The most important factor governing timbre and control is the hardness of the materials making up the mouthpiece.

If the materials are too hard, the sound will be too harsh, and the basic appeal of the sax sound will be lost. On the other hand, if the materials used are too soft, the sound becomes mellower - but it becomes more difficult to produce sound expressively.

While firmly maintaining core sound quality, we've managed to reach perfect balance with hardness of mouthpiece materials, allowing fir ease of expression when playing.

- In this way, the Aizen Mouthpiece was developed through a long period of trial and error, which finally led us to the ideal combination and hardness of materials.

Good timbre and consistent sound quality are crucial for saxophonists. However good the phrasing is, however great the song, the playing won't hit home to the audience if these factors aren't right.

In mouthpieces, timbre and sound quality depend on the balance between baffle and facing.

High-quality vintage mouthpieces (each costing US$1,000 and over) display an exquisite balance of baffle and facing, along with meticulously fine craftsmanship. And Aizen has perfectly re-created the vintage mouthpiece structure, making possible a rich, reverberating sound - just like an original vintage mouthpiece.

The saxophone's greatest appeal as an instrument is the way that it lets players express themselves through subtle variations in volume and tone. In the proper hands, the saxophone takes on the full expressive power of the human voice in song.

But no matter how talented players may be, they can never realize their full musical potential if the mouthpiece doesn't play its part just right. Aizen's painstaking research on materials and structure has produced a mouthpiece that lets players of all skill levels really give of their best.

Using an Aizen mouthpiece, payers find it easy to control their volume output by varying their breath production. So, players can express themselves musically to the highest degree.

With some mouthpieces, keeping in tune is no easy task. This is usually because the facing has been designed with an unnatural curve.

Under concert or recording conditions, saxophonists have to pay attention to a lot of things simultaneously - finger placement, tone, phrasing, rhythm, and so on.

Performing players should be able to concentrate entirely on these aspects of their art. Expecting them to use their mouth and lungs just to keep their instrument in tune is really just getting in the way of the music, and handicapping their performance.

At Aizen, we pay obsessive care to the curve of the facing when we're manufacturing our mouthpieces. So, when saxophonists use them, they can glide from top to bottom of the register, blowing smoothly without a care about the mouthpiece. We think that's one less worry - and one big step closer to an enjoyable performance for everybody.

With some mouthpieces, the sound seems to be trapped, and the air you blow in just seems to be escaping somewhere. With some mouthpieces, it's hard to control the tuning and tone. Or it's hard to match another player's hook. Or you blow into it and get rewarded with some kind of wheezing sound...

Either this kind of mouthpiece is just plain badly designed, or the table's poorly finished. Not so with Aizen. We're extremely finicky about the details,that way, you can blow through an Aizen mouthpiece for hours without tiring or getting stressed.

You buy a cheap mouthpiece. It's not a precision instrument. So, you rarely or never find satisfaction in using it. So, you start looking around for something better. So you buy another mouthpiece...

Then again, vintage mouthpieces are in high demand, but they're also very expensive. You can expect to pay hundreds of dollars at least for one, if not something over a thousand. These mouthpieces come from another age - an age of skilled hand craftsmanship.

They're popular because they're so well-made, the materials are so good, and they offer players easy control over a sound of great tonal quality.

But finding such a mouthpiece takes an awful lot of time and money, along with a well-trained eye.

At Aizen, we've picked the single best vintage mouthpiece from the cream of two thousand contenders, and our skilled craftsmen have faithfully re-created the sound.

Our production methods produce dependable product quality to the highest degree, and each mouthpiece is individually hand finished by skilled craft workers before it goes on sale.

Each and every Aizen mouthpiece offers exactly the same performance quality as a vintage mouthpiece costing a thousand dollars or more - at a fraction of the cost and with none of the trouble.

The unfortunate fact is that today's mass-produced mouthpieces mostly don't come up to scratch. The quality control staff don't have the requisite experience, and moreover the producers are often too concerned with costs to check every mouthpiece one by one with the needed care. As a result, there are inevitably big variations between individual mouthpieces.

So, the marketplace gets flooded with products of varying quality, leaving the consumer to sink or swim when it comes to making the right choice.

Our manufacturing process and combination of materials ensure that product variation is kept to an absolute minimum. Also, because our mouthpieces are individually hand finished by skilled craft workers before shipping, Aizen mouthpiece users have no cause for concern about the quality of our products.