TromboneChat

https://www.ebay.com/itm/233609393426 What is that? How does it work? Anyone had experience with an adjustable cup?

Adjustable cup mouthpieces are mentioned in Ed Kleinhammer's "The Art of Trombone Playing." Some of them look like this.

I'd try before I buy, especially for ~$300.

The modern (and cheaper, and better) approach is to have a screw rim and a couple underparts.

There are a bunch of patents from the early to mid 1900's on adjustable cup mouthpieces. Some are spring operated so they get shallower when you use more mouthpiece pressure.
I haven't seen this particular one.
The whole idea doesn't really work very well.

I think I would not want a cup that changes by itself depending on pressure. It is hard to play anyway.

/Tom

Did anybody make a cup insert?

The modular screw rim and cup swap makes sense but I've wondered if you could just make the cup really deep then snap in inserts until you're shallow enough. It seems like that would have beee a logical evolutionary step on the way to the modular.

paulyg wrote: ↑Mon Jun 08, 2020 1:07 am Adjustable cup mouthpieces are mentioned in Ed Kleinhammer's "The Art of Trombone Playing." Some of them look like this.

I'd try before I buy, especially for ~$300.

The modern (and cheaper, and better) approach is to have a screw rim and a couple underparts.

Scott Hartman's mouthpiece system addresses this by having threads outside the cup and shank, and having threaded rings of different weights. It's really interesting to hear the different effects between two weights that are only 1/8 of an inch apart in width.

How about this 1 1/2G adjustable cup from Giardinelli in the late 60's ? It worked great !

timothy42b wrote: ↑Mon Jun 08, 2020 6:38 am Did anybody make a cup insert?

The modular screw rim and cup swap makes sense but I've wondered if you could just make the cup really deep then snap in inserts until you're shallow enough. It seems like that would have beee a logical evolutionary step on the way to the modular.

I have a Stomvi "Comby System" which is a rim (gold plated) a deep body and 2 shanks- 1 large and 1 small. There are then 5 gold plated cups of varying depths. The 12 rims go from28.57mm to 23.54mm which are equivalent to Bach 1 to 22.

Mine has a 4 rim which is between a Bach 4 and 5 and I am working with the medium C cup and the shallow E cup at present. I have only been able to try it at home because of the lock down but it seems to be working quite well.

Cheers and stay safe

Stewbones43

I haven't seen it much with trombone mouthpieces, but Houser Tuba mouthpieces have delrin "extenders" that allow one to tweak the cup depth of their modular mouthpieces.

Many years ago I tried making extender rings to go one size deeper, and decided that it really didn't work well enough for what I wanted. When you take a good mouthpiece and change the depth but keep the shape the same, it really only makes it play badly. Kind of like the usual effect of drilling the throat bigger.

If I see it correctly, Laetzsch mouthpieces have an interesting concept here.
They seem to allow varying cup depth to a degree by using different rims, e.g.:
https://www.xn--ltzsch-shop-l8a.com/en/ ... mbone.html

I have never played these mouthpieces myself, but would hope that they know what they do, looking at the prices...

The thing with that, like with the delrin inserts, is that you are pretty much extending it into a cylinder. It doesn't have the nice taper and shape you'd get with a fully threaded rim.

The shape of the cup is very important. Arbitrarily deepening it is probably not going to work

Years ago I tried filling a cup with wax and scraping it out a layer at a time.

The results weren't good. On the other hand my playing was pretty bad then too, just coming back from a couple decades off, so who knows?

timothy42b wrote: ↑Wed Jun 10, 2020 6:32 am Years ago I tried filling a cup with wax and scraping it out a layer at a time.

The results weren't good. On the other hand my playing was pretty bad then too, just coming back from a couple decades off, so who knows?

This is sort of how Denis Wick got into mouthpiece design.

harrisonreed wrote: ↑Wed Jun 10, 2020 7:43 am

timothy42b wrote: ↑Wed Jun 10, 2020 6:32 am Years ago I tried filling a cup with wax and scraping it out a layer at a time.

The results weren't good. On the other hand my playing was pretty bad then too, just coming back from a couple decades off, so who knows?

This is sort of how Denis Wick got into mouthpiece design.

Wait...............by playing badly????????????

No haha! But he used an additive technique with some sort of coating in the cup of a mouthpiece, and then carved away at it until he had his 4AL or whatever his signature piece was.

Elow, when you mentioned monstrosity, I thought of this:

As a quick background on this thread I remember an adjustable cup trumpet mouthpiece, first produced by Walter Sarad back in the early 1960's. If memory serves me I think these mouthpieces were originally meant for trumpet teachers to work with their students in finding a good cup depth for them. Much later, in the 1990's I was given one as a gift by a local music store that I did a lot of business with. It was terrible in so many ways, but it was certainly a great conversation starter for brass players. It was serving as a paperweight on my band office desk when it disappeared over one summer break. I never found out who took it.

I had a Sarad adjustable cup. Rim was about a Bach7. At it`s deepest it was around a Bach depth.
At it`s shallowest it was around a Bach 12E.
If you had OCD, This mouthpiece would drive you nuts