3D printed mouthpieces. High quality, highly customisable, and - in theory - highly affordable. There's just one problem: they're actually not that affordable.

Despite the cost of materials being remarkably cheap, prices for professional 3D printed mouthpieces have stayed more or less on par with hard rubber and even some metal pieces. But what if we could just print them at home? I crunched the numbers and found that for the price of a single professional mouthpiece, I should be able to get everything I need to print my own pro-level pieces at home - and not just one mouthpiece, but a whole range in different profiles and tip openings for every saxophone I own.

If it works, it's a genuine game changer for sax players everywhere. Here's how it went.

Where to Start When You Know Nothing About 3D Printing

I came into this knowing absolutely nothing about 3D printing. My only requirements were simple: find the cheapest, simplest way to print a professional quality mouthpiece - and make sure whatever comes out of it is actually safe to put in my mouth. No microplastics, no chemical leaching, no face full of regret.

After a couple of weeks of research, I found that the 3D printing world broadly splits into two camps: resin and FDM (filament-based printing). Resin gives you incredibly smooth, detailed prints - but the materials are full of chemicals you absolutely shouldn't be consuming. That rules it out immediately for anything that's going to live in your mouth for hours at a time.

FDM printing, on the other hand, is the most popular form of 3D printing generally, and - reassuringly - it's also what SYOS use to make their professional mouthpieces. So that's where I landed.

Choosing a Printer (and Sticking to a Budget)

With a budget of around $275 - roughly the midpoint of what most professional mouthpieces cost these days - I settled on the Bambu Lab A1 Mini at $234. The main appeal wasn't just the price. What really attracted me to it was how consistently easy people said it was to use. Setup is minimal, it handles most of its own calibrations, comes with the slicer software you need to prepare your prints, and you can even track jobs from your phone via the Bambu app.

For a first-time printer who was mainly trying to make saxophone mouthpieces and not become a 3D printing hobbyist, that sounded perfect.

Picking the Right Filament (This Matters More Than You'd Think)

The choice of filament turned out to be one of the most consequential decisions of the whole project. There are dozens of options, but for a mouthpiece specifically, it really comes down to two: PLA and PETG.

PLA is the easier print - if you want a successful first attempt, it's your best bet. But it has a heat resistance of around 60 degrees Celsius, which means it's likely to warp when washed with warm water or left in a hot car. It's also not very chemically resistant, so cleaning with isopropyl alcohol could cause warping or degradation. For a mouthpiece you actually want to play and keep for years, that's a dealbreaker.

PETG, by contrast, is chemically resistant, waterproof, shockproof, food safe, and won't degrade in your mouth. The downside is that it can be finicky - if the settings aren't dialled in just right, or there's too much moisture in the air, you can end up with a wiry, incomplete mess instead of a mouthpiece. More on that shortly.

I went with a budget reel of black PETG and set off on my merry way. I may have regretted that - but we'll get to it.

The Open Source Designs That Made This Possible

Here's where the story gets genuinely interesting.

Back in July 2020, Kevin Braner and Neil Xu started a company called Windy City Woodwinds, producing professional 3D printed jazz mouthpieces at an affordable price - typically around $80 for an alto piece. Over four years they sold thousands of units, collaborated with Dr Wally Wallace from the Saxophone Academy, and built a strong reputation in the community.

In June 2024, after closing the company to focus on their careers in science and engineering, they did something remarkable: they open sourced all of their designs. Anyone can download them and print them for free. Without that act of generosity, this video - and this whole experiment - simply wouldn't have been possible.

If you'd like to show your appreciation to the Windy City Woodwinds team, they've suggested donating to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. There's a link to that donation page in the YouTube video description.

The Reality of 3D Printing (It Was Not Plain Sailing)

I'll be honest with you - this is not the video I expected to make. I thought this was going to be a fun, breezy vlog. Print a mouthpiece, play it, roll credits. What I actually got was a crash course in the less glamorous side of 3D printing.

Bed temperature. Z hop. Layer height. Nozzle temperature. Rectilinear patterns. All the stuff I was desperately hoping to avoid. Every time I walked in to find another failed print, my AI assistant confidently declared it had identified the smoking gun - only for the next attempt to fail just as spectacularly. After two weeks I had a collection of half-finished mouthpieces and wiry spaghetti monsters that had launched off the print bed mid-job. Frustrating doesn't really cover it.

But then I had a thought: what if the problem wasn't the settings at all? What if I'd simply cheaped out on the filament?

The man in the store had told me the difference between budget and premium filament was negligible. Out of desperation, I decided to test that claim. I switched to Bambu Lab's own PETG-HF filament - only $8 more than the budget reel - and made one other change: I added far more supports to the print.

The A1 Mini is a "bed slinger," meaning the print bed moves front to back during printing. This makes for entertaining viewing but also means taller prints have a tendency to wobble or fly off the bed entirely. So I painted supports across the entire bottom half of each mouthpiece design in the slicer, generating a tree-like scaffolding that anchors the piece to the bed throughout the print.

Fresh filament, extra supports, one last prayer to the 3D printing gods - and I pressed print.

It Actually Worked

After two weeks of failed attempts, I finally had a professional looking mouthpiece. A baritone piece, no less - which was actually my goal from the start, since I'd been booked on a show requiring a punchy, aggressive bari sound and had looked at the price of new baritone mouthpieces with some alarm.

With the settings now dialled in, I went on to print pieces for soprano, alto, tenor and baritone - with no failed prints. The same settings worked across all of them.

One Last Step: Levelling the Table

Before playtesting, I did what virtually everyone online recommends - levelling the mouthpiece table (the flat section the reed sits on). For this I picked up wet and dry sandpaper in 600 and 1200 grade, and a cheap bathroom mirror to sand on. The mirror matters because you need a perfectly flat surface if you want a perfectly flat result - a mirror from the hardware store does the job just as well as the specialist glass plates you'll find on mouthpiece websites.

I sanded with water to minimise heat from the friction, worked through both grades, gave each piece a good wash, and then - finally - it was time to find out whether any of this had actually been worth it.

The Verdict

The short answer: yes. The mouthpieces play. Really well, actually.

I got a baritone piece I genuinely love and can see myself playing for a long time. The alto 72 design has honestly impressed me so much it might even give my Meyer a run for its money. For the price of a single professional mouthpiece I ended up with a full range of soprano, alto, tenor and baritone pieces - which, depending on how you look at it, is either an absurd bargain or just the natural outcome of spending two weeks debugging spaghetti monsters. Probably both.

The bigger takeaway, though, is this: mouthpiece design is an art. The value in a great mouthpiece doesn't come from material cost alone. It comes from the countless hours of prototyping, testing different geometries, gathering player feedback and translating all of that into precise measurements. Were it not for the Windy City Woodwinds team open sourcing those hard-earned designs, none of this would have been possible for a first-timer like me.

3D printing can be finicky, technical and genuinely frustrating. But when the settings are right and you understand even the basics, it's also incredibly rewarding - and the saxophone community now has a legitimate, affordable pathway into it thanks to some very generous people.

Want the Exact Settings I Used?

If you'd like a click-by-click walkthrough of the slicer process, plus downloadable presets and a PDF quick reference guide, head to this link drop in your email and I'll send them straight to your inbox.