Equipment


Trumpet

Roy played a few trumpets during his career.  Early in his career he played an Olds Super model trumpet.  In the 40’s through the part of the 60’s Roy played and endorsed the Selmer (Paris) K Modifed model.  There are some Selmer ads with him in the Writings section of this site.  After Selmer, for a short time Roy endorsed a Calicchio model that was a ML bore with a 1S bell and 3 leadpipe and the Holton ST-100 which was later known as the Dave Stahl model.  After these endorsements and until his death, he played a Paris made French Besson Brevete (pics below).  He also owned a Meha which he seldom used.  Roy used the Brevete on all of the demo audio recordings on this site.  He felt the silver plated Brevete projected well yet maintained its warmth and character.

Mouthpiece

His mouthpiece during his Stevens-Costello teaching period was a custom art deco step shaped mouthpiece.  The original pieces were custom made by Rudy Muck.  Later when their operations changed, Roy had Jet Tone under the original founder Bill Ratzenberger make his mouthpieces.  They came in three sizes RS1, RS2, and RS3 differing in only the backbore.  He also made a flugelhorn and trombone model.  Below are some close specifications of the RS1 trumpet mouthpiece.

RS-1         inches            mm

OD           1.09627            .84

ID               .654            16.61

Depth         .417            10.59

Throat        .144 (27)       3.66

Length      3.45              87.63

On the left is the custom Stevens mouthpiece made by Rudy Muck when their shop was on 48th Street NYC near Roy’s studio

Later Jet Tone made the mouthpieces which are the models second to left: a RS1 followed by a RS2 and a flugelhorn model which is also called RS2

As mentioned already, all of Roy’s playing on the audio tapes is done on a French Besson Brevete trumpet with a RS1 Jet Tone mouthpiece