Survey of tuba mouthpiece masses -- results posted!

[bort]

I learned to play tuba in the 10th grade, because I thought it looked cool, I thought it sounded cool, and it was a whole lot better than playing trumpet. Oh, and the band didn't have any tuba players, so I wanted to fix that.

Beyond that... I think it's outrageously easy to play the tuba. You KNOW what it's supposed to sound like, and there is NO mystery to what your output is supposed to be. It's not hard to understand. Repetition and accuracy... That's the hard part.

Side note -- I just had a nice coversation with a non -US mouthpiece maker, who flat out said that masses of mouthpieces is such nonsense that he wouldn't even measure them. It's that unimportant in his eyes.

[peterbas]

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[bort]

Tables and charts below, but a few results:

* We ended up with 63 observations. There were 67 replies, but 4 of them were recorded as 0g mass... so they had to be thrown out.
* That's really a pretty small sample size by any measure, but especially since there were so many singleton measurements (1 measurement for 1 brand). Whatever, it's what we got, so I used it anyway. Not quite as scientifical, but whatever.
* The Kellyberg plastic mouthpieces were the low-end outliers, super light! I had forgotten about those!
* A HUGE Romera mouthpiece topped the charts at 780g.
* The middle 50% of the measurements fall between 196.5g and 263.0g, with a big peak around 230g or so.
* Didn't really have a lot of data for mouthpieces described and sold as "heavy" models... so nothing to really glean from that, except that the few that were "heavy", were actually "heavy."

Results below! Thanks again for the replies and free data!

Distribution of masses:


Summary Statistics


Calculation of Quartiles:


Average mass by brand (with number of observations):

[peterbas]

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[bort]

Yeah, that kind of plot works better for way bigger data sets.

I'll pull together something for between brand differences. Only a few brands had enough data to show something, but will post what I have.

Hope this is interesting to someone out there. If nothing else, was fun to dust off my R skills in the summertime!

[peterbas]

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[peterbas]

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[bort]

Here's more info:

The distribution of all masses recorded (index just ranks them 1 to 67). You can see, there is a huge flat spot in the middle.


Separated by brand and model. It's a lot of data and a little hard to see, but here it is. When there are multiple dots on the same line (e.g., Kelly -- Kellyberg), that represents multiple data points [2 people replied with masses of Kellyberg mouthpieces]). Not flawless and a few oddities in the data... but good enough for now!

[bort]

186!

Closest we got to 186 was a Conn Helleberg 7B, which was 185g.

Hrmm... "186" being the default answer... and "Helleberg" being the default mouthpiece choice and almost 186g. Coincidence? Hrmm...

[Matt G]

Did you create a moment generating function and generate the moments?

[Matt G]

Not kidding reply:

It would be cool if you could collect more data over time just for completeness and smoother graphs.

[bort]

Not kidding reply:

It would be cool if you could collect more data over time just for completeness and smoother graphs.

Definitely. I may just reopen this and leave it open indefinitely, and see what happens over time.

It's something that I can't do on my own... and it may/may not yield anything more interesting. But, yes, more data is always better. So many sample sizes of 1... that's not so good.

[peterbas]

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[Donn]

Conical / funnel shaped cups are likewise massiver. Or to look at it another way, their shape makes them shallower (volume) for the same (linear) depth.

I've seen pictures of a guitar (bass guitar, I think it was) with steel rods mounted in little hollows inside the otherwise solid body, for extra resonance. I guess that's a lot to install inside the mouthpiece walls, but it would be easy to add those to the outside. Just a shallow hole, tap threads into it, and screw in that rod. Thread stuff onto the other end of the rod, and you have resonance all over the place.

[Matt G]

Obviously the foregone conclusion is to make a mouthpiece that has LM-12 inner dimensions and a outer shape of an R&S with a 10mm throat.

[E. Green]

Someone should get Bob Tucci involved in this discussion. He studied with Arnold Jacobs, is an experienced tuba player and has been making mouthpieces for decades.

Eugene

[bort]

Someone should get Bob Tucci involved in this discussion. He studied with Arnold Jacobs, is an experienced tuba player and has been making mouthpieces for decades.

Eugene

I've talked to Bob a lot of times over email about a lot of things. I have a tremendous amount of respect for him as a tuba player, teacher, and as a person. I wouldn't want to waste his time with my silliness about measuring the masses of mouthpieces. Maybe I can think of a targeted way of asking a few questions about his regular vs. heavy options. But again... I don't want to waste his time, for something that wasn't exactly serious to begin with.