Product Overview
This is the signature mouthpiece of John Putnam, Principal Horn of the Michigan Philharmonic.
Specifications: Similar to PHC S18
ID - .721 inches, 18.3 mm at .04 inches into the cup
OD - 1.112 inches, 28.25 mm
Rim Width - .195 inches, 4.95 mm
Throat - #13 (.185 inches, 4.7 mm)
This model is not available with a European shank at this time.
John designed his own traditional horn cup, previously manufactured by Stork Mouthpieces. In developing the Wedge version of the Putnam mouthpiece the cup was adapted to have an oval shape. Below is John description of his original design concepts.
“I had a suspicion that all of the famous “efficient” mouthpiece designs had similar internal volumes. So I took 3D impressions and internal volume measurements of Froydis, DeRosa, Meyers, Roland Berger, Farkas, Horner, and Dell’Osa mouthpieces as a basis for the design.
As we know a shallow cup is great for high notes and clear attacks. A deep cup is great for the low register but the upper register suffers. The solution to this is a double (upper and lower) cup, sometime called an inverted cup. The Putnam upper cup is U shaped, and very shallow. It is shallower than Moosewood’s BD cup, and has the same cubic volume as the best high horn cups. This gives great response and helps speed up the air in the upper register, helping passages like Beethoven 7 pop out. The lower cup is long and smooth, like the famous Dell’Osa cups or the Meyers cups. It is ideal for double horns in that the #13 (.185”, 4.7mm) drill size and back bore as moderate enough to have efficacy and a full sound.
Usually a double cup has a bad note somewhere around the top of the staff (top G for most). This is caused by the transition from the upper bowl to the lower funnel. Incorporating the “U on V” double cup with a perfectly smooth transition eliminates any bad notes and makes it especially well-suited for triple horn designs. The shallow upper cup helps with intonation and articulation in the extreme upper register when one is using the short horn (high F/Eb). The lower cup is ideal for the longer Bb and Low F horns.
The design is highly efficient, providing full studio quality tone with the flexibility demanded in the woodwind quintet. As a principal hornist in a Symphony orchestra the desire was to have a mouthpiece that would let me perform Mahler on week and Bach the next. This cup does it.
My custom Wedge rim (based on a Paxman PHC S18) is a wide internal dimension (.721”, 18.3mm at .04” into the cup) allowing for flexibitly and lots of lip to vibrate. The result is a full spectrum sound with lots of overtones that is very flexible sonically. The peak of the rim is very comfortable and allows me to play large-scale romantic works without an assistant. Yet the peak is pronounced enough to have clear articulations in any register of the horn.”
