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My second mouthpiece made by hand completely from scratch, this time from a piece of white oak. It was an interesting challenge similar to the first, however….wood is not a great material to use for a mouthpiece.

Wood is very sensitive to temperature and humidity, and because of this is not a suitable material to keep the table flat and the facing dimensionally accurate, especially over the long-term. This is why I tried to seal all surfaces of the piece, although I still had to sand through this for the most part on the final table and facing passes. I knew this already, but thought it would be a fun project anyway, and it actually plays quite well. The wood also looks cool so that’s a plus! I should note that the harder the wood, the less extreme these problems will be, but it still won’t have the stability of hard rubber or brass.

Another note about mouthpiece material:

The design of this piece was made completely freehand without any real plan, but turned out sort of like a medium chamber Meyer but with a higher baffle. It was even higher when doing the first few play tests, but was incredibly bright and shrill, so I lowered it a decent amount. This goes to show that the internal geometry of a piece is the predominant factor in the overall tone, of course factored in with the facing length and tip opening for the overall playing response.

Many years ago I used to think that metal mouthpieces were loud and bright, and hard rubber pieces were softer and less aggressive. I think this is a super common misconception, but it’s understandable why people arrive at that conclusion by default. But as many players could tell you, there are metal pieces that play dark and tubby, and hard rubber pieces with a super high baffle that will play very bright and aggressive.

The playing experience between metal and hard rubber is very noticeably affected by the beak height (and angle), mouthpiece width, and other less obvious variables like the angle between the table and the bore. Many metal pieces will have a more parallel table-to-bore relationship where many hard rubber pieces will have more of a dramatic angle between the two. One reason for this is that brass can be made much thinner than hard rubber while maintaining it’s strength, where hard rubber pieces (in general) need to be a bit thicker for overall stability.

So how does the material factor in then? I actually do think it can make a small tonal difference, but you can only really test this difference with two identical mouthpieces, side by side for an A - B test. They have to have the same tip opening, facing curve, baffle, chamber, everything, except the difference in material. Only then can you have a fair comparison.

As for the future of my handmade mouthpieces, I think this will be one of the last times I make one in this completely freehand way. I’m currently designing a few custom pieces of equipment that will help me make pieces much faster and more accurately, but will still be a hand-crafted process.