Tech column: mute solutions for wind and brass

One of the advantages of being a keyboard player is the ability to plug in a jack lead and practise with impunity at any time of the day or night. Thanks to the ingenuity of the instrument building community, this luxury has now been afforded to drummers, guitarists and even string players, who have access to ever-improving digital instruments. The one group who have been left behind in this insatiable march of musical progress is our colleagues in the wind and brass section.

Practice mutes for brass players are not new. Monteverdi calls for the first recorded muted trumpet in L’Orfeo. While a variety of tone-bending solutions were developed over the next 400 years, the challenge of creating a mute to allow brass players to practise with impunity took far longer to address. This is mainly due to the physics of sound production; practice mutes operate by redirecting the air flow back into the instrument, which causes a build-up of pressure and changes the tuning of the instrument – often quite substantially in the upper and lower registers.