What’s special about a $300+ mouthpiece?

[Hamertones]

So just curious. I see crazy Tuba mouthpieces like Laskey, Shilke and Dennis Wick that are approaching $400!! Gold plated no less. Is there anything to this musically or are they just for show?

[Schlepporello]

That really depends on the mouthpiece. A lot of us are not satisfied by a Bach 18 or a Hellberg mouthpiece. And several of us have gleefully switched from a silver-plated brass mouthpiece to a stainless steel mouthpiece or even a more exotic one like Titanium. The last two mouthpieces I bought were Stainless Steel and I most certainly paid a premium (to me) price for them. But I won't trade them for anything else. That being said, I also have a few older mouthpieces which I consider to be collectible and I will not consider selling them either.

[bloke]

Gold plating cost a whole bunch these days. I strongly advise against it, particularly considering how temporary it is.

You can get inaccurate (I bought them, so I've actually looked at them) Chinese knockoffs of stuff like Bach 22 and Conn Helleberg mouthpieces for +/- $30 on eBay sometimes and sometimes not. Mouthpieces that people have heard of tend to be +/- $100.

My three-piece modular stainless steel stuff is usually $250 - $300 (from regular to stuff that's optional), I've come out with more affordable and slightly dimensions-altered versions of some of my most popular designs, along with some that are now just exclusively brass. My one piece silver plated brass stuff is usually $175, and my silver plated brass stuff that is threaded to fit my stainless steel rims is usually $150 (+ rim). Stainless steel is the answer to gold plating, because it's much more resistant to either scuffing or wear than silver or gold-plated brass, so it stays smooth like a gold-plated mouthpiece feels (when brand new) forever, whereas even subtle beard stubble will scratch and wear away gold plating. My rims are even offered with a titanium coating over the stainless steel that looks just like gold plating and so far I've seen no evidence that it's ever going to wear off.

So I guess there is stuff you can find that will play a tuba for about $30 or $35 to $300 and stuff that I offer with my name on it from about $175 to $300. You mentioned that you've seen some $400 things that other people sell... But I'm also wondering if those were gold-plated versions, as - again - gold plating has become so very expensive.

I guess I'd be grateful for one of those $30 Chinese ones if I forgot my mouthpiece at a gig, but I would probably rather wish that I had one of those acrylic Kelly mouthpieces somewhere in the back of my car's glove box.

You can get a complete clarinet outfit from Walmart for $90, but there are also some $10,000 clarinets.

People buy both, so there must be at least some subtle differences and the cheapest stuff and the nicest stuff.

One last thing to consider is that - between 2021 and 2024 - the value of the dollar, for most things we buy - has fallen to about half. It hasn't affected things that are not essential (such as mouthpieces and instruments) as much as it's affected everything else (actually very little) but that still leaves a little.

I believe - with an instrument or its mouthpiece (ones that aren't the cheapest or those that are just good enough to work), what people are looking for are control of playing and ease of playing.

[donn]

Of course the price will be a psychological factor. There's nothing really wrong with that. We're artists, not technicians, and a couple hundred dollars is not much in the musical instrument scene.

It isn't like some things in that world, where a $2000 guitar is more or less guaranteed to be better than a $400 guitar. A Faxx Helleberg or Bach 18 copy is as good as it gets - popular mouthpieces because they have for generations suited many people's faces.

On the other hand it isn't necessarily like they're robbing you blind. Schilke (to take your first example) Helleberg II is a little over $200 I see, and milling something like that to any standard and getting it plated, that's going to involve some people's time. Faxx has an economy of scale going on where they have probably invested in a more industrial operation. To be clear, I really have no idea - for all I know, Schilke may farm it out to Faxx and just add a hefty charge. Denis Wick is already part of a larger firm that might be tempted to do something like that.

[bloke]

Most any tuba mouthpiece is going to play a tuba.
For those of us who remember the Astro nylon cup mouthpieces. That's what I had to use for the better part of the year as a boy in public school junior high band. Those always ended up leaking between the cup and the shank, but - with enough masking tape and electrical tape and duct tape and other tape - they don't leak very much, and a player can still get a sound out of a tuba with one of those things.

Old cup, rim, and throat designs are tried-and-functional. I'm not sure that a whole bunch of them are necessarily tried-and-true, but those would seem to be true deserve to be emulated, and with experimentation towards making them even better being worthy pursuits.

Though King and a couple of other manufacturers really seemed to have the B-flat tuba intonation thing figured out, many of the really old tubas (though some of them produce a pleasing tone - whether those tones come close to fitting in the scale or not) feature pretty wretched intonation characteristics, but some (not all) of the newer models - via a combination of trial-and-error and technology - feature a lot more player friendly intonation compromises - with seemingly less improvement (in the intonation department) being in bass tuba bugle taper designs. The 1980s - 1990's weren't particularly friendly to upper model tuba designs (nor other wind instruments), whereby the mentality was that everything that can possibly be made bigger is better, and the same mentality bled over to mouthpieces. Just now, the thinking about these things is just beginning to recover towards the sensible, but sensibleness still doesn't seem to be the rule. (I tend to suspect that the stumbling block with improving bass tuba intonation characteristics very much is that the mentality dominating these many of these designs is still stuck in the bigger-is-better 1990s train of thought.)

In regards to mouthpieces (the thread topic), gigantic throat diameters are a workaround, but there's a price to pay. Rims with a tremendous amount of surface contact or very tight turning inner edges tend to cement the player to the mouthpiece, and my personal opinion is that this is not a good thing. If we look at stringed instrument bows, the frog is not shaped like a hammer handle. Rather, it's quite minimal and - as important as the bow is to stringed instrument playing - the contact points between the human hand and the bow frog are quite minimal. (Yes, the German style string bass bow frog is larger and designed for a different angle of hand contact - which defines it as a little bit easier to apply more pressure to the larger and longer strings, but even those are only chosen by roughly half of bass players.)

With tuba mouthpieces, though, extremes in design characteristics are not always bad things. In some cases the shallowest cups available aren't quite shallow enough to play particular types of instruments as well as they can be played. The deepest cups tend to be used by too many players (in my opinion), but those can also address particular instruments' shortcomings. For quite a few years, I owned a contrabass tuba that was wonderful but just a little bit too gritty in the low range at top volume levels, and an extra deep cup smoothed the sound out (defining it as more marketable) yet without muting the sound. Maybe it should be noted that I didn't combine an extra deep cup with an extra large throat, which is a combination I personally view as flawed with many mouthpieces on the market. A repeated advice that's assumed to be a truism is "Find a good mouthpiece and stick with it." I've never embraced that advice, because how am I supposed to know if there's something better than good if I don't investigate what's available...and the same goes for instruments, obviously. It sounds like I'm trying to coax everyone into buying a bunch of mouthpieces (and far too many people own far too many mouthpieces), but I'm really not. I'm just encouraging people to always continue to be in search of something better. Hold on to the "good" for a while until that which is deemed to be better is confirmed to be better. Then decide whether or not to build one of these 100 mouthpiece collections, or sell off the "good" (yet judged to be not-as-good) in order to be able to continue to define oneself as sane (and the same goes for tuba collections).

[gocsick]

In the grand scheme of things the market size for ribs mouthpieces isn't really big... beyond the Bachs, Hellebergs, and Tucci pieces that all the high school players use.

I have a fair amount of experience with getting small batches of parts machined and finished.... and I can tell you that Bloke is either getting a sweetheart deal from a buddy and/or taking a fairly small profit margin on his pieces. I believe he said the price of first run of one piece OG Ultimate basically just covered his costs plus a few extra mouthpieces for inventory.. So if you consider a small manufacturer paying typical rates for machining, taking a more standard markup, plus the retailer/distributor markup etc... it is not surprising to see prices on more boutique pieces at $400..

[bloke]

Silver plated brass is annoying to manufacture, in that - when a stainless steel mouthpiece is buffed - it's done, but when a brass mouthpiece to be silver plated is buffed, it's not done. Polished finishes smudge very easily on brass, and brass tarnishes very quickly. They have to be wrapped up very carefully to avoid smudges and fingerprints and even being smudged by the wrapping material.

Shipping them to Anderson and back isn't that expensive, because a whole bunch of them can be shipped at once. The time delay is a little bit annoying, and Anderson really doesn't charge all that much to silver plate a tuba mouthpiece... but plating is annoying. It tarnishes as well, and mouthpieces that have been sitting waiting to be sold sometimes have to be picked up and shined up again carefully because they begin to tarnish...

... but there is a significant percentage of players who believe that the type of metal a mouthpiece is made of has an effect on the sound... and I don't have the energy to evangelize to the contrary, which (candidly, along with lower price) is one of the reasons why I went ahead and started offering some of my products in brass... but the durability of the smooth surface with steel is why I went ahead and began offering those same brass mouthpieces with threads that accept steel rims.