Posted by Joe Sellmansberger on July 14, 1999 at 22:47:12:
Jay Bertolet has been crying out for some standardization of tuba mouthpiece receivers to eliminate the gaps between the end of the player's selected mouthpiece and the small end of the mouthpipe tube. Perhaps the solution, if a solution is desired, is simple:
Virtually no FRENCH HORNS have mouthpiece receivers. (They might APPEAR to have receivers, but they are actually mouthpipe COVERS.) They just have the last bit of the mouthpipe itself flaired out to receive the mouthpiece, and their mouthpiece ends are usually almost razor sharp, to "dovetail" smoothly right into the mouthpipe without a bump. Regardless of whether the french horn mouthpiece shank is very slightly fatter or very slightly skinnier, as long as they stick to the standard Morse taper and stay within reasonable limits, this works just fine for french horn players.
Tuba manufacturers could easily start doing the same thing with no retrofit problems whatsoever, simply by definition of design. Many of the older Miraphones used this system, as do/did other manufacturers. If we, as a group of tuba players, are too clumsy to keep from bending this proposed new very thin small end of our mouthpieces, manufacturers could supply protective plastic caps (for storage) for the small ends of the mouthpieces.