Mouthpieces: To anneal or not anneal?

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That is the question I have been asking myself in practice sessions in the last month.

My wheel of doom.

Sweet fit.

I own two nearly identical copies of a Moosewood Cartouche D6 model. One is annealed and the other is not. It is part of my mouthpiece wheel-of-doom since the Patterson update.

For the past year or so, I have been using the un-annealed version simply because of its aesthetic fit into the horn. Lately though I am preferring the annealed version because the sound is so much more lively.

This may or may not coincide with my recent upgrade to abalone-embedded valve caps but I am not sure.

I tried to ask Mr. Pickles, but all he did was get annoyed with me.

[Extracted from a “Random Monday” post, JE, 2021]

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