Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2023-12-30 00:05
Paul Aviles wrote:
> So those dimensions should be completely disregarded and
> searching for a mouthpiece should just be an expensive crap
> shoot.
>
> Got it
Oh, c'mon Paul. We all know that you know better.
It seems interesting though that Everett Matson once told me that a difference in tip openings of less than .05mm really wasn't meaningful. By that he meant, not that a good player couldn't tell the difference, but that a difference <.05mm could be managed through reed choice or small changes inside the mouthpiece.
Matt was working on every brand of mouthpiece (of his time) under the sun and a lot of the work he did on them involved internal tweaks and rail adjustments once he had cleaned up the facing. His reasoning was that once you got a well balanced (straight) facing that was in the ballpark of what you had wanted, you stood a better chance of ruining it by trying to get to an exact measurement. Like reeds, it's painfully easy to go past what you want, and you can't put material back. So, if I asked him to put a 1.02/34 facing on and he got it to 1.03 or even 1.05/34, he would stop there and ask me to play on it at home with different reeds and see if I could become comfortable with it.
Then, while I'm on the subject, there are the discrepancies among tools used to measure tip openings (the length is much easier to measure consistently). I have two different dial gauges and two taper gauges, and I get different measurements from each. When I measure a mouthpiece I've bought and know the maker's tip opening measurement, I often find that I get different ones. My gauges all come out higher (more open) than Clark Fobes's numbers. Some of my Vandorens come out closer than the openings VD advertises. So, if Lee Livengood promises a range of facings, he's simply telling you his facings fall in the accepted range of close facings. The absolute number really **doesn't** mean very much, but the type of facing his numbers describe **does** matter.
Still, for students reading any of this, it matters very much what the rail, chamber, baffle and other points of measurement are, aside from the tip and length. Meaning, you can shop by facing measurements, but you won't like every mouthpiece that meets your specs.
Karl
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