In a SentiMETAL Mood is a tenor saxophone mouthpiece, sold with its ligature and mouthpiece cap, and it was the first titanium mouthpiece SYOS has ever made.
How it was made
The mouthpiece was manufactured using Laser Metal Fusion, an advanced metal 3D printing technology used in aerospace and high-precision engineering, in which fine titanium powder is fused layer by layer with a high-precision laser, allowing us to create internal geometries with an extraordinary level of precision. Once printed, each mouthpiece was carefully refined and polished to a silky matte finish. Smooth, elegant, and comfortable in the mouth, before being individually laser engraved and inspected.
The result is a piece that is striking the moment you hold it: clean lines, perfect finish.
The design
This is where our years of acoustic design at SYOS really came in. We have developed hundreds of internal geometries over the years and tested them with thousands of musicians, and for this project we wanted to start from that body of knowledge and push it a little further.
The geometry we developed is built around a fairly high step baffle combined with a medium chamber, which gives the mouthpiece a bright sound with strong projection and presence, while the medium chamber keeps the sound balanced and focused so that it never becomes thin or nasal.
One thing kept coming up again and again during testing, which was the "ease of playing". Everyone who tried the prototypes was surprised by how quickly the sound came out, how immediate the response felt, how stable the mouthpiece sat in the mouth, and how easily the instrument spoke across the entire range.
A limited edition of 100
This was not a mass-produced mouthpiece. Only 100 SentiMETAL Mood mouthpieces were made, and each one was individually manufactured, finished, inspected, and engraved with its own number, which means every mouthpiece in the series belongs to a strictly limited numbered edition.
The sound
The name In a SentiMETAL Mood is a small tribute to one of our favorite jazz pieces, In a Sentimental Mood, which felt like the right reference for a project that meant as much to us as this one did. While developing the mouthpiece, John Coltrane was never very far from our minds, and the sound we had in mind was that combination of brightness and depth, strong projection, but still round and centered. And of course there is also a small nod to the material itself: metal.
The mouthpiece was designed to capture that balance, bright enough to cut through the band and warm enough to keep the soul of the instrument, and on our internal scale the SentiMETAL Mood sits on the fairly bright side, somewhere around the Chad LB and possibly even close to the Spark. Brightness sits at 7, power at 8. Compared to the Spark, it offers more depth and warmth in the tone, and is less bright and more flexible.
There are still a few Tip 8 opening mouthpieces available. [Click here.]
