This web site offers you four controls with which to tweak the cup of your mouthpiece, these allowing you to adjust the cup’s diameter, depth, the vertical and horizontal positions of the inflection point and the shoulder angle. These nature of these parameters is shown in the diagram below.
The rest of this page describes how the shape of the cup influences the performance of the mouthpiece but you may also jump to the pages describing these parameters directly by clicking below:
Access the Cup Diameter Description and Tutorial
Access the Cup Depth Description and Tutorial
Access the Inflection Point Description and Tutorial
Access the Shoulder Angle Description and Tutorial
When discussing any aspects of an instrument’s mouthpiece, it must be accepted that all the elements present in a mouthpiece contribute to its usefulness to the player but these pages are organised into sections based upon the editable features on this web site.
A key element in a mouthpiece cup is its volume and it’s pretty obvious when looking around a band or orchestra that the larger instruments have larger mouthpieces with larger volumes. This is partly because of the lower frequencies which need to be generated by the lips when playing these instruments. As the player’s lips need to vibrate at a lower frequency, they need to be freer to vibrate over a larger width on the larger mouthpieces and not be as constrained as on a trumpet or cornet. In addition, the lower frequencies have longer wavelengths than higher ones so, if the mouthpiece’s resonant cavity is shallower than a quarter of a given wavelength, it cannot be established within the cup’s volume.
The total volume of a mouthpiece cup is determined by both the cup’s diameter across the top, its depth and, to some extent its shape. Thus, a cup may have a hemispherical cross section as on some trumpet mouthpieces or it may be conical as on a French horn.
To a degree, the diameter of the cup which suits an individual player on a given instrument is somewhat dependent upon the structure of their lips and teeth. Some players with thicker lips may well be better off with a slightly-larger mouthpiece cup diameter.
Four Tenor-Pitch Mouthpiece Styles
On a given instrument, the form of the cup may have a profound effect on the sort of sound which is produced when it is used on an appropriate instrument. For instance, a deeper cup, because it is able to support lower frequencies, will allow these to be introduced into the sound spectrum, yielding a richer tone. Such a cup will also allow lower notes to be played more easily and with a richer, fuller tone. On the other hand, because of this support for lower notes, such a mouthpiece will call for better muscular control of the lips when playing higher notes. Thus a deep-cup mouthpiece will prove a challenge to a beginner when it comes to playing in the high register.
Shallower cups will be more-suited to the beginner, enabling them to control the sound more, requiring less effort to play and, therefore being much less tiring. Because they favour the establishment of the higher frequencies, they enable a brighter sound to be produced.
Very shallow cups tend to have a much brighter tone, making them more suitable for jazz work and situations where the player has to stand out. Their ability to help in the higher register re-inforces this suitability
The smaller volume of the shallower-cupped mouthpieces provides the player with a certain amount of freedom when it comes to moving quickly between notes.
Cup diameters on brass instruments range from around 15.5 mm (0.61 in) on the soprano cornet to around 32 mm (1.3 in) on the tuba or sousaphone. In spite of the large difference in diameters of mouthpieces, there is relatively little difference in their overall lengths. What does change is the proportional shape of their cups with the depth of a trumpet cup being, in general, only about half of their cup diameter while the ratio on a tuba mouthpiece is typically different with the cup depth varying enormously, their cup depth being between 75% and 200% of their cup diameter.
The other hugely important factor in mouthpiece cup design is the degree of conicity in a particular mouthpiece. In the drawing at the top of this page, it can be seen how different the French horn mouthpiece is from all the others, it being very conical and having a very smooth transition between the cup and backbore. These features interact with the shape of the French horn itself to give the combination a smooth, mellow tone, losing all the brightness and bite of the shallow, spherical-cupped trumpet mouthpieces and proving a smoothed-out articulation when tonguing notes.