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Re: Better version of M30 lyre?

Author: Bob Bernardo
Date: 2019-02-10 20:42

The issue is the Zinner mouthpieces have a very deep chamber and baffle. The ONLY way to get that dark and not warm sound out of an M30 or pretty much any mouthpiece is take a file and dig out the chamber and baffle. A lot! But then you can get into trouble with projection. The Vandoren mouthpieces tend to be on the shallow and in some cases you need to spend about an hour or up to 5 hours filing out the rubber. The Zinner's in some areas are 1/32" deeper in the chamber. I of course feel this is too deep and the Vandoren's are too shallow. I use an assortment of air files, that run on powerful $1500 air compressors. Even this takes 15 minutes and the files are diamond cut files, the hardest material used. Remember Ricardo was playing on Zinner's they had Backun stamped on them, but they were Zinner's and he realized he could get a bigger sound out of a crystal mouthpiece so you can buy a Backun crystal mouthpiece and overpay or but a Pomarico in Italy and get the same thing! Mitchell Lurie crystal mouthpieces and rubber mouthpieces were made by wim also.

The Selmer Concept is close to very good, but they need work or the sound will be stuffy. The Yamaha Custom's also are good but like the Selmer Concept the tip openings start around 1.13mm's up tp 1.24mm's. Just too open. I've fixed a lot of these with very good results. The first thing I have to do is bring down the tip opening to about 1.07mm's or whatever the client wants. Thats easy. The hard parts are the rails and the facings and I use a special machine or I use 18 or more feeler gauges. This stops flat spots on your mouthpiece and the curve is simply perfect.

As I've said before in past posts playing the M series mouthpieces above high C and the higher you go the flatter the notes go as the orchestra wind instruments go up in pitch, Thus why I now have a 442 pitch mouthpiece. A blessing to keep from biting when orchestras and bands tune to 441 and 442 when Buffet and other companies make their instruments tune to 440. Buffet and Vandoren both need wake-up calls. How dare they do this and mess up the tuning of their horns and mouthpieces. If people stopped buying the horns and mouthpieces for a year or even 6 months they'd realize they need to tune the horns to 442, because the rest of the world tunes this way. Such jerks. I told them I'd help them, they didn't replay to my 4 phone calls.Same with Vandoren, but with them I sent emails.

If you don't play in any groups the pitch surely doesn't matter, nor does the sound sounding bright above high C6. You can't fix it. Well you can. Buy a Yamaha CSVR and the horn comes with the Custom mouthpiece. Just use a 2 1/2 reed strength or have a GREAT mouthpiece expert do his/her magic. You can buy the Vandoren BD5 but spend 4 hours filing the chamber and using about a 3 strength reed or a 2 1/2. Oh as for files buy the curved files or do what I do and heat them up with the kitchen gas flames and use pliers to bend the metal. You need to see red and blue on the flies before bend or the may snap on you.

So your answer to your question is dump the Vandoren and buy a Concept or a Yamaha Custom and have them reworked. Or file out the baffle and chamber for hours and hours until you find the sound you like. Oh, I've had decent results with the BD5 (Vandoren) but I have to do a lot of work on the baffle and chamber taking out material.

Something to remember - less and less top symphony players are using Zinner's, because they don't project well. Greg Smith with Chicago Sym uses and sold Zinner's, but he had them made special so the chamber and baffle were less deep.

Feel free in emailing if you don't understand this. My gauges measure the chamber and baffle within a human hair. So if you want to send me your Vandoren I'll measure it for free and then you will know how much to file. Shipping rates just went up so I'll even cover the $4.50.

Last comment. I don't think you need to pay more than $250 for a mouthpiece that is custom made or $150 that is machine made. I think it's sad to rip off people when a mouthpiece only cost about costs about $40. I strongly feel music should be FUN not expensive.

Hope this makes sense. Cheers!

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

Yamaha Artist 2015

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