Vintage horn needs a vintage mouthpiece? It’s complicated.
There is a kind of “received wisdom” among saxophone players that vintage instruments need huge chambered vintage mouthpieces to play in tune. This is mostly a load of tosh. The main point is to get a mouthpiece that is just the right combination of a variety of factors. Chamber size and shank length being the most important.
If you think about the construction of a saxophone, you’ll notice one big difference between it and other woodwinds such as flute and clarinet. Those two are tubular whereas the saxophone is conical. All the way from the bell up to the end of the neck, apart from where there is a tenon joint between neck and body. You’ll also be aware that the sound of a saxophone is very different from a clarinet even though the reed and mouthpiece area the same. “But of course,” I hear you say, “that’s because a clarinet is wood and a saxophone is metal!” But no, there are many metal clarinets and they don’t sound like saxophones. There are plastic saxophones and they don’t sound like clarinets (as proven by Charlie Parker at his Massey Hall concert album).
So the main reason for the difference in sound is the conical bore. It isn’t just a different tone, it causes a different tonal response. For example on a clarinet it is no problem, even for a beginner, playing the very low notes at pianissimo. But on a saxophone those notes tend to honk out a lot unless you have either a very closed tip opening, very soft reed or exceptionally well developed control of your embouchure and airstream.
BUT
(and it’s a big BUT) in an ideal world, for the best acoustics re:sound and intonation, this conical bore would be a perfect geometric cone. But, in geometry, a cone tapers all the way down to a point. This is a bit of a fly in the ointment. There is no way of having a perfect cone on a saxophone. This is because we need to put a mouthpiece on the end.
So what happens is a compromise. The cone is cut off at the end of the neck, where there is a nice bit of cork for the mouthpiece to fit onto. Ideally the volume of the inside of the mouthpiece equals the volume of the end of the cone that would otherwise be there. Even then, it’s not scientifically perfect. It cannot be the same shape as the inside of what we might call the “missing end of the cone.”
This image shows approximately what a saxophone would look like if the cone was complete. Compare with the “missing cone” replaced with a mouthpiece:
It’s not difficult to imagine that the mouthpiece would need to be a lot fatter and have a really huge chamber if it had to have enough volume to replace that long cone. Too big to get in our mouths or else maybe it would need to look something like this:
But then we may not like the sound of such an “oversized” huge chamber. It would probably sound lifeless and stuffy. Also it would be a problem for the tone hole positions. Imagine if all that missing cone was actually there, the tone holes would need to start a lot closer to the cone’s apex in order to fulfil their function of changing the length of the instrument’s vibrating air column to get different pitches. In this case they would probably need to start actually on the mouthpiece. (NB: this needs acoustical fact-checking)
What this shows is that what we have is obviously a bit of a compromise. Or maybe more than just a “bit of a compromise.”
What about the old days of “pickle barrel” mouthpieces?
Good question. They were fine and dandy back in the early days of the saxophone when people wanted a mellow sound. But then players and manufacturers found that by reducing chamber size and increasing baffle height, they could play the instrument with a brighter tone and therefore a lot louder. This meant that in a big band the saxophone could compete with trumpets and trombones. And when rock and roll came along the saxophone had a better chance of competing with an electric guitar. But it seems the guitar may have won that battle.
Why not make the mouthpiece longer instead of making the chamber fatter?
Another good question, but this is where it all gets a bit complicated. And scientific.
What we often find with smaller chamber mouthpieces is you need to pull them out a bit more on the neck to tune the notes (based on a note in the low/midrange). Because there is less of the shank covering the cork, that extra bit of internal bore adds to the chamber volume to help make up the missing cone. In this case we now basically have a longer saxophone. It seems to be that this affects the higher register more than the lower register. If you want to delve more deeply into the acoustics, you will find that:
- Length of air column (in the cone or tube) affects the high register more.
- Volume of air column affects the low register more.
If the air column is too long it mainly affects notes above G, which may tend to be flat. But you often need to push larger chambered mouthpieces on more to tune to a low/midrange note . This may not affect the low notes so much (as they are affected more by volume rather than length) but can make the high notes sharp due to the shorter air column.
So:
- Thin mouthpiece pulled off the neck to tune = high notes are flatter relative to low notes
- Fat mouthpiece pushed on to tune = high notes are sharper relative to low notes because air column is too short
We need a compromise.
If you’ll pardon the gratuitous advertising plug, we have found that PPT mouthpieces seem to have just the right size chamber and baffle and length combination to work well on vintage instruments. The tenor was developed using Conn 10m, the baritone was developed using a Martin handcraft. Feedback has been pleasingly good in regard to working well on vintage instruments. Or as I prefer top call them “senior.”
It gets even more complicated
To make things more complicated mouthpiece position also affects the “correctness” of the octave vent positions. In fact these positions (one on the neck and the other on the body) are themselves a compromise. The octave vent helps to cause a fundamental note to instead sound its first overtone, which is one octave higher. The ideal position of the vent to do this is half the length of the air column. This doesn’t mean half way down the saxophone, it means half way down towards the key that is opened to play a specific note. And remember, where we measure from cannot be the ideal because that would be the tip of the cone which isn’t there. It has been replaced by the mouthpiece.
Octave vent positions:
- To play an upper octave F the ideal octave vent position is half way towards the open tone hole that allows a F to sound. The key we open to do that is E.
- To play an upper octave Bb the ideal octave vent position is half way towards the open tone hole that allows a Bb to sound. The key we open to do that is A. (assuming Bb fingered with bis key)
So in an ideal world each note would have to have its own octave key. As this would be impractical the compromise is to have two keys, one on the neck for A up to C# and one on the body for Ab and below. In the old days players had to operate these separately, but since the beginning of last century they are switched automatically by a single very clever octave key mechanism. One day I will invent a saxophone with electronic key touches and each note will have its own octave vent operated automatically.
Has this helped you play your old Conn in tune? Maybe, but at the very least hopefully you have a better understanding of why you don’t.