There has probably been more written about mouthpieces
than any other aspect of tuba, or any brass instrument for that matter. I was
never very much a mouthpiece person, I have friends and colleagues who have
tried almost every mouthpiece that exists and can tell you everything about
each one of them; they know the cup size, the rim size, the rim thickness, the
choke size, every idiosyncrasy of the back bore and the exact weight. Further,
they can give you a detailed verbal description how each of these aspects affect
the way an instrument plays.
That’s a pretty dense paragraph and at first read
it may appear to be sarcastic, it absolutely
isn’t meant to be; I deeply admire those mouthpiece sages, I’m even a little
jealous of them. I would like to know the secret formulae to match the perfect
mouthpiece for a specific tuba or a specific player; instead all I have is my
ears to depend on for forming an opinion.
Testing and listening to various mouthpieces, especially
with a group, can be a very educational experience, it enables us to listen into the sound as though with a
microscope; the fact is, a mouthpiece is very much like a lens, but instead of
focusing light it focuses sound.
As light of an image passes through a lens it will
project a picture on a surface. For example, the image of a light fixture on
the ceiling of a room is easily recognizable, but with a very high quality lens
the image is recognizable, including the dirt, dust and dead flies in the light
fixture. A mouthpiece is very similar, it can take a sound and focus it, or if
it’s a very high quality mouthpiece it will focus the sound including the
extemporaneous noises, the dirt, that exists in the tone. The lesser-focused
mouthpiece can mask the extemporaneous noises in the sound and give the player
or listener a seemingly beautiful tone. However, with the clearly focused,
highly refined mouthpiece, we frequently find that it sounds bigger and more
solid, plus the fact that the clearer sound is much easier to manage regarding
intonation.
Of course, not everyone will like the highly
focused sound but as a therapeutic device it can be very useful in exposing the
extemporaneous noises that might be part of our tone. When we can hear our
unmasked sound with all its distortions, hisses, snaps, crackles and pops, we
will quickly make the micro-adjustments necessary to minimize those noises and
when the sound is “cleaned”, the tone
produced on the lesser-focused mouthpieces will be probably be more beautiful.
Mouthpieces, like instruments, have a proclivity to
change with fashion, very similar to the way skirt lengths raise and fall in
women’s fashion. When observing the ultra heavy mouthpieces that seem to be so
in fashion today, I can’t avoid remembering the early sixties when the players
of the Chicago Symphony, the brass section that was looked up to as the standard
of reference at the time, led a trend to skeletonize their mouthpieces. The
external surface of these skeletonized mouthpieces followed the internal contours
at minimum thickness and, of course, were very light. Arnold Jacobs himself led
another fad of using an adjustable cup mouthpiece; within a few years he
abandoned the adjustable cup and returned to more standard equipment.
It’s our nature to experiment, and the one thing we
can depend on is that there will always be this tendency. History tells us that
we can expect more changes in mouthpiece design, that astute players will try
these changes and after some period will either adapt or reject them; this is
how we learn, this is how we grow.
Tokyo, Japan, New Years Eve, 2006
Tyoko, Japan, November 3, 2012
