Morgan Fry
Senior Member
- Messages
- 446
- Locality
- Leeds
Rather, the matter of whether mouthpiece matter, erm, matters --
OK, this isn't an invitation to beat a dead horse -- it's an opportunity to find out for yourself whether you can tell the difference.
Nobody has really done a very thorough study of this, in part because nobody markets mouthpieces that are identical except for the material.
So I made some.
Several mouthpieces, identical in every possible way -internal dimensions, external dimensions, facing, everything -- out of some different materials (I don't want to skew the results by revealing how many mouthpieces or made of what, except to say at least one is brass and at least one isn't) I took them down to Dave O'Higgins' studio in London. We recorded multiple clips of him playing each mouthpiece with otherwise the same setup.
8 randomly selected pairs of clips of Dave playing the same tune. Some are different clips with the same mouthpiece, some are different clips with different mouthpieces. If we get enough participation it might be interesting to see whether we have a significant result.
It might not be the most scientifically rigorous possible test, but I think it's more important to see what happens in real life, with real players playing real music.
The blog post
The Mouthpiece Challenge
The details
Give it a go and let me know what you think!
OK, this isn't an invitation to beat a dead horse -- it's an opportunity to find out for yourself whether you can tell the difference.
Nobody has really done a very thorough study of this, in part because nobody markets mouthpieces that are identical except for the material.
So I made some.
Several mouthpieces, identical in every possible way -internal dimensions, external dimensions, facing, everything -- out of some different materials (I don't want to skew the results by revealing how many mouthpieces or made of what, except to say at least one is brass and at least one isn't) I took them down to Dave O'Higgins' studio in London. We recorded multiple clips of him playing each mouthpiece with otherwise the same setup.
8 randomly selected pairs of clips of Dave playing the same tune. Some are different clips with the same mouthpiece, some are different clips with different mouthpieces. If we get enough participation it might be interesting to see whether we have a significant result.
It might not be the most scientifically rigorous possible test, but I think it's more important to see what happens in real life, with real players playing real music.
The blog post
The Mouthpiece Challenge
The details
Give it a go and let me know what you think!