This diagram reperesents three stock shapes for Osmun horn mouthpieces. The shaded area is our standard blank. Then green lines show our #2 blank. It adds about twenty percent more mass to the standard blank and has a little more core and stability at the expense (we think) of tone color. The red lines outline our heavy blank, which is fifty percent heavier that the standard one. It is extremely stable and focused but the extra weight makes it more fatiguing to play, especially in the upper register. The heavy blank can also be supplied with ribs, which lessens the weight and increases the surface area.
January 25, 2010 at 10:30 am |
Bob,
Just a word on why adding ribs to a mouthpiece might make a great deal of difference. I have two CF Schmidt horns of roughly the same vintage, one is very free blowing, the other (you know the horn) isn’t. I also have 2 versions of the same model mouthpiece, whereby the inner contours are the same, but one is just the “heavy” blank and the other has the ribs that you cut for me. On the free blowing horn, the heavy blank works really well and the ribbed form isn’t very good at all. On the unfocussed horn, it’s completely the opposite situation: the heavy blank almost seems like just so much dead weight and the horn doesn’t project, but the ribbed form actually makes this horn very playable (and it’s the only mouthpiece in my collection that does anything for that horn). And the fact that sacrificing some mass for a couple of ribs to get extraordinary results is pretty fascinating, wouldn’t you agree?
January 25, 2010 at 11:28 am |
So what is it? More surface? Less weight? Until someone does some scientific studies (attention all you physics majors out there)we won’t really know. Until then I’ll continue to make them on order.
January 26, 2010 at 9:58 am |
Being that the lighter “standard” mouthpiece which served as a basis for the mouthpieces described above / same inner contours / is equally not as effective on both horns, I’m not sure it’s all about less weight. My intuition tells me that the concept at work is similar to “wing loading”, where the surface area of the wing vs. the weight and drag of the airframe dictate the performance of the aircraft. The ratio has to be just right to give you the results that you need. Or perhaps the two mouthpieces may be generate different pitch fundamentals in and of themselves that resonate differently in each horn. My 2 lira.