Designing the Model CL

The Model CL design process followed the standard engineering joke of "slowly, then all at once".  We had been toying around with the general concept of a "darker sounding" cup since the beginning of Strachan Brass; the saga beginning with our original C and later GC cups.  Those cups had problems - they weren't particularly in tune, they slotted wider than I wanted & they weren't able to condense into a core of sound at louder dynamics.

At some point I had chalked this up to "there's a limit to depth that we can get to play right mechanically", however my thinking evolved on this over time with the introduction of the CV - you can go deep, you just need to use some trickery to cut the cup volume back down and you need a more efficient back bore to balance it.

The CV was our first "c-series" because of it's broad play-ability, it does it's thing on a super wide variety of horns and has a really nice stability to it.  It's quickly became one of our best-sellers and we even turned it into a one-piece (the Model One).

But that's on the stable end of neutral.  One of the characteristics of the GC we'd always been trying to foster was how much touch and expression you could get out of it at p and pp.  For all its other faults, it was unmatched at this.  Still the CV was a much better overall mouthpiece and we quietly discontinued the GC (v3).

Along came the two core-making machines - the GA and CR.  After pushing the limits on our designs I had built two ultra-efficient cups in two different flavors; a control piece with a conic bore and a large-bore bowl with the efficiency and color of a conic.  Both designs have their fans and they set new standards of responsiveness but both on the bright / shallow end of the spectrum.

The groundwork all laid, it just took a nudge; "I love playing my Strachan for work, but in an audition setting I'm having trouble with it - the very character that makes it so effortless to play in a group make it less well suited to auditions".  The facts were; the optimizations we'd made to fit the sound into empty space in the ensemble made lots of horns too bright when played alone.  And our tight slots that help give an "on rails" feeling to the intonation can lead to more chips when there's no reference pitch from the other players of the ensemble to ground on.

We now had the technology though from 2 years of designs to put together the right solution; a cup with as much touch as the GC but with the playing characteristics and intonation of a modern, high-performance cup.  The CR's upper bowl gives us the immediacy of the attacks, the CL is one of our "pingiest" mouthpieces to date.  Articulation clarity was a high priority, of course, for the audition setting so that was a natural starting point.

The CR is also secretly a conic bore cup - the upper bowl shape is paired with a very slight deepening of the bore entrance to balance what would otherwise be a very unstable design.  The CL takes this idea further, deepening the conic bore entrance to add a little more stability and depth to the sound.

Last we needed to open up the back bore to give some more flexibility to the pitch, but that would lead to a cup that takes excessive air input.  So for balance, the back half of the. mouthpiece ends up being almost exactly a CV.  #13 coming off a deep cone transitioning into a fairly linear back bore taper.

The last thing to do with this was to balance out the weight.  It needed to feel flexible and responsive so we went back to our roots and cranked the weight all the way down to a feathery 24.2g.  This gives it the responsiveness and helps to widen the feel of the slots.

After some plastic prototypes and some internal rounds of testing I made up a few to send out and the early sentiment was... positive.

So all that was left was to make some up - which we've done!  The Model CL is now available.