This is super-geeky, but whatever. This summer I’m going to only play one mouthpiece per horn!
Today starts my summer playing schedule and for the next month and a half, it’s going to be a very busy one. The last few months I have been slowly driving myself crazy switching mouthpieces. I was juggling about six and (obviously) not completely thrilled with any of them. I think the reason I wasn’t happy with any one mouthpiece was because I was changing too often and not settling in to any one piece. Well, whatever the case, I have sold all my options except one I am going to use for my Bb and one for my C. I’ll use one of those for Eb if that need arises and leave my pic stuff alone. Selling my collection might prove to have been a mistake but I needed to get the “temptations” out of the house.
So if anyone is interested, I settled on playing an old pair of Monette 2’s I bought from my buddy, Tom Photenhauer a bunch of years ago. These are the non-Prana, standard 2’s that I used to play back in college. I had been playing Curry, Bach and Prana Monettes and was going to look into GR’s. I tried to make some appointments to get a GR consult but my schedule was too tight to accommodate the consultants’ schedules so I decided to go with this scaling back idea.
I’ll let you know how it goes!
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Amen to that! After I finished college, I played with some great players who were definite trumpet jocks. And it seemed that every time we got together, they would have 5 different mouthpieces to try. It never seemed to affect them. The mouthpieces always felt great for a day or a week, and then I would try another one until my good old trusty Bach 1C didn’t feel right anymore. Nothing felt right. About 2 years ago, I decided to do the same thing you’re doing, and just force myself into one mouthpiece. Best decision I made.
So far, this “experiment” has been great for me. My confidence, and thus, accuracy is much more consistent. I’ve talked with other trumpet-geek friends that have called what I’m doing ‘gutsy” and “inspirational”. I don’t know that I’d go that far but one thing I believe I’ve figured out is that after you establish your playing through a solid foundation of fundamentals, you sound about the same on whatever you play. So changing equipment was only effecting stuff that was happening on my side of the mouthpiece. So, I figure why mess with my head when my results are going to be about the same anyhow.
I’m interested to hear how this shakes out — and your ideas about 1) the mouthpieces themselves and 2) the notion of hanging with fewer mouthpieces in general 3) your thoughts on how long a mouthpiece experiment should last (how long does it take for your chops to find balance on a new piece) and 4)your process of matching mouthpieces to horns. Looking forward to updates!
Hi, David.
I am sorry that the GR consultation could not be fit in and I am also truly sorry that I didn’t have enough models in stock for you to come to see me as well.
Perhaps in the future you can get over to Charlie and Pierre.
Best wishes,
Rich
Thanks Rich, No worries there will be other times.
Thanks for checking in.
The difference is that the lower the nbeumr(1c,3c,5c etc.), the bigger the hole in the mouthpiece part that you blow through allowing you to play higher notes easier but you need more air. If you’re in marching band, you would need a 7c or 6c Bach because when your marching, youre already using energy marching but you need to blow through your horn, that’s why you use the 7c with the smaller hole. but, if you need to play some high notes, use the 6c, but finding a bach 6c will be very hard since they are rare(it took me a while to get one).hope that helped
[…] wrote a post on a mouthpiece experiment back in 2011. It’s now 2014, summer just finished, and I’d like to follow up on that […]