Preferred mouthpiece?

[donn]

You can see some info on friction of various materials here: Friction - Friction Coefficients and Calculator, including "plexiglass". Won't mean much, really, but it's the feature in question. I didn't spot any numbers for "slobbery lips". "Static" friction is the force necessary to start the two surfaces moving against each other, which is normally much larger than the force to keep them moving.

[Pat S]

I use a Wick 3SL on my Mack Brass 3/4 CC tuba. For me it gives the best sound and response in the staff and down to the G below, and that's where I spend most of my playing time. It's been described by some as a "brighter" sound, but the tuba has a brighter sound by its very nature. I've tried to fathom the world of cup depth/shape, backbore, etc, and can't make much sense of it. I've tried a Conn 18, which gives me a stronger bottom but weaker top. I also tried a Helleberg, but found it to be uncomfortable.

[bloke]

You can see some info on friction of various materials here: Friction - Friction Coefficients and Calculator, including "plexiglass". Won't mean much, really, but it's the feature in question. I didn't spot any numbers for "slobbery lips". "Static" friction is the force necessary to start the two surfaces moving against each other, which is normally much larger than the force to keep them moving.

As a "mouthpiece expert" "The Science" of mouthpiece rim friction (against the facial indention between the chin and the lips (where tuba players will mostly slide the mouthpiece, as I can't imagine too many of them wishing to slide it around above the lips) has much more to do with the profile of the rim than either the material from which the rim is made or even how scratched or bunged up the rim has become.

BUT...shiny/smooth and not bunged up slides easily WITHOUT hurting.

me...?? I choose a narrow rim with fairly rounded drop-offs on the inside and outside, as well as falling away from the face towards the outside edge. It scoots real good (just to lay some scientific lingo on y'all).

footnotes...?? ok...

__________________________
¹ bloke says (see this post, just above)

² Someone send me a good/used (ok...new...??) CORRECT carafe (we've been making do) for a Cuisinart model DCC-1200P1 coffee maker, and I'll sell you one of my stainless steel rims for 40% off. (You pay postage on the rim, I pay nuthin' on the carafe).

[matt g]

I use a Wick 3SL on my Mack Brass 3/4 CC tuba. For me it gives the best sound and response in the staff and down to the G below, and that's where I spend most of my playing time. It's been described by some as a "brighter" sound, but the tuba has a brighter sound by its very nature. I've tried to fathom the world of cup depth/shape, backbore, etc, and can't make much sense of it. I've tried a Conn 18, which gives me a stronger bottom but weaker top. I also tried a Helleberg, but found it to be uncomfortable.

A Laskey 30H might work well there or the upcoming Helleberg variant @bloke is coming out with. I’d imagine a funnel cup would work well on one of those. The Laskey (or Schilke HII) and blokeberg will have way more comfortable rim profiles.

[matt g]

Plastic rims do tend to have more “sticky” to them. The Kelly pieces were/are finished well and reasonably smooth, but not as slick as plated brass and certainly not as slick as stainless steel with the titanium oxide coating.

I’m pretty sure that the titanium oxide coating is slicker than gold to the face.

Tangent: when I was in college (spring 1994), Terry Warburton had some Helleberg cup mouthpieces cut out that he hadn’t finished the rim profile on. He told me that he had copied someone’s Helleberg cup for @edfirth and had an extra left over.

He was willing to put a rim on it for me. I had a Rudy 3/4 I was borrowing from UCF as the instrument to test.

We went back and forth for about an hour making the inner rim bigger and getting the contour pretty much “Bach” like. All of this was done with the mouthpiece in raw brass, obviously.

I think the inner diameter ended up in the 34mm range. It was huge. It also made that Rudy 3/4 sound magnificent. Then he went and finished it off with plating. My lips were falling into it…

It still made that Rudy sound awesome, but that was only temporary. I never really used it on anything else and sold it to a kid that used it on a 20J and made him sound awesome.

Anyhow, point of this ramble is that raw brass is really grippy compared to silver plate and that actually made a difference to the “feel” of the mouthpiece on my face.

[bloke]

Did you test the unplated brass after it was turned down and only touched with super-fine sandpaper, or did he also stop and actually polish the brass on a buffing machine (two stage buffing), or do you remember for certain?

[matt g]

Did you test the unplated brass after it was turned down and only touched with super-fine sandpaper, or did he also stop and actually polish the brass on a buffing machine (two stage buffing), or do you remember for certain?

I’m pretty sure it was not buffed before it was on my lips but was reasonably “smooth”.

Basically, he would wonder off and be back about 3-5 minutes later, from what I can remember. He had the CNC lathe, but he might’ve been turning the rim on a smaller machine lathe.

[bloke]

There's a big difference between really fine sandpaper and jewelers rouge - as far as how those different grades of polished surfaces feel. I can tell a difference with my calloused hands - when polishing instruments.

I used to get little blisters on on my embouchure skin above my lips after mouthpieces picked up enough of those tiny little scratches back when I mostly played silver or gold-plated mouthpieces. With the really smooth steel or coated steel mouthpieces - which stay smoother because they are harder metal, I don't get any of those anymore. I would just as soon the back of the mouthpiece be made of lexan, as long as the rim is really polished and stays really polished. I even asked Dave to experiment with a lexan back part cup-shank or separate cup and shank, but then I discovered that it didn't save any money (lexan isn't cheap) and the lexan male threads tended to be a bit grabby - even though the female threads on the lexan rims don't seem to be grabby.

[donn]

Plastic rims do tend to have more “sticky” to them. The Kelly pieces were/are finished well and reasonably smooth, but not as slick as plated brass and certainly not as slick as stainless steel with the titanium oxide coating.

That plastic is polycarbonate. Does anyone have experience with a Delrin rim? Delrin has notably low friction properties, at least in contact with metal and I assume likewise slobbery lips.

Just to be clear - what I got from the Warburton brass mouthpiece anecdote, was that the mouthpiece felt larger after it was plated.

I have a Dillon mouthpiece I like a lot that I believe is from the Warburton era, that's supposed to be "bronze." I am a skeptic on mouthpiece material and I don't think the bronze has anything to do with why I like it (nor do I have much confidence that things labeled "bronze" are really CuSn alloys), but it is a material that holds up pretty well.

[2nd tenor]

Years ago I needed a utility mouthpiece to use so I didn’t trash something expensive. Well, it ended up that I played that very inexpensive utility piece so much more than anything else that it stuck! You all would probably laugh, so I won’t bother saying what I use for almost everything I do now. Needless to say it was pretty much as cheap as they came at the time.

This post keeps coming back to mind and makes me curious. I’ll take a guess and say that the mystery mouthpiece is a Blessing 18.

A while back I picked up an Arnold 25 off of Amazon, they were being heavily discounted - they’re much more expensive now - and I thought why not? I sometimes kick myself for not having picked up a similar discounted Arnold 18 - they’re expensive now too. I have a second hand Wick 2 now and I suspect that it’s functionally much the same as the Arnold 18.

Mostly, with whatever I have, I find that the more I use it the better the results. That’s not to say that an even better mouthpiece wouldn’t somehow help me but rather to say that short of trial and error I’d struggle to select better mouthpieces and that you can gain a lot with just working with what you have. Obviously mine is the opinion of a hobbyist.

[matt g]

Plastic rims do tend to have more “sticky” to them. The Kelly pieces were/are finished well and reasonably smooth, but not as slick as plated brass and certainly not as slick as stainless steel with the titanium oxide coating.

That plastic is polycarbonate. Does anyone have experience with a Delrin rim? Delrin has notably low friction properties, at least in contact with metal and I assume likewise slobbery lips.

Just to be clear - what I got from the Warburton brass mouthpiece anecdote, was that the mouthpiece felt larger after it was plated.

I have a Dillon mouthpiece I like a lot that I believe is from the Warburton era, that's supposed to be "bronze." I am a skeptic on mouthpiece material and I don't think the bronze has anything to do with why I like it (nor do I have much confidence that things labeled "bronze" are really CuSn alloys), but it is a material that holds up pretty well.

Yeah, after plating, the lack of friction made the mouthpiece feel bigger on my face.

I had a Dillon G5B that was a blemish piece. Good mouthpiece and worked well on my MW32. The deal with bronze was added mass without looking dumb. I don’t think it mattered.

[Rick Denney]

Currently, on my Hirsbrunner HBS-193 (kaiser Bb), I'm using a Sellmansberger Orchestra Grande cup with a Symphony backbore. All my blokepieces have a No. 2 Medium Narrow rim. The Symphony backbore dials the zip down just a bit, I think.

On the Holton, I use the Orchestra Grande cup and Grande backbore. That tuba benefits from the slightly tighter backbore. The mouthpiece that came with that tuba was a Holton Revelation 52, which is a toilet bowl that I have nicknamed the Woofmeister. Definitely what you want for the lap sousaphone effect, but not for much of anything else. My favorite mouthpiece before using Joe's was the PT-48, the Anti-Woof, which is supposed to be Helleberg-like but really isn't.

On the B&S F tuba, the Sellmansberger Solo is the only piece that works. Mine is the original one-piece model. That mouthpiece works for an F tuba, but it isn't really just an F-tuba mouthpiece. It also works in my Yamaha YFB-621, which tends to favor mouthpieces used in contrabass tubas.

On the Miraphone 184, I have vacillated between the Sellmansberger Symphony (mine is an old 2-piece version) and a Doug Elliott T cup with T backbore and a gold-plated 2N-132 rim. (That rim is a touch smaller than Joe's No. 2 rim, but not upsettingly so.) For some reason that mouthpiece is just right for that tuba, permitting reasonably good tone and excellent intonation. This mouthpiece has a slightly undersized shank (about .010 smaller than "Standard") which fits the receiver really well, but which Doug originally sized for my York Master.

On the Eastman EBB-534 (a King 2341 clone), I've been all over the map, and I'm not sure I have a favorite. I'm reasonably sure the Shires-branded mouthpiece that comes with it is not the right choice for me. The Grande works pretty well, but so does a plain-old Conn Helleberg.

For the Giardinelli 101, I'm still experimenting. Right now, I have a Doug Elliott R cup, R backbore, and 2N-132 rim. The R cup has a touch less volume than the T cup, which also works well in that tuba. I have one of Joe's new mouthpieces on order that might work really well in either that tuba or in the Eastman. We shall see.

The fleet includes many mouthpieces--I don't sell them because invariably I end up going back to old mouthpieces that used to work from time to time, just to reset my chops a bit. The list: Conn Helleberg 120S, Stofer Geib, PT-48, PT-1 (aka PT-36), Kellyberg (glow-in-the-dark, of course), Laskey 30H, Holton Revelation 52 (for historical purposes only), PT-64, Warburton experimental that was my standard for the Yamaha F tuba before discovering the Solo, and a bunch of others I'm forgetting.

The PT-64 was recommended to me by my teacher at the time (Mike Sanders) for F tuba use, but I think even there it's best suited for F tubas of too large a bore that need to be restored to F-tuba-ness. Such as: The PT-modified B&S models. My late-model B&S Symphonie has the smaller bore in 1, 5 and 6, and can be happy with something of a bit more volume. The PT-64 just didn't work at all in the Yamaha. I originally used it in a "Musica" F tuba, but I rather doubt I was getting an effect that I would want now.

As can be seen, the mouthpieces I use tend to have a more rounding on the bottom than a straight Helleberg--the pure Helleberg shapes are in the backup fleet, not on the road. That lean in the direction of Geib gives the sound a bit more zip, but it's a bit less needed for the 184, the 101, and the 193. Even that generalization falls into the category: "All models are false, even if some are useful."

On the topic of rim feel: I find that gold plating stays smooth for me for as long as it's gold and not worn through to the underlying silver. Plastic is the most grabby but also the least likely to either freeze or burn my lips. Stainless steel seems to preserve its gold-like feel indefinitely. I don't have titanium mouthpieces, because I can't think of a reason to pay for a material that expensive. And even brass is expensive these days compared to steel. I have not tried any nitrided mouthpieces.

Rick "choose mouthpieces on the basis of minimizing weaknesses" Denney

[donn]

This mouthpiece has a slightly undersized shank (about .010 smaller than "Standard") which fits the receiver really well, but which Doug originally sized for my York Master.

Would you happen to have the diameter at end of that shank conveniently at hand?

I'm just a little curious because my impression has been that, if you measure mouthpieces that one would expect to represent the "standard", most of them come out about .010" larger than the supposed standard. Marcinkiewicz H series from 10-15 years ago are the consistent exception, at or perhaps a hair under the commonly cited .520" And Kellyberg was around .520.

[bloke]

@Rick Denney

My short 4/4 Holton is not way off from your King tuba...not at all, and I found that several different mouthpieces seem to play it okay, as long as I have the rim contour that I like on the mouthpiece. I don't like using shallow mouthpieces with it tuba. One that seems to work fine as the new Helleberg II variant that I'm selling, but others work as well.

When I stuck the Holton together, just for fun I put one of those receivers on it that is sort of in between standard and euro. It's one of the older King receivers from "back then". I'm pretty sure that the new style version features the same receiver on the inside but is more plain looking on the outside. In between - around the 1990s when they first came out with the tall 2341, I believe they switched to a rather small and short standard shank receiver.

[Rick Denney]

This mouthpiece has a slightly undersized shank (about .010 smaller than "Standard") which fits the receiver really well, but which Doug originally sized for my York Master.

Would you happen to have the diameter at end of that shank conveniently at hand?

I'm just a little curious because my impression has been that, if you measure mouthpieces that one would expect to represent the "standard", most of them come out about .010" larger than the supposed standard. Marcinkiewicz H series from 10-15 years ago are the consistent exception, at or perhaps a hair under the commonly cited .520" And Kellyberg was around .520.

0.510 for the smaller one that fits better. 0.520 fits okay, but the smaller one fits better. Doug actually stamped the size into the shank after turning a standard one down slightly, but I measured it anyway.

(I've never liked measuring the tips of mouthpieces, which is very difficult to relate to anything important. I'd much rather measure the opening of the receiver, but it is more difficult to measure. My Starrett adjustable bore gauges only go up to 0.500", my fixed precision bore gauges only go up to 0.250", my telescoping T gauges only go down to 3/4", and my drill bits larger than a half inch are in sixteenths--not finely graduated enough--and they are SIlver & Deming bits with a reduced shank and that doesn't help for use as a measuring tool. So, I usually measure the outside of a mouthpiece receiver at the point where it emerges from the receiver, but that's subject to a bit of measurement error, given the taper. The taper is so shallow that thousandths are important, and even tenths. So I'm back to the tip, but I don't like it.)

Rick "agreeing" Denney

[Dents Be Gone!]

I agree, guys. This is the way to go.

[donn]

(I've never liked measuring the tips of mouthpieces, which is very difficult to relate to anything important.
...

At least it relates to the tips of other mouthpieces.

If we make some assumptions

• the tip can be measured accurately
• the taper is always the same
• including receiver taper

... then you can use the shank to measure any point on the receiver, am I right?

[Rick Denney]

(I've never liked measuring the tips of mouthpieces, which is very difficult to relate to anything important.
...

At least it relates to the tips of other mouthpieces.

If we make some assumptions

• the tip can be measured accurately
• the taper is always the same
• including receiver taper

... then you can use the shank to measure any point on the receiver, am I right?

Measuring the diameter of a taper isn't actually that easy. Calipers are most properly used on the flat sections, but you can use the knife edges. But calipers struggle to be accurate to the thousanth, let alone more accurate than that. Micrometers generally have flat anvils that are not that easy to line up on the spot on the taper where the end of the receiver actually landed. Easy to within a thou, but not so easy if you want to be more accurate than that. A Jarno taper is 50 thousandths per inch, so being even a sixteenth off in measurement location is over 0.003" of error. Tapers are notoriously difficult to measure with precision. And 0.010" different in diameter changes the insertion by a fifth of an inch.

Of course, the inside of the receiver is tapered, too, and poses similar problems. But proper bore gauges are easier to use in tapers than measuring the outside of tapers, at least for me, and despite that for straight cylinders the opposite is the case.

Probably doesn't matter. If "standard" is a bit big, I'll chuck it up in the lathe and take some off with emery paper. That's the main thing I like about stainless steel mouthpieces or screw-together mouthpieces with raw shanks--I don't have to worry about going through plating.

But I'd rather have that problem than being slightly too small. A standard-shank Helleberg will bottom out in the receiver of my Hirsbrunner, which is Euro size. Fixing that requires machining the tip of the taper, which I'd rather not do in general. That's probably why mouthpieces are sized a bit large. Either that, or they measure them in raw brass and don't consider the thickness of the plating. Or their tooling is a bit worn and is cutting stuff a bit oversize.

Rick "suspecting traditional factory tolerances aren't as close as one might think" Denney

[bloke]

I cheat and have a receiver here with no built-in counterbore (which I consider useless, as it has no counterbore)...Actually, it was a former "stupid" receiver with only a 3/16" counterbore...which isn't secure enough to use (imo), so I cut it off and cut off a small amount of the receiver part as well.

Knowing (but easily measuring) the small end i.d. of that receiver-like thing, I just insert mouthpieces, measure the part of the mouthpiece that sticks out past the receiver, and do the math...all with my cheapo stay-on-bench-so-they're-right-where-I-always-need-them-and-after-they-fall-on-the-floor-too-many-times-I-throw-them-in-the-trash-and-replace-them calipers.

...but I rarely give a crap about random mouthpieces' final o.d.'s on their shanks.

I'm in here whoopin' on sousaphones, and stickin' 'em back together (after I get the two lowest butterfly latches on their cases opened).

Y'all's so-called "gap" neuroses...?? (I look back in there, I might (?? find the choke-point (with something tapered more gradually than the inside of the receiver), stick in the mouthpiece, do a little bit of arithmetic, hopefully it's about 1/8" to 5/32" back from the g̶a̶p̶ choke-point, and usually try that first. If it seems to sound just a little bit to blatant (yet, for whatever reason, I don't suspect the mouthpiece itself), I might back off just a bit (such as another 1/8") but most of the time I like the 1/8" to 5/32" distance to the choke-point (ie. beginning of the expansion of the mouthpipe tube).

non sequitur:
I tend to believe that some of these instruments with a .656" bore or even .687" bore might 'do' better with mouthpipe tubes with origins of only c. 1/2" i.d. or so... That possibility being the case, I'm thinking that small shank receivers and mouthpieces might be the ticket for some of those instruments (were their mouthpipe tubes to begin that small). Typically, (old school "British" - same as trombone "large/bass") tuba small shank is somewhere just under a half inch (at the small end of the o.d. of the mouthpiece shank...perhaps drifting around the .496" range. My myself built an instrument with a .689" bore valveset (yet the instrument takes its own sweet time getting there). The receiver is a small shank (aka trombone "large"/"bass" shank) size. What does it "do"? It keeps other people from trying out my instrument.

[imnotbrown]

I'm experimenting a bit right now. I played on a PT-50 for years, but recently wanted something a bit smaller just because i was playing more solo style stuff. I swapped to a Laskey 28H, and shortly after that i got access to an F tuba that really diminished the need for solo stuff on my contrabass horn. I use a PT-64 with that. Been practicing a lot of excerpts lately, been testing them with both my 28H, my PT50, and a TU25. Thinking about maybe getting a 32H or possibly a bigger perantucci but overall I'm really not sure. I got time to figure it out.