Description
Order a custom-built Orca to your specifications. (Please allow 8 to 12 weeks.)
The Stachelvarius Orca tenor saxophone mouthpiece design was perfected over the course of year and a half with over 200 prototypes made. This painstaking R&D resulted in a mouthpiece with an uncanny combination of projection and solid tenor tone. It sounds massive, but is not overly bright. Masterful facings hand-applied by Norbert Stachel lead the industry in response, expression, and reed-friendliness.
It features a long rollover baffle, rounded side walls, a true large chamber, and a unique oval throat with a wide ramp area. This design combines complexity and fatness of popular low-baffle mouthpieces with the projection and power found in high-baffle mouthpieces without the acoustic compromises of radical chamber designs. Add our responsive facings, and you have a superbly expressive palette from pppp to FFFF.
The “Brilliant” baffle is our standard model, with room-filling projection that does not resort to paint-peeler treble for an artificial sense of power. It is pure, solid punch. We recommend this for players who perform in a variety of contemporary settings, or to liven up a dark horn.
Our “Dark” baffle will be a better option for players used to low-baffle pieces who may find the Brilliant baffle too overpowering. Take note that this is NOT a super dark, smoky chamber. True to the Orca experience, it has plenty power. It’s just slightly darker than the Brilliant baffle.
We offer two general tuning options by varying the chamber size. Our “Standard” tuning is generalized for contemporary Selmer-inspired bore designs. Our “Vintage American” tuning is intended for vintage Conn and similar horns. A well-matched mouthpiece promotes good intonation with minimal voicing effort. Please understand that the acoustic match of the mouthpiece to horn is rather complicated and varies widely by players’ physiology, reed preference, and individual instrument attributes.
Fulfillment of custom Orca mouthpieces is usually 8 to 12 weeks.
