Mouthpieces

[rockitprimejive]

Okay, I am going to sound like an idiot, but until recently I had no idea there was different kinds of mouth pieces. I have played for 7 years now, and am just finding this out. it has never been brought up, with all the three band directors I've had, none of them even implied it.
I have two mouthpieces, really the way I told them apart was "marching" and "concert". The marching one is less shinny, and the concert one is very shinny and new. Looking at them more closely, I see that my "marching" one is Bach 7C. My "concert" one is a Yamaha 11B4. Both of them came with my two trumpets (bach and yamaha )
So now that I am just now discovering this, it is interesting me. I always thought of plastic mouthpieces as something fun for little kids, but I had no idea that they work well for marching in the cold.

Okay so, I have a few questions...
1. So I have a 7C and a 11B4...what does that mean? What are the numbers and letters representing?

2. What ares creamers?

3. How come some mouthpieces look so different than the others?


Hope those aren't too broad of questions

[Trumpet1]

1. Different companies have different numbering systems for their mouthpieces. Bach 7C for example, the 7 tells you the cup diameter; the small the number, the larger the cup diameter. wider cups provide more volume and control, smaller cups provide endurance. The C tells you the cup depth, in this case a medium depth (A being deepest); a deep cup provide a dark tone, and shall cup provides brightness and response, plus ease in the upper register. The 7C has a medium-depth cup with a 16.20mm cup diameter.

2. Creamers are what you put in coffee. Screamers are mouthpieces with a shallow cup (upper range) and small cup diameter (endurance) so the lead trumpets can wail in the upper ranges all they want. Screamers don't go very well with coffee.

3. Exterior of a mouthpiece is the least concern when picking them. Different companies have different styles, but the exterior has little effect on sound. Some mouthpieces look "fat", because the manufacturer add extra weight to the mouthpiece. Mass of the mouthpiece might play a small role in tone and stability of sound (claim by Bach MegaTone for example), but realistically, the isn't sufficient computational aeroacoustics research to support the claim.

Voilá

[rockitprimejive]

Aw, I did have the S there, just in a different spot!

Thanks though! That helped