Posted by Brian Frederiksen on April 06, 1999 at 22:43:37:
In Reply to: Arnold Jacobs Mouthpiece posted by Brandon Thomason on April 05, 1999 at 16:23:04:
A few years back, I was with Mr Jacobs doing a class in Florida. A friend of mine was there with a custom mouthpiece that Terry Warburton made for him. It was the Jacobs mouthpiece that was thick walled and heavy. I called it the shower head.
We were comparing this to one of the stock mouthpieces with Mr Jacobs and myself playing them. With Mr Jacobs, there was no difference between the two. The only time we heard a difference was when I played the Ride about three times louder that it should be. It did sound better on the shower head. Mr Jacobs just laughed and said if I ever played the Ride that loud in an orchestra I would probably get fired. He made me do it again at the normal volume - there was no difference.
Later he told me that he did work with Shilke on mouthpiece thicknesses. They did the heavy ones and even thin walled some (I even have one of those). They really did not think there was enough difference and Shilke stuck to the normal weight mouthpieces. This was all done in the 1960's!
He was never really impressed with the trend for heavy mouthpieces, he tried it over 30 years ago and thought it was interesting that it was coming back now.
DISCLAIMER: No animals were used in these tests but a few bottles of beer disappeared! None of these mouthpieces were Y2K compient (they were all written in old BAL code).