This crucial measurement was arrived at by a simple process of wrapping cigarette paper around the top of the shank.
#Dennis brain mouthpiece full#
I tried it the result was sensational! The problem was solved! I had a mouthpiece with no bad notes, a rich full loud sound and a real trombone quality in soft playing.īack again after the tour, I managed to work out the perfect projection of the mouthpiece from the trombone. He emerged two minutes later brandishing the mouthpiece from which he had taken a sliver of metal from the bottom of the cup.
He looked closely at the mouthpiece – “Uno momento!” – and vanished into the back of the shop. We all faced the same problem of trying to find the ideal mouthpiece, so when they realised that I was working on it, several of them said “When you get it right, let me have one” We all agreed that a final touch was needed, so on the next LSO visit to New York City, when we paid our regular visit to Bob Gardinelli’s shop I asked his advice. This was almost perfect, and I asked many colleagues to help me with testing. I could now screw the modern rim onto the ancient mouthpiece cup, with the additional advantage that I could vary the cup depth with some plasticine to fill the gap, I was able to experiment with the cup depth. Any engineer can copy a thread, so I took one of the least successful of my seven (all slightly different!) 4G mouthpieces, had the rim cut off and the inside threaded, then worked the same system on the old Salvation Army euphonium mouthpiece. Otherwise competent engineers could never copy delicate curves of the mouthpiece cup and rim so I worked out a way to solve the problem. The all-important cup of this mouthpiece was a 19 th Century design, the rim however was completely unusable and I felt that the cup should be a little deeper.
I found an old Salvation Army euphonium mouthpiece at their Judd Street emporium when we had been rehearsing in the nearby St Pancras Town Hall in 1966, and it formed the basis of my first mouthpiece. Having made certain there was nothing from any manufacturer that would do what I wanted, I began the tedious and slow process of trying to design my own. This set me on the path of trying to find a better mouthpiece. The other weakness was a tendency towards anonymity (horn, euphonium, harmonium?) in soft playing. One was the need to be able to play a reliable high D – I remember describing this feat as being like getting a ‘double top’ in darts, i.e.
This made a magnificent loud sound, but had two weaknesses. “Having started the trombone revolution in London when we began using the newly available large bore Conn 8H and 88H trombones with my colleagues in the LSO, I was using a small bass trombone mouthpiece, the Vincent Bach 4G. Here is a history of its development in Denis Wick’s own words. The 4AL is one of the most important and best-selling mouthpieces for trombone designed in the twentieth century.
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