The Music Starts Here...

A mouthpiece affects both how you play and how your instrument sounds in very significant ways. Fit and feel are obviously major factors, but the mouthpiece also exerts a considerable influence on your tone, range, and even intonation. The mouthpiece is the point of greatest sound pressure within the instrument, therefore its acoustic qualities – dependent on material, thickness, shape and other factors – affect the overall sound of the instrument to a remarkable degree. The taper of the instrument extends all the way from the mouthpiece to the bell, so in a very real sense the mouthpiece is an integral part of the instrument's sound-producing mechanism. A part that must be chosen with the utmost care.

Why Yamaha?

Since every player and instrument is different, there can be no single "perfect" mouthpiece. This makes the task of creating top-quality mouthpieces all the more difficult. Advanced manufacturing technology is essential, but so is experience. The Yamaha approach to creating superior mouthpieces is to bring experience and technology together in perfect balance: experience in the form of continuous consultation with some of the world's leading artists – Yamaha has been producing special custom mouthpieces for top artists for decades – and technology in the form of precision computer-controlled machining equipment.

In contrast to some other areas of musical-instrument manufacture, mouthpieces are not best crafted by hand. The tolerances that can have a big effect on performance are far too small. Yamaha employs and advanced computer-aided design and manufacturing system that ensures exact dimensions and contours in every single mouthpiece. Shaped cutters are not used because wear and re-sharpening rapidly alter the original shape. Instead, a computer-controlled lathe sculpts the spinning mouthpiece blank precisely to the specified size and shape. Continuous monitoring and a special cutter design guarantee that prescribed tolerances are always maintained. Another advantage of computer control is that a constant cutter-to-workpiece speed can be maintained relative to the position of the cutter. This ensures a perfect finish, eliminating the need for the final hand-polishing which could result in distortion and inconsistencies from mouthpiece to mouthpiece.