The Gale Triple-Rail Mouthpiece

One of the oddest mouthpieces that I have come across is the Gale "Triple-Rail" mouthpiece.  Lots of vintage mouthpieces have tried things to differentiate themselves from conventional mouthpieces.  Odd shaped chambers, metal tables, anything to make the mouthpiece stand out.  Of course, the manufacturer also has to make a claim as to why the design modification is superior, or what problem it solves, or how it improves the sound or tuning or something.  As we have seen with musical accessories, the claim doesn't need to be true or even make sense.  

Most of the inventive changes to saxophone mouthpieces over the years claim that the modification improves the sound when in fact it is often only the visual aspect of the mouthpiece that has changed.  The white Brilhart Tonolin mouthpiece is claimed to sound different than the original black Brilhart Ebolin mouthpiece.  Nobody can agree on what the acoustical difference is, and nobody can tell in a blind testing, so there is not likely any difference caused by the color.  Also, having been produced by the same mold makes a rational person doubt any acoustical difference.  But as musicians, we don't have to be rational.  I am sure that some would argue that they know what a red Brilhart Rubylin mouthpiece would sound like.  Maybe bloody good?  A rosy tone?

Mouthpieces have occasionally taken on a novelty design.  I believe that the Gale Triple-Rail is one of those.  Try as I might, I could find no information on just what problem the "middle rail" was intended to solve.  Or what improvement resulted from having a rail down the middle of the chamber.  A radical design change should be a refinement that outweighs any negatives caused by the change.  That doesn't seem to have happened with the Triple-Rail.  There was no "up side" and lots of "down side."

First, some background.  In about 1948, Mr. Carl Satzinger formed a corporation with several of the principals from Rico Products, famous for their woodwind reeds.  Mr. Satzinger was the son-in-law of a Rico employee who was involved with Rico's mouthpiece fabrication.  Mr. Satzinger had some college training as an engineer and started a business with Roy Maier, Frank De Michelle, and Nathan Snyder, all principals at Rico.  The venture was incorporated and Mr. Satzinger opened his own shop with a business address.  The company was named "Gale Products" after Mr. Satzinger's daughter Gale.

Gale Products was short lived, lasting less than a year.  Some of the first mouthpieces stamped Gale appear to have been made from blanks using Rico's existing line of mouthpieces (the M.C. Gregory model).  But others were clearly from different blanks, maybe even designed by Mr. Satzinger.  The Gale Products molds were sold to a local jeweler when Gale was dissolved after less than a year.  The jeweler later sold them to Charles Bay, a well-known clarinet instructor and mouthpiece facer.  Below is a picture of a selection of blanks made from the Gale Products molds.  

The Gale Products Triple-Rail mouthpiece that I'm writing about is a curious modification of one of the Gale molds.  If you look at the above picture, it is shown on the lower  right, the third one in (with an aluminum shank band).  There is a rib or "rail" down the center of the chamber.  There is another Triple-Rail on the upper right, second one in.  That one apparently had the rib mostly broken off.  There is no way of knowing what percentage of the Triple-Rail castings ended up defective, but it would certainly make production more costly than a regular chamber.

The following are pictures of my unfinished Gale Triple-Rail blank.

There are a couple of things that stand out about this rough blank.  First, the mold line on the beak doesn't seem to run down the center of the beak.  When looking from the tip (above picture), you can see how asymmetrical the tip is.  That is not going to be very easy to work with.  It requires a lot of shaping, something that the molding process was intended to reduce.  Even the third rail down the middle isn't symmetrical.  This appears on many, but not all Third-Rail mouthpieces.  There is simply no way to fix that when finishing the blank.

Another common flaw on these is that the middle rail tend to chip right where it meets the top of the window.  The picture below is a close-up of the flaw on my blank.  Right at the top of the rail a tiny piece is missing.  Not that it matters, as we will see when this mouthpiece is finished.  

The actual middle rib is often warped and can have minor casting flaws on it.  In the picture below you can see a little blister on the "curtain" that forms the middle rail.  It could be removed but I didn't bother.  You can also see that the inside of the mouthpiece suffers from the brown oxidation found on most 75 year-old ebonite mouthpieces.

I wrote the original lay on the blank.  It was fairly even side-to-side, but with a close tip opening at .050 inch for an alto mouthpiece.  The lay is 20 mm (a Brand number of 40) which is long for that tip.  This is probably a preliminary lay from which a larger and more precise lay can be fabricated.  On the following picture, you can again see at the start of the third rail the little indentation from a tiny bit of material missing as was mentioned above.

I was curious if the three rails were all even.  Normally, when using a ruler to measure the lay, you have only two rails.  What if the middle rail was high?  Or low?  Turns out that it basically has to be low.  But in first examining it I got a little moisture on the glass and pressed the rails against it to see how they lined up.  The middle rail seemed a little high.  Any side-to-side pressure difference when putting on a facing would cause the center rib to be higher.  Uneven rails can be a problem, but the center rail would really accentuate even a tiny difference that would normally be unnoticeable.

I began by cleaning up the lopsided beak profile.  That wasn't too difficult, but it is time consuming.  Filing makes for fast work, but then one has to work through different grits of sandpaper (300 to 1200) and then bronze wool and finally polish.  It probably took 40 minutes on what could have been a 5 minute project to clean up the flash line left by the mold.  This flash line formed a surprising deep crevice that also had to be removed.

Next was flattening the table and beginning the cut for the lay.  I should note that the tip opening I wrote on the table above was kind of an interpolation.  Because there is rail right down the center of the tip opening, the usual methods of measuring were not possible.  With the Triple-Rail, the tip opening can be a bit of a guess.  

The Triple-Rail leaves a weird track on the paper.

I thought that the drop into the chamber at the tip looked like it might sound a little dull.  Time to think about maybe working the insides towards the tip and get a little baffle.  Unlike a normal mouthpiece, this meant working on both sides of a middle rail. 

I rounded off the tip to fit the reed and that gave me an indication of how to shape the inner tip rail and baffle.  Shaping was time consuming because of the middle rail.  I have seen other Third-Rail  pieces that still have file marks, probably because it is a pain to work only in and out with sand paper instead of side to side.  Also notice above that the width of the outer railings are not even.  It was odd that the widest "1/2 chamber" at the top of the picture also had the widest outside rail.  More work cleaning that up.  And the bottom inner rail has a wow in it.  More work.

As I got closer to finished, it became obvious that the unevenness of the beak was revealing itself.  More time spent of making the beak symmetrical.  Plus, you can still see the offset mold line.  More time.

Finally, a chance for a test blow.  It was dull.  No altisimo.  In fact, it started to fade at about high D.  It sounded like the lay was bumpy at the tip.  I checked it again and everything looked okay.  I knew that on most every picture of a Triple-Rail that I had seen the third rail did not actually go all the way to the tip.  Some of them had the rail stopping well short of the tip.  Maybe 2 mm away.  So I fabricated a little tool with 1200 grit emery paper attached to a split reed.  I wet-sanded down the rail right at the tip.  Better.  I sanded more.  Even better.  The further the rail was from the reed, the better the response.  But after reducing the height of the rail I had to go back and make sure that the tip rail hadn't been nicked by the sandpaper.  More time spent because of a rail down the middle.

Finally I had a responsive mouthpiece.  Did it have any special color to the sound?  No.  It was just a nice vintage piece.  This mouthpiece was not marked in any way and never had the three white dots put on it, but adding dots is really a simple (although time consuming) project that, like the third rail, adds nothing to the piece (for most players).

From the estate of Charles Bay.

Here is the finished mouthpiece.

No markings or white dots.

The interior had a lot of oxidation that I haven't yet cleaned up.  Which raises another practical problem with the Triple-Rail (problem #22?).  How do you swab out the mouthpiece to keep it from looking like this?  This blank had never even been played!  Is there a special Rico Triple-Rail mouthpiece swab?  My guess is that Mr. Satzinger's experienced business partners would have nixed the idea of having Satzinger design a Triple-Rail mouthpiece swab.

So what's the deal with the Gale Triple-Rail?  I've read that they have a cool Paul Desmond West Coast vibe.  That's probably because one of Rico's other mouthpiece models at the time was the M.C. Gregory, which is what Mr. Desmond played.  If you believe in the transmogrification of acoustical characteristics through corporate affiliation, then the business involvement of Roy Maier and Frank De Michelle of Rico Products spilled over into Gale Products, infusing both mouthpieces with identical characteristics despite different molds, finish quality, and one having a rib down the middle of the chamber.

I don't buy the assertion.  It seems more like wishful thinking.  The unrelated Gale mouthpieces were the brainchild of Carl Satzinger.  It is true that the principals of Rico Products were on the Board of Directors of Gale Products, but I would guess that is why Gale failed after one year.  Satzinger was an idea guy.  The others involved in Gale Products were idea guys but also successful businessmen.  If an automobile designer for Henry Ford came up with an idea for a vehicle with 8 wheels (four on top in case of a rollover), my guess is that the designer, like Mr. Satzinger, would lose his job.  Not all innovation is an improvement.

The castings of the Triple-Rail appear to have often been less than perfect.  It is time consuming to straighten things up to make them presentable.  And even then the center rail was often crooked, warped, and blemished.  In fact, calling it a "center" rail isn't generally accurate.  Adding three white dots was more time consuming than simply stamping the piece.  Putting on the lay was more complicated because of the center rail.  Finishing two chambers more than doubled the work involved.  And then after all the additional work, the piece performed best, and maybe performed at all, if the third rail was cut back so as not to interfere with the reed.  

Now say you are the CFO of Rico Products, a young, flourishing, expanding business venture in 1948.  You have several existing lines of mouthpieces (the M.C. Gregory, the Roy Maier, the Jimmy Simpson, etc.) that are successfully selling at a premium over your competitors (like Otto Link).  You begin another mouthpiece enterprise (Gale Products, Inc.) and your new associate designs a truly unique mouthpiece that costs more to mold, has many quality control issues, and requires at least twice as much finish work plus some additional machining to apply three white dots.  Then, the kicker is that the groovy Triple-Rail design feature doesn't do anything and, in fact, has to be partially removed in order for the mouthpiece to perform properly.  I doubt that Satzinger was able to convince the experienced principals of Rico Products that a mouthpiece looking cool was better than sounding cool.  And so Gale Products folded after a year.  Other unrelated parties re-used the Gale name later, and maybe even the molds, but the Triple-Rail concept was never used again.  I now know there are good reasons for that.