I just received 5 of these FANTASTIC mouthpieces late yesterday and spent four hours with them this morning. It was so hard to pick amongst them, with their consistent elegant, robust, rich sound and amazing response. I picked one for me and have colleagues and students coming over to try them later this week. They will be snatched up! This completes the full collection of Rousseau NC and ER50 mouthpieces for me, in addition to Jody Espina’s other wonderful work: five Custom Dark jazz saxophone mouthpieces and six Chedeville clarinet, bass clarinet and classical saxophone mouthpieces. Never has one designer so dominated my studio. Here are all the cases on display…yes, I’m that proud of them! That’s about a third of my mouthpiece collection on the shelf below them. Note the spare Custom Dark tenor mouthpiece (with the gold plated ring on the shank!) I just couldn’t stop at one!

The Rousseau mouthpieces come with the excellent Rovner Star Series ligature, but make sure you put it on like this…flip the screw around and then put the pins on the reed for far more resonance and projection. I do this with all Rovner ligatures that do not come with metal rails on the reed and it is very effective. The wonderful Rovner Platinum ligatures are designed to work only that way. These ligatures are fantastic, and I will be stocking them in the studio, replacing all the standard brand inexpensive metal mouthpieces that I have been handing to students for decades.

The Brancher ligature to the right is also a wonderful choice for this lovely mouthpiece, but the Rovner Star Series gets similar results, great value and is basically indestructible.