What mouthpiece gap?

[MiBrassFS]

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[bloke]

Trumpet players definitely led the way on such activity… others have followed… including the tuba euph crowd. Doesn’t seem to be any discernible between groups anymore. There’s a lot tuba tooters with trumpet tooter attitudes.

The toobuh playuh artiste Facebook pages crack me up.

[MiBrassFS]

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[bloke]

That explains the attitude of some of them.
... It ties in with how a bunch of people in subsequent generations turned out after parents and "educators" read Benjamin Spock's baby book.
My high school mentor (the amazing player who was nothing more than a student a year older than me, yet all grown up because his mother was a widow and he had to earn money to help his mom, as well as the hours he put into practicing on the sousaphone at home every night so he could end up getting a job in a military band after high school, and not end up getting sent to Vietnam) pointed out to me how important it was to not play things in front of other people that weren't ready to be performed. .. and on those pages I see a whole bunch of that, except it's not just walking past someone one time hearing them practice, Rather, it's a permanent record of it on the internet.
I believe - since I was already being hired as a teenager to play solo guitar gigs for cocktail parties and things like that - I understood that pretty well. It has to do with others' first and single impressions of one's abilities.

summary:
- "This is how I sound so far on the blah blah sonata"... Is a huge no-no.
- "an epically inexperienced student being told to view themselves as an accomplished professional" - an even more of a huge no-no
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I don't watch many of those "this guy study with Arnold Jacobs" YouTube videos, but I did watch one the other day (whereby a close friend of mine was being interviewed), and it was mentioned by the interviewer that - when Jacob's practiced in practice rooms at Curtis (as opposed to somewhere away from other musicians) he avoided practicing things there that he could not already play well.

[MiBrassFS]

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[the elephant]

My mom owned a copy of Dr. Spock's book. After reading it cover to cover she spanked me with it.

[bloke]

hilarious

[MiBrassFS]

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[bloke]

If I remember the story on Curtis and practicing is that he didn’t want a particular conductor that would walk through the area hearing him not sound his best. Mild “CRS” in play on that one…

By the same token, sitting in a professional ensemble waiting for a rehearsal to begin (or - God forbid - a concert) and someone sitting there working on a solo piece or - even worse - an excerpt that they haven't perfected: Yikes.

THE WORST: playing through passages in the actual scheduled works on stage just before the concert...

... I heard a tuba player (just before a concert of a full-time orchestra quite a few years ago) play an A-flat at the top of the staff on their 6/4 C tuba over and over and over and over again on stage and right before the concert. I bent over to my daughter and said "They're going to miss that pitch in the concert." It came time for that pitch to be played I nudged her, and - roughly ten seconds later - the tuba player missed the pitch.

[1 Ton Tommy]

To me most of the techie add-on stuff is so much BS. Heavy valve caps to produce a more focused sound? Please! My arm is tired enough at the end of a gig playing a standard light trumpet. And then there's the ugly bracing and such on "modern" trumpets. I'll stick with my old Benge with its non-existent MP gap. I haven't even invested in a reverse lead pipe. I just play the sucker, it does the rest as Eldon Benge intended. He knew more than I do about trumpets and mouth pieces.

On stage I head for the zone where the notes disappear, the horn disappears and I'm just playing to the 6-YO kids dancing on the floor having escaped their mothers. That's when my sound is best and my solo lines are best. I'm not trying to spell changes in my head as I play and I don't give a rip about the MP gap. I take my two choruses and hand it off to the lead guitar or whomever.

Tuba playing in a small group is way different. We're on all the time trying not to step on anybody's solo, keep on the beat with the drummer or rush him if he's falling behind and play the roots. Maybe take a solo, if somebody asks.

But then there are arrangements! One this season was for the whole 40-piece orchestra to do "Sway" in D- with the chorus coming in the second time around. The conductor rented the arrangement. The chorus needed D-, up (or down) from a trumpet chart I have in G-. The trumpet player was 8 months pregnant and refused to even attempt to top out at trumpet E above high C. So the arranger rewrote it to save her from a premature event or worse. I just sat back and played my rhythm in octaves as written. I could have done better left to my own devices but why fight it given all the arrangements with bass trombone parts I'd already done that evening.

Some days I wish I was back in the trumpet section. So the week before the "Sway" concert I and one of the chorus tenors who plays guitar did "Sway" for the food bank benefit, in G-, along with a couple of pop tunes with me on trumpet.

A year earlier the 40-piece did "Sweet Georgia Brown, again with the chorus coming in the second time around. The tenor sax also plays in a medium band, not big enough to be a big band but too big to be a jazz combo. He did the arrangement for Sweet Georgia. One--five one--five etc. in G for me. On my old Eb I can't play those low Gs in a fast rhythm so I didn't; and made up a bass line I could play. At the break tenorman calls me out publicly for not playing his arrangement. "You're supposed to play the roots." " I can't hit your low Gs," says I. "I'm playing the first inversions." Nothing more was said and I played a nice bassline to support the trumpets. I know pretty well what they're doing.

[opus37]

Boy this goes way back. I think it might have been Allen Baer who was into this. The gap, as I remember it, was the distance between the end of the mouthpiece and the start of the lead pipe tubing. You were supposed to measure this and having it be like a couple of millimeters. Anyway that’s what I remember which could be very wrong. This was to affect the sound of the horn because the transition between the mouth piece and the lead pipe was somehow very critical.

[donn]

It isn't an unreasonable idea. I mean, if you think the backbore of a mouthpiece makes a difference -- that's a sort of semiconical shape with very subtle (if at all) curved profile. Then that abruptly transitions to a sort of randomly dimensioned chamber resulting from the position of the shank end vs. the beginning of the leadpipe. It doesn't make sense that one of these justifies very critical attention to dimensional detail, and then the next one right after it can be any old way.

We have just gotten kind of hung up on what may have been the original conception of this picture, where there's a step down in diameter between the receiver and leadpipe. Because this feature often doesn't occur in tubas, the word "gap" is not very well chosen. But several tapers and diameters come together there anyway, whatever you want to call it, and it's perfectly sensible to look for improvements here. It isn't like clocking, or whatever the gimmick was that supposedly bridged resonance between the leadpipe and the shank.

[bloke]

I'm sure I've already posted too much in this thread (as with most threads), but this has always been a subtle difference for me. Other mouthpiece features - and the rim width and contour itself being probably the most noticeable difference, even more so than cup opening - are far more significant to me as far as how much a mouthpiece affects playing characteristics as opposed to insertion depth.

I've already said this, but I think the only insertion depth that is really something that will mess up playing characteristics is when the end of a mouthpiece goes past the choke point into the mouth pipe tube itself... but hell, the instrument still "works" even then.

I've drawn crappy pictures before to show this, but draw your own picture. The farther back the end of a mouthpiece is from the choke point (where the mouth pipe tube begins), the more reverse taper of the mouthpiece receiver is revealed and becomes part of the bore... Back bore tapers of mouthpieces get larger whereas tapers of receivers obviously get smaller.

When the end of a mouthpiece hits the choke point right on the nose, and particularly if a mouthpiece end is quite thin with little drop off, it's often fun to play a mouthpiece (assuming it's a good mouthpiece) like that which is fit in that manner... but it might not be exactly the sound that someone's looking for (though I believe players can adjust their sound to the type of sound they're looking for way more than players are sometimes given credit for being able to do... Every time we hand our instrument off to someone else and it sounds totally different with the same mouthpiece, we are reminded of this).