About

Who are we?

Alex Strachan is an engineer and horn player who saw a need in the market for a new mouthpiece maker to serve the American market as the old guard of makers reach their retirement.  Alex designs and makes the mouthpieces & his wife Nina helps run the business to make sure you get your orders on time.

Design Principles

Taper Design:

Our mouthpieces are designed on the principle that tapers should be as smooth as possible - from the junction at the rim down to the interface with the leadpipe.  We use modern computer-aided manufacturing technologies to create an internal profile with no discontinuities.  This model also lets us produce a large design space (almost 2000 designs) spanning from those suitable for historic hand horns to descants in Bb soprano.

Through study of existing designs and extensive testing in collaboration with top players and experts we're building our library of designs that are best suited to certain horns.

The first project was to solve the major gap in the market for "What mouthpiece should I use with my Alexander" as a player in America?  Common mouthpieces in the US have poor performance in Alexander horns for a great number of reasons; poor shank fit, a mismatched bore and back-bore for the larger lead pipe venturi.  This resulted in the model M - bringing together the American sound, rims and Alexander horns.

Since then we've worked with all-world pros to bring a full line mouthpieces for Geyer & Kruspe-style horns as well.

Materials:

We choose brass for our standard cups because it's a great balance of performance and price. 

Getting brass plated though has become un-economical at our scale; you used to be able to get a whole mouthpiece gold plated for $40 when I was growing up in the 2000's.  Now, we got quotes ranging from $50-$75 for just the rims.  And that's just the plating, you have to make them first to get them plated.

As a result for rims we've had to deviate from tradition a little: we're using metals that are hypoallergenic in their uncoated state; giving us the choice of Stainless Steel or Titanium.

That leaves us in a little bit of a dilemma; we can't really make an affordable one-piece mouthpiece. We don't love how all-steel mouthpieces feel and respond and Titanium ones are pretty expensive.  Couple that with all the variations of rim size that people offer and we've decided to focus on making two-piece mouthpieces with the American standard Giardinelli threads. (3/4", 36 TPI with a 16.5mm inner junction).