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I’ve made some equipment changes recently. As I noted in this article, I recently found a particular passage I was recording to be VERY challenging on my main setup. The passage in question was a low slurred passage, it was unusually difficult to smoothly transition from note to note. However, when I changed horns and mouthpieces it suddenly became much more playable. That was a good thing, really, as it gave me a new metric to use in rethinking my setup.
The “Wheel of Doom” theory of mouthpiece testing
Way back in 2009(!!, Horn Matters has been around a while) I posted an article about the Mouthpiece Wheel of Doom. The term is from jazz hornist Mark Taylor, who I knew then from The Mellocast podcast. The basic idea is that when you start testing mouthpieces you will end up, at some point, back where you started – all the way around the wheel of doom.
At that time in 2009 I had come back from larger Laskey mouthpieces to the Conn 5BN I used on my solo recordings. But going further back to my first year at ASU and just before that, I was mainly playing Moosewood mouthpieces. They were made here locally (out in Sun City) by the late Tom Greer. That’s him in the photo from 2012, taken by my Horn Matters partner Bruce Hembd.
I did use one of these on my triple horn on the Table for Three CD as well, so it is not my first time back around to Moosewood.
Happiness is a mouthpiece that works well
The favored combo right now on my Patterson Geyer is a Moosewood B-13 from about 1999 with what he then called a Yamaha shank – with a favorite Houghton H-3 rim. As a bonus, I have several other Moosewood cups that are very near to the same dimensions (either B or BV cups) that I can spread around with the various horns I use for practice at home, etc. Although trying to primarily play on that B-13.
Embrace the past
My final note would be, even you fall out of love with a mouthpiece, try to hang onto it if it was ever your main mouthpiece, especially if it is not easily replaceable. At some point it may be the solution that future you really needs — for a horn you don’t yet own, and with a rim you don’t yet have.
