Last year I figured out that many of my mouthpieces were flat in the high range on my main horns. I could make them all work, sure, but it was like lifting weights to get the intonation up.
Only a small subset (especially the vintage Moosewood mouthpieces) were in tune in the upper range. An article talking about that may be found here. At that time my thinking was I had just been adjusting the pitch up on those mouthpieces when I used them in the past, and it was time to move on from them.
Rethinking the sharp high range
However, I’ve just learned some new things about my own mouthpieces and horns in the past month.
Backing up, this topic comes up all the time. Lots of students are sharp in the high range. Better sharp than out of tune, as they say! I’ve operated under the assumption that they needed to tune their horn differently. And often the horn is tuned sharp on the Bb side, so that’s part of it. (And often students are confused what the slides do! More on that here).
Fast forward to the past few weeks. I finished up a project, building a customized Kruspe-style horn, and, as I got used to it, I was pretty happy with it — except that it played sharp in the high range, and I could not see a way to alter that fact. But … then I remembered the “flat” mouthpieces and tried them again — and found one that I like a lot and fixed the issue. It’s flat on my other horns in the high range, but solid on this horn.
Interlude: A medium bell custom Kruspe?
At the end of the semester, with it not yet too hot to use my garage shop, I’ve been mainly working on three horn projects. I completed the bodies of two natural horn conversions (which came out great!), made two crooks and a coupler, and rebuilt the horn seen below. (For more on the rebuilding of this horn, see my personal blog starting here).
It’s a probably late 1970s Mirafone Kruspe body, which in addition to being apart in two places had a very large bell on it. I switched the bell out with one from a probably 1960s era Mirafone single horn (the body of that is being used for yet another project I’ll get to in the fall). It’s a lovely (if a bit heavy) medium sized bell, hand hammered and with a garland. I was able to get it to mate up perfectly with the body, and when I put it back together I modified the bracing as much as I could to match my vintage Kruspe. To that I added a vintage Lawson leadpipe I had picked up used a few years ago. The person I got it from said they were told that it had been bent for a single F. As to this customized Mirafone body, it was an almost perfect fit! The end result is a horn that I feel like I almost can’t miss notes on, with the type of sound you would expect of a Geyer style horn.
When I started testing the horn, however, I fought the horn mightily, as I felt the high range was sharp no matter what. And to my mind it should be better than that with a Lawson pipe.
Different horns have different tendencies
What I came to realize clearly was that this horn has a different basic intonation tendency than that of my Patterson Geyer, my Paxman 25A, or my vintage Kruspe.
Relatively speaking, the Mirafone Kruspe I just customized has a tuning that widens out as I go higher, where my other horns close in, if that makes sense. Even with the two sides balanced well at third space C on all the horns.
I remember actually one of my teachers making this same point, that a Kruspe style horn (such as an 8D) has intonation that opens up wider in extreme ranges, and a Geyer closes in.
Mind blown
So, back to my recent practice, I had several mouthpieces easily at hand that I felt (from tests last year) played flat in the high range. Mouthpieces that I liked in the past, but could no longer use. Testing them systematically again, among them I’ve found several options that almost totally fix the sharp high range. Which I didn’t expect!
As I used a Lawson pipe in the past on a pre-letter 8D (when I was Third Horn in Nashville and shortly after), the Mirafone Kruspe, although new to me, overall it feels like an old friend — now that I’m also using mouthpieces that suit it.
(Can the Kruspe-style horn come back if made with a high quality medium bell? I’d like to think so; they can sound like a Geyer with this type of bell.)
Which is all to say, different horns will sometimes need different mouthpieces to settle in for intonation. Because that same mouthpiece that feels great on the Mirafone Kruspe is still flat in the upper range on my other double horns.
Why? I think it’s something to do with the backbore shape, but I can’t say exactly what. Thousandths of an inch type stuff that would take ages for me to figure out. It’s black magic, almost. The sort of thing there is no reference book for; you would have to experiment carefully with various parameters on a few dozen mouthpieces and see what they do.
This goes back again to another of my old posts, you need to own at least 5 horn mouthpieces, only then will you maybe have enough options to be able to scope out things like this.
In conclusion
If you feel your horn tends flat in the high range — or tends sharp! — you need to find a mouthpiece that helps correct the tendency. They are out there!
