When you spend years playing the saxophone professionally, you develop a very specific relationship with the mouthpiece. You feel how small changes in the baffle, the chamber, or the facing affect your sound, your response, and even your physical comfort. That kind of knowledge doesn’t come from drawings or measurements alone.
Yet, if you look at the history of many well-known mouthpiece brands, you’ll notice something interesting: a large number of the people who designed them were not saxophonists.
Many of the classic models we still see today were created by toolmakers, engineers, or craftsmen who had a strong technical background, but little to no real experience actually playing the instrument. In the past, some of these makers worked closely with professional saxophonists to test and refine their designs. That collaboration helped. But over time, many of those original relationships disappeared.
What often remains is a process of copying, adjusting, and reinterpreting existing models. One maker studies another’s work, makes small modifications, and releases a “new” design. Another maker does the same. After several generations of this, we end up with mouthpieces that are variations of variations — pieces that carry forward both the good decisions and the compromises of the original designs.
The problem is that a mouthpiece is not just geometry. It is an interface between a person’s body, their air, their embouchure, and the instrument. When someone designs without that direct experience, they are forced to rely on second-hand information. They can measure, they can calculate, they can follow tradition — but they are guessing about how the piece will actually feel and respond in a real playing situation.
This doesn’t mean every mouthpiece made by a non-saxophonist is bad. Some are excellent. But it does mean their understanding is necessarily limited. They are working from the outside in.
I see things differently because I approach mouthpiece making from the inside out.
Before I ever shaped a single piece of material, I spent decades as a working saxophonist. I know what it feels like when a mouthpiece fights you in the low register. I know the frustration of fighting for control in the altissimo. I know how a small change in the facing can completely change the way you approach a phrase. That experience is not something I read in a book or learned from someone else’s design. It comes from thousands of hours of actually playing.
When I sculpt a mouthpiece, I’m not trying to improve on an existing model. I’m trying to solve a problem for a specific player — often problems I’ve faced myself. That changes the entire process. The decisions I make are guided by direct, physical knowledge of what it means to play the saxophone, not just by tradition or by what has been done before.
There is still a lot to discover about the saxophone and its sound. But I believe the most meaningful discoveries will come from people who understand the instrument not only as an object to be optimized, but as something they have lived with for years.
