Theo Wanne: Meet the Makers

The legendary saxophone mouthpiece designer tells the story of his hard-won success, and reflects on a lifetime of striving for peace and beauty through music.

If it seems like there’s something extraordinary, even otherworldly, at play in the work of Theo Wanne, that’s because there is. “I have a kind of synesthesia,” says the friendly, easygoing artisan, whose modesty can’t obscure the fact that he’s the finest saxophone mouthpiece refacing technician in the world. What’s more, his namesake company has continually set new standards in quality and innovation for mouthpiece manufacturing.

“It’s a kind of synesthesia that allows me to see mouthpiece shapes when I hear a sound,” Wanne continues. When he and his head machinist, Matt Ambrose, make even the slightest alterations to the interior of a mouthpiece, Wanne can visualize that interior with accuracy, and project the tonal shifts that will follow. The same gift has elevated Wanne’s craft in mouthpiece refacing, which is the art of using simple sanding tools to, as the master explains, correct existing defects and help players pursue their personal sound concept.

A lifelong interest in Eastern spirituality has also raised his art, and has deeply informed the Theo Wanne brand’s aesthetic. Wanne pursued his spiritual life in Thailand and India, and began a daily meditation practice at 13, which allowed him to sustain the intense focus he needed for 12-hour refacing workdays. (The stakes are high, he says: One teeny-tiny error might take more than an hour to correct.) Meditation gets Wanne to a state that Buddhists call “empty mind”—the place where he’s essentially removed from himself, so that he can solve problems and evaluate his craft anew. “First I get to ‘empty mind’ and know nothing; then, magically, new designs and answers just appear,” he says. “That is the best way to know the real answer: know nothing.”

Spiritualism, however, is only part of the Theo Wanne story. The other pieces are the stuff of classic business and manufacturing success: an absolutely relentless work ethic; new patented methods; constant refinement based on musician feedback; and a small but devoted team that Theo praises constantly in conversation. Further, Wanne has built his company with the belief that old-school principles of craftsmanship and cutting-edge technology are complementary. After earning renown with his handwork, he sought to recreate that level of artistry through CNC machining. Today, many of his production models transcend anything he could accomplish by hand. As Wanne says, “I’m standing on the shoulders of the greats, but I have to keep innovating, right? Keep moving forward.

“When I started my company more than 20 years ago, I fought this idea that there’s no possible way to make anything better than vintage,” he continues. “But I know my mouthpieces are better, because I’m able to duplicate the best of the vintage mouthpieces and improve upon that.” The breakthroughs, including Wanne’s affordable new ESSENTIALS Collection, continue to arrive at a steady clip, and they aren’t limited to mouthpieces. He has produced bold new saxophones and ligatures along the way, and recently showed us some staggering products to come.

To celebrate the house that Theo built, we asked the maestro to take us through his story. Here it is, in his words.

“I Was a Bit Obsessed”

My family moved to Washington State when I was in preschool, and as a boy in the early ’80s, I started apprenticing with a bicycle frame builder. I was always good with my hands. I was also a painter, and I’ve done very detailed pencil drawings.

I started in music on the clarinet. My brother, Tom, who helped me start my company and is currently our production manager, took up the saxophone, and I thought the saxophone was way cooler. My brother quit, so I picked up the saxophone when I was in high school to play in the jazz band.

In high school my idol was Dexter Gordon. His tone, his sound, like when he played a ballad, it just made me melt. So while all the other kids were listening to pop music, I listened to Dexter, Eric Dolphy, Sonny Stitt, Gene Ammons—all these great players who had gorgeous sounds on the saxophone. I went to the library to photocopy pictures of the tenor players with that great expressive look on their face. I would cut them out and plaster them all over the walls of my bedroom. I was a bit obsessed.

As this little high-school kid I was trying to sound like Dexter, and I was struggling. A new Otto Link 10* mouthpiece was the only way I could get that fullness of sound, but it was way too big for me.

Later, because of my passion for trying to get the sound I was looking for, I got into vintage instruments. I started buying and selling vintage saxophones, which helped me pay for college. As I traveled across the country to and from college—including CalArts, where I studied sax; Macalester, in Saint Paul; and the Buddhist Naropa University in Colorado—I stopped at all the pawnshops. This was long before eBay.

I was still trying to get that classic Dexter tenor sound, and Randy Jones, who founded the legendary saxophone shop Tenor Madness, told me, “You can have a vintage horn, but you need a vintage mouthpiece, because they’re different.” The level of quality in manufacturing during the ’70s and ’80s was so low; the vintage stuff through the ’50s, made when a system of apprenticeship was in place, truly was better. That way of passing down knowledge went away, and nobody really wrote it down. I went to masters around the country to try to learn, and they all told me something different.

Eventually I found a vintage Otto Link 7* in Florida. I don’t know how else to say this … my world changed. I realized that so much of your sound is in the mouthpiece. That Otto Link mouthpiece sounded great, but it was old and dinged up, and the facing wasn’t right anymore.

Randy introduced me to a master refacing technician named Bob Carpenter, who lived in Seattle. He fixed it and sent it back, and I couldn’t believe it: The table was flat, the facing curves were correct. I asked Bob to teach me how to reface a mouthpiece, and with his tutelage I started to reface everything.

The Legend Begins

Using my connections for buying saxophones, and as I traveled around to pawnshops and music shops, I bought every mouthpiece I could find—hundreds at a time. I used every penny I could save. I began to study the vintage mouthpieces of Otto Link, Meyer, Selmer, Brilhart. I was very scientific and methodical in trying to understand the design. I’d take the bad-playing ones and work on them until they sounded as great as my favorites. I started to learn design philosophy. I made discoveries too, like the fact that the “French curve” is a mistake due to limitations in manufacturing. It’s unintentional.

People started playing my mouthpieces. I was living in Philadelphia, where I also studied saxophone repair, and all of a sudden I had this huge clientele. I was refacing mouthpieces for Joshua Redman, Eric Alexander, Chris Potter, Grover Washington Jr.—many of the best saxophonists in the world. Over the years, players like Jan Garbarek, Nelson Rangell and Mindi Abair have offered invaluable feedback. I’d do for them what Bob Carpenter had done for me. Word spread, and soon enough I had a backlog of two years. And I’d done no advertising whatsoever.

It was the early ’90s, and I was working 12 hours a day, responding to players who’d bring their box of mouthpieces in for me to reface. That was my school; that was how I figured out what people want. Eventually, I thought, “There’s no way I can keep up with this.” I also felt like a factory, because everybody was saying, “Make me one like the one you made for Joshua Redman.”

I knew I had to figure out a way to mass produce these, so I started looking for machine shops that could do it. I tried places in New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Diego, Indiana—nobody could do it. In 2002 I returned home to Washington for Thanksgiving, and went out to run an errand with my brother. We had to return a Wi-Fi router to the cable company. We looked across the street and there was a machine shop. My brother said, “Let’s go ask them.”

At that point I had nearly given up. I didn’t think anyone could machine a mouthpiece to the level of detail that I can by hand. And I wasn’t going to accept anything less than that, because I was known for my detailed handwork. We went inside, and they said, “Well, one of our lead machinists is a CAD designer, and he plays the saxophone.”

That’s when I met Matt Ambrose, our head machinist. God bless his soul, he became equally obsessed. It took us three years designing together before we could release our first mouthpiece, and even then they required my handwork on the baffles.

During that time I patented a process that let me machine one half, machine the second half, put a thin sheet of solid silver between the two and then stick that in an oven. I’d pull it out and finish the outside and the baffle by machine.

It was the only way I could make an Otto Link-style mouthpiece that was truly consistent—the originals were not—and accurate to the design I intended. It was so much work. In 2005, our first mouthpieces cost $775. Everybody complained they were too expensive, and yet I lost money making them. Slowly we figured out how to keep increasing quality while lowering production costs. I was living above the shop, taking showers out of a bucket because I couldn’t afford my own apartment. I was putting every dime I had into the company. It wasn’t until a decade later that the company became profitable.

Mouthpiece Masterpieces

There are a few models I point to when I think of real milestones in our product line:

DURGA: When we launched the DURGA in 2009, there’d never really been a mouthpiece like it. I became motivated by listening to players in smooth-jazz and rock ’n’ roll, and I thought, “Wow, this is great music, but I’m having a hard time hearing it because of the whininess that’s in a lot of the sound.” It just didn’t have the beauty I wanted.

I wanted to make a mouthpiece that these kinds of players would love, that would make me want to hear their music. It became our number-one-selling mouthpiece by far. You could get a great amount of projection, and yet it had deeply rounded inner walls. It was like a large-chamber mouthpiece, but with a big step baffle.

AMBIKA 3: Players kept telling me, “I want a dark sound; make it darker.” Think of a sound like Ben Webster, Zoot Sims, Stan Getz, Gene Ammons—these fat, dark-sounding players. So I made all these mouthpieces with really low baffles and massive chambers, and nobody bought them.

Through feedback, I learned that when players said “dark,” they weren’t really looking for what Ben Webster used. It wasn’t until the AMBIKA 3, released in 2020, that I figured out what people meant: a mouthpiece with enough projection that you get this big, fat, dark core sound—without hollowness.

BRAHMA: The BRAHMA tenor, released in 2022, came from realizing I had a big hole in my product line. I had all these big-chamber mouthpieces that sounded great, but I saw that players were still buying other brands.

They were buying elsewhere because they wanted a smaller, medium-chamber mouthpiece with a lot of core projection. I bought some of my competitors’ mouthpieces, and I played them and thought, “How can I make something better?” I was shooting for a large-chamber sound but with a small chamber. That led to, again, a lot of research and development and innovation. It became a massive hit, and now it sells more than the DURGA.

The ESSENTIALS Collection, for All Players

In Philadelphia, well over 30 years ago, the feedback I got with my refacing was so positive, and touching. I’d meet these student musicians whose parents would force them to come in and see me. A kid would say, “I don’t want to play anymore. I want to quit band, but my mom made me come in and get my mouthpiece checked out.” I would reface their mouthpiece, or get them on the right mouthpiece for them, and that kid would go from wanting to quit to being incredibly passionate about their music.

One of those kids I met two years after he came in. He was a music major; he’d gone from almost quitting to becoming a music major. That changed me. I realized how crucial the saxophone mouthpiece is. But I couldn’t create a mouthpiece that had that effect at a low price point.

Not until the ESSENTIALS Collection was I able to hit this price point, because my knowledge of production had expanded. I’d worked with injection molding, a manufacturing method that allows for low-cost, fairly high-quality mouthpieces. Unfortunately you’re limited with this method in the way of design, because everything has to be tapered so that you can remove the inner molds. With the ESSENTIALS, it looks fully machined but we use an updated version of 3D printing that is proprietary. We have a whole room dedicated to it in our factory, which we don’t let anybody see. This is deep R&D.

The material is also proprietary. It’s not hard rubber, but it has a durometer very close to hard rubber, a sound very close to hard rubber, and it has very nice resonant qualities. In many ways, it’s superior to hard rubber. If it’s in the sun, it’s not going to oxidize and smell and turn green.

With the ESSENTIALS, we’ve got phenomenal material, phenomenal designs, perfect baffles, perfect tip rails. I honestly didn’t think we’d be ready for another three years.

Manufacturing in Vaastu

We’ve been based in Washington for over two decades now, and our offices and factory are located in Bellingham. It’s a great work environment. There’s a truth called vaastu, which is the source of feng shui. Vaastu came from India, and then when it moved to China, it got turned into feng shui. In vaastu, we’re all affected by the rotation of the earth—the moon and the sun. These energies move the tides. And if you know how to use them—the science—you can get a positive effect.

Our factory is in perfect vaastu, in a place that allows everybody to be calm and creative. There’s a river right next to the shop and it’s flowing to the north. That is perfect vaastu, and when you’re in good vaastu, you feel it: You relax, your problems go away, you just feel at peace. I want all my employees to have that experience, because it will make them enjoy their work more—and be more effective at work. It’s a win-win. We collaborate on everything. It’s so much fun. Nobody ever makes a ‘mistake’; we just see areas for process improvement. Often, what are traditionally called mistakes are blessings showing us a better way of doing things.

Our mouthpieces remind me of an old Ford Thunderbird—a classic design that’s not contrived at all. There’s something elegant and right about them. We want to make a beautiful product, so we need to be in a beautiful environment. Every aspect of this business is designed to create peace and beauty. This is our small way of helping bring heaven to earth.

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