While studying music at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas) in the late 1970s and early 80s, I was fortunate to formally apprentice with the flute maker and master repairman John R. Kilpatrick, and was also able to observe master woodwind mouthpiece re-facer, Claude Humber. If I am not mistaken he is possibly the first or at least one of the first individuals that did custom adjustments of mouthpieces.

It began with Claude working on my mouthpieces, and me asking how and why questions concerning what he was doing. Soon, I was tagging along with anyone that was going down from UNT to see Claude for mouthpiece work so I could observe. I did it enough and asked enough questions that I even got to look through his very private book of numbers and artists he re-faced mouthpieces for when he was on the road playing. I remember seeing the numbers for jazz artists like Coleman Hawkins, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Johnny Hodges, it was an amazing experience. I do not know what happened to the book after his passing, I wish I could find that. For the next year, I continued to observe Claude,  asked lots of questions, conducted some independent research (especially studying the now unavailable Erick Brand repair Manual) as well as buying Claude’s pamphlet on mouthpiece refacing and some of his mouthpieces. I eventually bought the tools and began experimenting on mouthpieces. Jump 30 years later, and I am still doing custom work for musicians from all over the world.

At the beginning I did not keep track of all the musicians I did mouthpiece work for, but some of some of the people have included Dave Liebman, Dave Riekenberg, Roger Holmes, Lew Delgato, George Young, Tom Christensen, George Weremchuck, Jim Riggs

So some 30 years later, I am still working on mouthpieces, and offer a full repair, re-face or re-construction service of woodwind mouthpieces.

In the near future, I will expand the information here, to include my prices and services, but if you are interested please contact me via my contact information.