Archived under: Equipment, Humor, Mellophones & Marching, Mouthpieces
Videos from BlackJack Mouthpieces, and the Ultimate Mellophone Mouthpiece
One great series of videos on YouTube are Trumpet Tips from Jeffrey Curnow, Associate Principal Trumpet of the Philadelphia Orchestra. A good introduction generally to the series is this one, in which he lays out a number of models of the BlackJack Spartacus series mouthpieces, including the Magnum, Super Magnum, Super Duper Magnum, Eight Ball, Left Hook, and “their most popular model” the HitMan. And in this video we learn of the Micro Airbag Supplied HitMan, extremely useful on contemporary German compositions.
Watching these videos you can tell the trumpet world certainly has a different culture than the horn world. The video below is another of my favorites in the series, and while it is on Pops playing there is also a scoop, that the BlackJack HitMan mouthpiece is for real! Life imitates art or, as they say in the video, “Change your mouthpiece, change your life.”
Going over to the Curry site, I see that the BlackJack HitMan blank is available as a custom option for any Curry trumpet mouthpiece. Thus this means you could get the Curry 1HTF which is popular on the marching mellophone and have it made as a BlackJack HitMan Curry 1HTF. Would this be the ultimate mellophone mouthpiece?
The whole series of videos is really well done and very entertaining. This video on auditions is another favorite of mine. Check out the whole series.
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