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Mouthpiece Guide

A guide to understanding how to find/design/choose the right mouthpiece for you!

REPEAT AFTER ME:

THERE ARE NO MAGIC MOUTHPIECES!
THER ARE ONLY MOUTHPIECES THAT ARE A GOOD FIT FOR YOU,

THE MUSIC YOU NEED TO PLAY,

AND HAVE A WELL BALANCED CUP VOLUME-BACKBORE COMBINATION.

UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT RIM, DIAMETER, CUP DEPTH, CUP SHAPE, THROAT AND BACKBORE COMBINATION WORK BEST FOR YOU YOU'RE JUST PLAYING THE MOUTHPIECE LOTTERY.

THE ONLY WAY TO STOP PLAYING THE MOUTHPIECE LOTTERY IS TO BE METHODICAL.

THIS GUIDE IS ABOUT THE PROCESS OF BEING METHODICAL IN FINDING A GOOD FIT.

Finding and Designing Your Ideal Mouthpiece

Choosing or finding a suitable mouthpiece is a notoriously frustrating and difficult process. This problem affects even many top-tier professionals who play in orchestras, theatre pits, and film studios. The advantage these elite players often have is that manufacturers will work with them for free to create a product that precisely meets their needs, suits their embouchure ("chops"), and complements their playing approach. In return, the player simply consents to have their name on the final model for marketing purposes.

However, a mouthpiece bearing a famous player’s name tells you only that it was well-designed for that specific person—and very little else. After all, most of the stock mouthpieces you can buy (from manufacturers like Bach, Schilke, Monette, etc.) were also originally custom-made for a particular player. They worked for those players, but as you may already know, many of them do not work for you.

You cannot simply pick up Allen Vizzutti’s mouthpiece and expect to sound like him, play like him, or feel comfortable on it, unless it happens to meet all the conditions you need it to.

This doesn't mean you can’t make many, or even most, mouthpieces work potentially well enough for some situations. A professional golf player, for instance, can likely outperform most people using any brand of clubs, even if they are slightly too long or short. But they would never compete in a major tournament using clubs that didn’t allow them to play at their absolute best.

At Phoenix Brass, we are trying to help all players find what works best for them, and to make that process affordable through the use of modern technology.

The inherent problem with the normal approach of simply buying the latest "magical mouthpiece" is that you have no idea if the player-specific aspects of its design are going to actually suit your embouchure and playing style.

The Essential Functions of Your Mouthpiece

A suitable mouthpiece must perform many functions to support your playing. It must:

Feel Comfortable on your lips.
Provide sufficient endurance beyond your playing requirements, ensuring you are not exhausted or a "broken mess" the next day.
Allow you to play softer than required without struggling for control.
Allow you to play louder than required without struggling for control.
Stretch the octaves correctly so they line up across at least your primary playing range.
Produce a full, centred sound beyond the registers you typically need to play.
Articulate cleanly.
Respond quickly and without requiring you to manipulate your embouchure to find a response.
Produce the right sound/timbre for the style of music you are playing.
Provide the flexibility you require to move easily across intervals.
Provide a comfortable feeling of airflow—it should not feel like you are holding back or struggling to produce enough air.
Work well with your specific instrument.
(And probably some other requirements that haven't occurred to us yet!)

That is A LOT of things.

Every mouthpiece design involves some amount of trade-off between one or more of these elements. For example, a design that gives you a rich, fat sound in the low register might also make the upper register feel significantly more difficult to play.

If you play in different musical styles, a single mouthpiece might not give you everything you need. The mouthpiece required to play loud Double Cs on a lead gig is unlikely to be suitable for playing 3rd Trumpet in an orchestra, for instance. Therefore, you may need more than one mouthpiece to cover different situations.

How to Find YOUR Comfort Zone

Forget about finding the "perfect" mouthpiece, and forget about "magic" mouthpieces or people telling you their design will fix all your problems. Unless it is a custom-designed mouthpiece just for you, it will not be true.

The only reason a mouthpiece will feel "magical" is because it hits the sweet spot for you on as many of the parameters as possible. It does not matter if you spend $500 or $20; both might be just as likely to work for you if you aren't factoring your own needs and physiology into the equation.

What you need to do is systematically find the following:

A comfortable diameter.
A rim shape and cup-entry angle that supports you.
A cup depth and volume that facilitates ease of playing.
A cup shape that gives you the sound you want.
A throat that matches the amount of air you want to blow.
A backbore flare that balances everything out.

Crucially, none of these things need to be perfect; they just have to be GOOD ENOUGH that they aren't going to get in your way.

1. Diameter, Rim Shape, and Cup Entry/Alpha Angle

These three components are the most fundamental in terms of how the mouthpiece interacts with your embouchure. They directly affect each other.

For example, if you increase the diameter, you change the amount of lip likely to protrude into the cup. This will, in turn, affect the Cup Entry Angle that works for you. An angle that was perfect on a smaller diameter might now cause your lips to "hug" the wall of the cup in a way that limits vibration. This is why many players are not fans of "V" cups, regardless of how wide or deep they are, as the lips riding the walls of the cup can reduce the amount and quality of the sound they are able to produce.

Similarly, if you change the shape of the rim, you also change how much lip wants to fall into the cup. Some rim shapes hold the lips out, while others encourage you to put more lip in. Both can work, but the angle of the top of the cup must be in the right ballpark, or you will have issues playing that mouthpiece.

Basically: You must choose a Diameter and Rim Shape that are in your comfort zone. Once those are established, you can work out the range of cup entry angles that are workable for you, and then stick with those established parameters. Otherwise, every new mouthpiece you try is just playing the lottery. A 1-in-10,000 chance of finding a magical one is an insanely expensive, time-consuming, and wasteful approach. Since every mouthpiece you buy is different in a myriad of ways, you will never know for sure which factors made one better or worse than another.

1.A. Cup Diameter

Everyone can make a wide range of cup diameters work for them, provided that the rest of the mouthpiece is also suitable.

To choose a cup diameter, I recommend this approach:

Find the LARGEST diameter you can comfortably play everything you need to (high, low, soft, loud, etc.).
Find the SMALLEST diameter you can comfortably play everything you need to (high, low, soft, loud, etc.).

If you want to play across a range of different styles with varying demands: Pick a size right in the middle.
If you plan to be playing a lot in the upper register: Start at the SMALLEST diameter you can comfortably play and go slightly larger.
If you plan to be playing mostly in the lower and middle registers: Start at the LARGEST diameter you can comfortably play and go slightly smaller.
Otherwise, just choose an appropriate size somewhere in the middle that suits what you will mostly need to play.

1.B. Mouthpiece Rim Shape

The shape of the rim has a significant impact on comfort, flexibility, soft articulations, and endurance.

You need to test different rim shapes in your chosen diameter to ensure all three of these areas are acceptable and meet your playing demands. The only way to test this is to have a chosen diameter, and to try different rim shapes at that diameter, with a comfortably medium-depth cup where you sound good.

Eventually, you just have to choose one that is “good enough” and STICK TO IT.

1.C. Cup Entry Angle (Alpha Angle)

Once you have a diameter and a rim shape locked in, you should take a medium-deep cup and try different cup entry angles.

When playing softly, if the angle is too high, your sound may get buzzy or unpleasant, especially in the very low register.
If the angle is too low, your sound may become unfocused in the low register.

You can make an educated guess about where to start here based on mouthpieces you found you absolutely couldn’t play on. For example, most people don't sound very nice in any register on the Bobby Shew Lead mouthpiece, or similar models like a 13A4a or 14A4a, which have very high alpha angles.

Some people will have found that certain mouthpieces make everything feel like really hard work. This is often not purely cup depth, but because the alpha angle is too low and requires them to very actively “hold the lips together.” An unfocused sound or a feeling like you can only play down low if you play loudly is a sign that the cup entry angle is too low for you.

If you have some data points for where you start to run into these issues, you can go for a value in the middle. I would then explore that middle value plus $\sim 7.5$ degrees and minus $\sim 7.5$ degrees and see which one gives you a combination of a centred, clean low end when playing softly, but leaves you some "zip" in the top end. That is now your ‘default’ angle.

If you don’t need to play with a big sound down low, you can go for a higher angle.
If you don’t need to play with a big sound up high, you can go for a lower angle.

You should now have a Diameter-Rim-Entry Angle unit where everything is in the right ballpark for you.

2. Cup Shape & Depth

Cup shape determines the aesthetics of your sound—how you sound in different registers and at different dynamic levels.

Some cups will sound mellow, and some will sound bright. Some will sound mellow in one register or dynamic, but bright in another.
As a general rule, a deeper cup will sound darker, and a shallower cup will sound brighter.
As a general rule, a bowl-shaped or “C” cup will sound fatter/weightier, and a V-shaped cup will sound lighter and possibly a bit more airy/fluffy.
As a general rule, as you increase the VOLUME of the cup, the upper register will become more work.
As a general rule, as you decrease the VOLUME of the cup, the upper register will become less work, at the expense of sound in the bottom register.

A design with a medium or shallow cup and some sort of second cup or a long throat entry will generally play darker when you aren’t moving much air. As you use more air, the first cup will cause the sound to brighten. (I have a bunch of designs that use this to produce a really efficient cup that plays easily in the top end but still has a warm, rich sound in the bottom end. It’s pretty cool!)

Provided the Diameter-Rim-Entry Angle are all in the right ballpark for you, the cup shape and depth basically function as an EQ.

If you go too shallow, you will run into issues. If you go too deep, you will run into issues. BUT "Too Shallow" and "Too Deep" depend on how you (or your mouthpiece rim) hold(s) your embouchure when you're playing. We all put different amounts of lip into the cup, and what is super deep for one player might in reality be pretty shallow for another player once they have "filled" half the cup with their chops.

As a general rule, people who play large, deep mouthpieces with ease tend to put a lot of lip in the cup. It's not because they're "strong" players; it's because they are artificially making the cup shallower by relaxing lots of lip into the cup (which has nothing at all to do with how firm your corners are, by the way).

3. Throat

Throat size is a tricky one because the main things it does are:

Allow you to relax even more lip tissue into the cup.
Allow you to "blow the lips apart" more easily, which can mean it's easier to open the aperture for loud playing.

Because the throat can significantly change how much lip goes in the cup, messing around with the throat then has flow-on effects on what your "Goldilocks Zone" is for the Diameter-Rim-Entry Angle parameters.

In my opinion, a normal throat size is going to be fine for most people. Players who find an improvement from opening the throat up could likely have achieved the same result by making the mouthpiece slightly shallower and using a different backbore.

The throat size is something that I think the entire mouthpiece needs to be designed around. You can make a #30 throat feel free-blowing and you can make a #20 throat feel stuffy.

The other issue with large throats is that they introduce a certain amount of "hiss" or "airiness" to the sound and make the sound more "diffuse" and less "centred" at softer dynamics and in the lower register. Some makers try to offset this by making the mouthpieces heavier, which makes them feel more stable and centred, and might even help with projection a little. However, the more air you move through the throat, the more hiss you will get.

If you don't believe me, put a #30 throat mouthpiece into the instrument and just blow air through the horn. Now put a #20 throat mouthpiece in and do the same. One will produce a much louder "SHHHH" sound. That sound will haunt you forever at softer dynamics. It might be interesting as an "effect" or for a "Jazz sound," but most of the time it's going to drive you mad when you're trying to keep the sound focused and clean at soft dynamics.

4. Backbore

The mouthpiece backbore determines where nodes in the instrument occur. The taper of the inside of the backbore creates 'reflection points" and these shift the nodes around but as much as a couple of inches!

The main function of the backbore is to spread the octaves into alignment.

As the volume of a mouthpiece cup becomes larger, the octaves become compressed.
As the volume of a mouthpiece cup becomes smaller, the octaves become stretched.

The backbore is how you compensate for the amount of cup volume.
As a backbore flare becomes tighter, the octaves become compressed.
As a backbore flare becomes wider, the octaves become stretched.

As a result:
A small cup volume should usually be paired with a tight backbore flare
A large cup volume should usually be paired with a wide backbore flare.

It's usually very easy to determine if you do it methodically.

Basically, tune your instrument so your low C is in tune, then play a high C. Repeat this 3 times, checking both notes against a stable reference source like a tuner or an in-tune piano.

If High C is flat, your backbore is too tight. Try a larger backbore.
If High C is Sharp, your backbore is too wide. Try a smaller backbore.
If High is in tune with low C, the Backbore is about right. Now extend the test to Low G and 4th ledger G.

Don't try to chase sound with the backbore.

If you have found multiple backbore options that line the octaves up across the range of the instrument that you need to play, then choose the one you like best in terms of feel and blow etc. But the primary choice with the backbore is how it stretches the octaves. Everything else is secondary and best addressed by altering the cup shape/depth.