A Good Mouthpiece Variety

[Tubajug]

Hello everyone,

I'm not much of a mouthpiece connoisseur, but I was curious of your thoughts on what a basic variety of mouthpieces to have around might be. It would be solely for the purposes of trying a variety with a new horn, for example. I currently have:

Conn Helleberg 120
Conn Helleberg 7B
Blessing 18
Schilke 66
Denis Wick 3L
John Packer 611
Perantucci PT44
Sellmansberger Symphony (with #1 Fair Dinkum 32.6mm rim)

Any others you might suggest to round things out?

[Sousaswag]

I think that’s a good selection! Depends on what horn(s) you’ll be testing, I guess.

For instance, I don’t see any true bass tuba mouthpiece there so maybe add one of those? But, some use a Helleberg on bass tuba too.

I usually keep a Helleberg and Bach 18 around but never use them. I’ve found what fits my tubas and don’t plan on selling any of them

Maybe having a suitable mouthpiece for any old Eb you might find at a garage sale or something would be helpful? You never know.

[bort2.0]

Unless I'm missing something, you'd want a really large mouthpiece on there too, like a PT-88.

Sometimes I don't realize just how much a tuba can "open up" unless I try it with a truly large mouthpiece.

[2nd tenor]

That’s quite a number of mouthpieces and not a small amount of cash tied up in that group too.

I’m not familiar enough with these pieces but suggest that a simple table of cup size diameter and cup shape would help identify gaps. The ‘customary’ Bach 24AW also seems to be missing from your group, I don’t use them but many say that they are ‘the one’.

Different Tubas sometimes do seem to work better with different mouthpieces but it’s not necessarily easy to know why, and then we also change over time. To simplify matters I try to stick to the Wick range of pieces and just vary the size, I’ve recently taken to using a Wick 2L in my four valve Eb (used to use a 3L) and plan to eventually do similar with my small three valve Eb (which has a small shank receiver). The 2L just speaks better in the very low range than the 3L and the 3L spoke better than the 4L …

As an aside I think it worth having a few old and cheap small shank mouthpieces, sometimes they do come in handy and sometimes they’re just right for an old instrument.

Over the years I’ve tended to use progressively bigger pieces, but there’s something to be said for using smaller pieces too. Relatively small cups can work remarkably well for instrument and for player, they work well over the enormous range available on double trigger bass trombones, and I believe that historically tubas happily used smaller cups than is the norm today. On some instruments you might loose a small and inconsequential bit of tone but you might gain an easier high register and your chops might have an easier time of things.

I like to use a deeper cup because it seems to produce a better tone, but they can be harder to control so there are pro’s and con’s to everything.

Edit. This recent thread overlaps: Matching a Mouthpiece to a Tuba, viewtopic.php?t=4604

[bloke]

I use starkly different cup shapes on starkly different (OK...different to TUBA players, but - to everyone else - they're just "tubas") tubas.

I also use three cup/rim opening sizes (with those different mouthpieces on those different instruments), but all three of those rims are the same PROFILE (rim contour).

...I don't just use all of these different mouthpiece cups/rims "for fun".

Hey bloke, it seems to me that it would be hard to learn how to play on several mouthpieces.

If doing so didn't make things extraordinarily more easy for me, I wouldn't use different mouthpieces with different instruments...just as saxophonists, oboe/English horn/bassoon players, clarinetists, and bowed string players, and plucked string players all use different mouthpieces/reeds/bows/strings for different sized instruments.

[Mary Ann]

Unless I'm missing something, you'd want a really large mouthpiece on there too, like a PT-88.

Sometimes I don't realize just how much a tuba can "open up" unless I try it with a truly large mouthpiece.

Yeah I've ended up with the 7B on my Eb. I think it has a larger bore than previous Eb tubas, and definitely requires more air. With the 7B I am not restricted in high range (well, above F above the staff is a bit of a stretch, but I'm not going to run into that) and do better in the low. So I wonder what its "equivalent" would be on a bigger tuba? PT-88? Never played one of those.

[2nd tenor]

Via an edit I noted above that this thread overlaps with: Matching a Mouthpiece to a Tuba, viewtopic.php?t=4604

To my mind having a good variety of mouthpieces is helpful but what’s equally important is how one sets about trialing the different pieces with your instrument. What testing structure do people use?

Larger bore instruments seem to require larger cups and need more air than a smaller bore instrument. The larger bore instrument will, I find, be louder but that they don’t gain as much in volume as the extra air needed to drive them. The larger bore seems to give a slightly better tone too, but again at the cost of a lot of air. There are a lot of variables only some of which individual players are aware of - there’s much that I’m not aware of and the best that I manage is semi-organised trial and error.

A long while back (let’s say five years ago) I tested my Besson Regent (three valve, Eb, medium bore (?), small shank) Tuba out with a small range of mouthpieces including a borrowed Doug Yeo Bass Trombone mouthpiece. Bass Trombones and three valve Eb Basses have a similar low pitch range. The mouthpiece that sounded the best - the instrument really sang in some ranges and all ranges were good - was the Doug Yeo piece; unfortunately the owner of the Yeo wouldn’t sell and the new price was just too hard to justify. I ended up using a Wick 5 which worked just fine, that Besson now has a Wick 3 in it and over the years that Besson has developed a lovely tone - the more I play it the better it sounds. To my ears the Regent sounds better (slightly fuller or richer) with the 3 than the 5. As an aside top Eb (concert pitch) is similarly accessible (challenging) but the 5 has the edge there and the 3 has it in the peddle tones below bottom Eb (way below the stave) - but it is academic really ‘cause I never play at those extremes.

Whatever, the point I try to make is that structured trials can produce both unexpected results and useful results and that we, the player, are a variable that sometimes changes over time. Additionally an instrument that’s played a lot gives of it’s best and one that doesn’t doesn’t, well I think that that’s the case but YMMV.

[donn]

I propose that there's really no simple formula for matching them. While a larger bore tuba may (?) require more air, there's the old Miraphone 190 BBb that thrived best on a C4 mouthpiece - not especially voluminous, notably narrow throat.

(Though not sure we can tell from the catalogue 0.835" figure that it's "large bore", since the valve bore is only a function of where the valves are located on the conical bugle.)

Nor am I real confident that a single session will point the way to anything particularly interesting, unfortunately. I have some peculiar mouthpieces that I occasionally pull out to see how I feel about them, and they never fail to delight - and then the next day, I'm back to the peculiar mouthpiece I usually practice on, because after all, it does sound the best ... at home. Last night in band practice I swapped peculiar mouthpieces after a couple tunes, and lo and behold, the virtues of the one that's best at home are quite lost on the band.

The mouthpiece I ended up on there is actually available on the market today, I believe - Marcinkiewicz H1. I don't have anything else quite like it - something about the backbore, I suppose. If you want to know how the tuba sounds without the mouthpiece artificially throttling back, it's spelled Marcinkiewicz. The H stands for Helleberg, though I'm hard pressed to see the resemblance.

[bloke]

Having also owned a Miraphone model 90 kaiser orchestra B-flat (17-1/3" diameter bell rim / .835" bore / 45" height), I came to similar conclusions as did some others - regarding the possibly-best general style of the mouthpiece cup shape.

Having more options at hand - though - than the typical tuba person, I did find that a C4/TU-23 shaped cup worked best - for me - with that instrument, but I was able to deepen that same cup shape by 1/8" (towards the top), which seemed to work out slightly better. Also, with various back-bores, I came to the conclusion that the (approximately) 8mm throat opening (which is roughly the C4/TU-23 throat size) wasn't quite what that instrument needed, an went for a 8.2mm (no: not huge, by any means) throat opening, as well as the largest exit bore (at the back of the mouthpiece) allowable with a standard shank size.

=================================

of note, but with no conclusion being drawn:
I'm now playing a more recently-designed same-valveset-bore very large Miraphone B-flat kaiser orchestra tuba. Though the bell shape is wider, this (not understood by me, and - all along - I've considered this model to be an anomaly/enigma in both it's clear resonance and its remarkably close-to-"on" intonation throughout) more recently-designed Miraphone model seems to work best with a regular-deep mouthpiece with a funnel/bowl cup (funnel with a ridged bulge - about halfway down). Though the bell is wider, the resonance is more clear, and - thus - there's no need to supply additional clarity with a style of mouthpiece which tends to supply stronger upper overtones (such as does a shallow bowl cup, etc.)