# Titanium trumpet mouthpieces



## btboone

Here's a project I've been working on.  They are trumpet mouthpieces with a titanium shank and rim and they have interchangeable acrylic cups.  The idea is to add some cool factor and individuality to a player's mouthpiece.  They actually play better than their brass counterparts.  There will be lots of crazy options including the lasering and other finishing touches.


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## Charlie_W

Very cool!


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## buttonsHT

Very neat... the cool thing with titanium is that it's very easily anodized.


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## skiprat

Those look pretty cool Bruce.:biggrin: Is the existing brass to the titanium an issue for galvanic corrosion or will the anodizing solve that? ( if susceptible)


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## thewishman

Love 'em! Wish I would have had one back when I played - especially the Damascus-pattern one,


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## The Penguin

they play better than a regular mouthpiece? how so?

is the acrylic just a slip on piece and is titanium on the inside?


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## jyreene

Nice Bruce. That would make my trumpet look intense. Now to get back home and break my trumpet back out and be ashamed.


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## btboone

Skiprat, titanium forms an oxide immediately even when it's not anodized, so I don't believe we'll have an issue with galvanic reaction. The acrylic threads onto the shank, and the cup screws onto the acrylic with an extremely fine thread that doesn't unscrew.  The cup with rim would be sold as one unit and the shank a separate unit, so it can be less expensive to have multiple mouthpieces.  We will have about 80 colors, so students could match their school colors or whatever.  Lots of crazy options; laser engraved fingerprints, mokume gane, gold inlay, black zirconium, etc.  I am even planning a light system option, where a player could press a button on the horn and have the mouthpiece light up!  Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

The titanium is very hard yet springy, so maybe that's what allows them to sound better.  I need to research that further.  We had the school orchestra director try it and did a blind sound test to all the students. EVERY one of them chose the sound of the titanium mouthpiece over her expensive professional one that we copied the cup geometry from.  I've heard that from others that try it as well.

Here's a picture of the cup end.  The idea originated from another project I'm working on where I designed a mouthpiece with a continuously variable cup bore by rotating a ring near the cup.  I made prototypes of the smallest and largest cup sizes I anticipated in acrylic and screwed that onto a normal mouthpiece that I cut down and threaded.  My son took it to school, and kids reaction to that clunky mouthpiece was so great that it made me wonder what might be possible if I tried to make it better styled.  I did the cup from acrylic for both machineability and for cool factor.  Needless to say, the people that have seen and tried it do like the look and feel of it.  I realized that this could be a business that my son could grow into.  He's an accomplished trumpet player and likes making stuff as well.


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## The Penguin

very interesting. been years, but I used to play bass trombone in jr. and sr. high school.

an entire trumpet mouthpiece would probably fit inside of the one I used.


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## rsmith

If you need any additional "test subjects" I would be more than willing to help :wink:  I do this for a living and am a mouthpiece junkie who has gone through about 100 or so different styles, shapes, and everything else imaginable in my career...Will these be commercially available? I have some questions about dimentions and rim shapes, backbore sizes, etc...but a mokume style mouthpiece, well that is just awesome...


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## btboone

Rob, they will be commercially available soon.  We will have a choice of standard sizes similar to the Bach and Schilke lines and can do custom sizing as well.  I'm having a batch of 500 of the backbore pieces made now.  We'll be working on a website to show all the crazy options.  We'll eventually expand to the other instruments, but the acrylic will be in the range of $1000 per color to have batches made, so we need to be sure the trumpet stuff is dialed in first.


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## truckerdave

How about mouthpieces for tuba/Sousaphone?


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## PeetyInMich

Those are awesome, looks like you have found a nice niche to fill with your products.


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## btboone

I will be getting to the other instruments after the mouthpieces prove themselves and can pay back some of the initial costs.  The larger instruments will take very expensive batches of custom acrylic.

In that vein, does anyone have a feel if polymer clay would work in such an application?  I need solid bars that get machined, and they need to be able to hold fine threads and not be fragile.  It would be extremely cool to be able to offer a dragon scales type of look as well.


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## mrtrenier

So are they for sale?  If so, how much?


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## kirkfranks

Can you get a patent for this idea before the copycat folks see it?


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## btboone

It's not really patentable.  There are some screw together type mouthpieces out there.  A normal brass mouthpiece is around $60, a screw together one is about $120, and an all titanium one is out there for $295.  I haven't seen screw together titanium ones.  This one would have the option of threading your existing mouthpiece for $35 with a plain acrylic cup for $45 to the titanium shank for $95 and the acrylic cup with titanium rim for $95.  Cost would come down for multiple cups.  We will also offer all kinds of high end options like custom lasering, mokume gane, black zirconium, meteorite inlay, anodizing, etc.


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## oneleggimp

Beautiful.  Are you going to make any Cornet Mouthpieces?


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## oneleggimp

btboone said:


> Skiprat, titanium forms an oxide immediately even when it's not anodized, so I don't believe we'll have an issue with galvanic reaction. The acrylic threads onto the shank, and the cup screws onto the acrylic with an extremely fine thread that doesn't unscrew.  The cup with rim would be sold as one unit and the shank a separate unit, so it can be less expensive to have multiple mouthpieces.  We will have about 80 colors, so students could match their school colors or whatever.  Lots of crazy options; laser engraved fingerprints, mokume gane, gold inlay, black zirconium, etc.  I am even planning a light system option, where a player could press a button on the horn and have the mouthpiece light up!  Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.
> 
> The titanium is very hard yet springy, so maybe that's what allows them to sound better.  I need to research that further.  We had the school orchestra director try it and did a blind sound test to all the students. EVERY one of them chose the sound of the titanium mouthpiece over her expensive professional one that we copied the cup geometry from.  I've heard that from others that try it as well.
> 
> Here's a picture of the cup end.  The idea originated from another project I'm working on where I designed a mouthpiece with a continuously variable cup bore by rotating a ring near the cup.  I made prototypes of the smallest and largest cup sizes I anticipated in acrylic and screwed that onto a normal mouthpiece that I cut down and threaded.  My son took it to school, and kids reaction to that clunky mouthpiece was so great that it made me wonder what might be possible if I tried to make it better styled.  I did the cup from acrylic for both machineability and for cool factor.  Needless to say, the people that have seen and tried it do like the look and feel of it.  I realized that this could be a business that my son could grow into.  He's an accomplished trumpet player and likes making stuff as well.


There was maybe forty years ago a variable cup trumpet mouthpiece available.  I think about $100.00 which was a lot of money back then.  The two piece Bachs and Schilkes were considerably less that that in that time frame.  Haven't seen or heard of the beast in many years.


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## Nikitas

My son plays trumpet and that would be really cool to get him as he enters high school band!


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