Imagine: you just bought a beautiful vintage baritone horn. You put your regular mouthpiece on and… it’s way too sharp.
First, don’t panic it’s not you, you haven’t lost your embouchure during your holidays….
Then, it’s not your horn either, it’s perfectly fine.
The problem is that your modern mouthpiece isn’t adapted to your vintage horn.
Why?
Because the volume of the missing cone on this old Conn is way bigger than on modern saxophones.
What is exactly the missing cone?
In a nutshell, the saxophone is a bent cone that had his upper part removed. In order to be in tune, the volume of the mouthpiece needs to be equivalent to the volume of this missing cone.
If you want more details, Maxime wrote an article that explains what is this missing cone and why the Syos mouthpieces have different lengths.
So, in order to work on a Vintage saxophone, the mouthpiece needs a bigger volume.
At Syos, we can easily add this extra volume by adding some length to the mouthpiece. That’s what we did for the Funk Off signature mouthpiece.
Dario has an old Conn Lady Face Baritone Saxophone so he needed a special mouthpiece to work perfectly with his vintage sax. He is the leader of Funk Off, which is the official Brass Band of the Umbria Jazz festival, one of the biggest Jazz festival in Italy.
So he wanted a powerful mouthpiece that could stay flexible and with a warm tone in order to play different types of music. So we designed a mouthpiece with a very high step baffle, a large chamber and with an added length of 23,6 mm.
And he is really happy with it :)
That was the story why this mouthpiece is perfect for vintage horns. That’s also why it won’t work on modern saxophones.
