On Changing Equipment

It’s funny to be speaking on this; those that know me also know it’s been flavor of the week for horns and mouthpieces ever since I started Strachan Brass - but I have a good excuse; I need to field test all our designs.  The question for many is "how do you know it's the one"

The first thing to address is one of the reasons people get on the equipment merry-go-round; in addition to always looking to better oneself and their playing, or solve a specific problem, new gear always feels great.

The nature of the horn is that there’s imperfections and compromises made across the instrument and we, the players, are always compensating for. Maybe it’s that one funny note, or a large resistance change between partials, or how the F and Bb sides balance when you’re bobbing back and forth in the basement. All setups have inconsistencies to work through.  One of the core things we believe in here is that we can break the zero sum game; some issues can actually just be fixed, but the point stands; the horn is imperfect and that's some of the beauty of it.

When we’re trying something new, especially high quality, well designed equipment, the first impressions are often formed by tackling problem areas head on.  You go right for the tricky bits and find that the new setup is immediately better at what used to be hard. Sometimes though there's a price to pay and we just haven't found it yet.

As we adjust to the new setup and play we'll find the faults as they come up.  Now it's a new funny note or some other issue.  Except now we don't have any tricks built in to our active muscle memory to compensate so it feels worse than ever.  Here we hit our lowest point and often end up switching back or trying something new.

Some may interpret this as “what’s the point of changing then, everything is crappy just toughen up!”.  And this isn't entirely a wrong thought; eventually everyone has to pick a set of compromises they want to work through, but it is the kind of statement often said by people whose equipment is fundamentally working well for them.  There are players who can make a beat school horn sound incredible, but when push comes to shove the sections at major orchestras around the world are filled with nothing but the finest constructed instruments from the most exotic of makers.  If you're not on the "efficient frontier" where every gain is offset by a loss, a change can be monumentally helpful.

So what sort of things can our mouthpieces potentially actually fix?

1 - Intonation.  The mouthpiece has a big effect on the width of the octaves on the instrument.  With an in-tune mouthpiece you'll find you have better accuracy at your Bb/F changeover points, better slurs across the registers, and typically better extreme register accuracy (since we tune the middle, any defects are amplified in the hardest registers of the instrument).

2 - Tone.  The mouthpiece can have a pretty significant influence on tone, both at quiet dynamics and loud.  Some designs can lessen the magnitude of the change in timbre as volume increases and others can amplify it.  The design can change the "bark" of the attack and the stability of the sustain afterwards.  While a mouthpiece can't change the inherent resonant characteristic of your horn (& particularly your bell), we can still affect the sound substantially.

3 - Range.  While the cup can do some things for you regarding extreme ranges, the most important part is to create an efficient buzz top to bottom.  Not all rims work with all faces and the correct selection of rim profile can give both better flexibility and better control.  Unfortunately there's no magic formula here, you'll just have to try rims and see.

Ok you've rambled for whole page already, what's the point

TLDR: it takes a week or two to know definitively if you've gotten it right.  That's why we have a 30 day return window.  And there are real things a new mouthpiece can fix, but there's no magic wand available.