the years go on the old Kaspars and Chedevilles have been wrecked by refacers messing up not knowing what they are doing. So soon these good mouthpieces will be long gone and destroyed.

By the way this is part of the reason why it's often hard to play on Legere reeds and to adjust the reeds correctly without killing the reed. Most of the time if the reeds don't work well you may have an issue with a bad unbalanced mouthpiece, because cane reeds when wet often form to the mouthpiece and plastic doesn't bend. I'm a double lip player and I can't play these reeds. However people send me there mouthpieces and a few Legere reeds and I set them up correctly.

I got off the subject a bit here but I feel all players should be aware of this major problem. I promise you that 99.999 percent of the mouthpieces sold, such as Vandoren, Selmer, all of them, do not have flat tables. Even from custom mouthpiece makers, not all of them. There is something called the French Curve. This curve is horrible. It is a hole in the table. Although you can't see it, when someone like me magnifies it it's huge. It's a stinky way to design a mouthpiece table and the worst ones are Rico and Vandoren and not far behind is Selmer and Yamaha. This is why when you test 10 Vandoren mouthpieces or Rico mouthpieces none play the same. So that's your proof. A common complaint you hear people say is the mouthpiece is stuffy, dull, you can't articulate.

A good mouthpiece up close should actually sound on the bright side because after maybe 6 to 8 feet the sound is warm, not dark and you will be heard at the back of any hall, but not with dark mouthpieces such as the old, out of business Zinners. The brighter mouthpieces must not be confused with a jazz sound or something like that. What you are hearing is a PING and a RING. This turns into a beautiful warm sound after a few feet so don't let your ears fool you.

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

Yamaha Artist 2015

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crystal mouthpieces new

packrat

2014-04-16 22:19