About Vennture
Vennture is a new company, but it is the result of years of dreaming, planning, testing, and development.
Vennture was formed to re-imagine the way custom mouthpieces are done. We are intentional about bringing together software, physics, and machining know-how for the good of brass players everywhere.
This is where the ideas for our Venn diagram-inspired company name and logo came from: Most machinists aren’t inclined to develop a CAD app; most computer programmers can’t rip a double A in half. But if we can bring all these disciplines together, we can empower you, our customer, to improve your playing by allowing you to feel truly comfortable with your equipment.
Imagine giving your next performance using a mouthpiece that YOU designed, for YOUR chops, to get the most out of YOUR playing.
Company Philosophy
Vennture believes that Seeing is Understanding. This means that if we can visualize our mouthpieces in cross-section, measure them, and compare them to each other, we can start to understand why they feel and perform as they do and envision how we might go about improving them.
Vennture believes that trumpet players are natural tinkerers, and should have the tools they need to improve their own equipment in the comfort of their own home. If you have an idea for the mouthpiece you’d like to play, you should be able to experiment and try designs without being grilled by a mouthpiece expert. You can have custom equipment without being under time pressure to make a decision or finalize your design.
Vennture believes in continuous improvement. You evolve as a player; we promise to continue evolving as a company. We will update VennCAD™. We will add new features. We will try new things. We will sometimes make mistakes or roll out features that nobody uses. But one thing won’t change: we will be obsessive about quality.
Doug McVey
Mouthpiece Engineer/Founder
Doug guides the technical direction of Vennture, oversees the development of VennCAD, and designs the tooling and processes used to produce Vennture custom mouthpieces.
Engineering Career
After obtaining a Bachelor’s Degree in Chemistry & Math from Amherst College in 2000, Doug taught high school science and math in Massachusetts public schools for 2 years before earning his Master of Engineering from Cornell University in 2003.
He worked at Cree for nearly half a decade designing semiconductor reactors and crystal growth processes.
He then Jerry Maguire-d his boss at Cree, teaming up to found KDY Automation Solutions, a design-and-build firm that makes custom test-and-measurement machinery and mechatronics for customers in biotech, green energy, and military aviation.
More recently, Doug has devoted his full time and attention to launching Vennture Mouthpieces.
Music "Career"
Doug picked up the trumpet at age 8. Three important things happened.
First, he discovered an LP of Maynard Ferguson‘s LP “Primal Scream” in his parents’ record collection. They have no idea how they came to own it, but it was Doug’s first step into a lifelong obsession with The Boss. And if you think The Boss is Bruce Springsteen, you can go ahead and delete VennCAD™ off your hard drive, because Vennture doesn’t want your damned money anyway.
Second, he met Tony Graziosi, a Berklee College of Music grad and student of Jerome Callet. It was Tony who first started teaching Doug how to access the upper register and power needed to approach Maynard’s music. (One of Doug’s kids has Maynard for a middle name. Like we said, lifelong obsession.)
Third, on a trip to Staten Island to meet Jerome Callet, Doug happened to see Jerome working on a mouthpiece (with hand tools on a manual lathe!). Doug. Was. Fascinated.
Fast forward several decades. Doug has played lead with his college big band, grown-up big bands, cover bands, and well-known beach bands like the Chairmen of the Board and the Catalinas. He has enjoyed featured soloist work and some musical theater pit work.
No, Doug has never done music as a full-time career, but he has just enough street cred to understand the equipment needs of players from students to weekend warriors to touring pros.
Engineering + Music = Vennture
Like most trumpet players, Doug has something of a mouthpiece obsession. Like many players, he is a natural tinkerer. And like a seemingly disproportionate number of players, Doug is a trained engineer. All of these merged into the idea for Vennture.
Inspired by the business models of Protocase (where a user can download a CAD application and design a custom electronics enclosure) and MyCaseBuilder (where a user can download a CAD application and design a custom foam insert for equipment cases), Doug conceived of VennCAD™ and a company (Vennture) where users could do something similar. Of course, if you own a camera and some lenses, you can measure them, and it is rather straightforward to design a foam insert that will hold them. But how do you even start to imagine what a trumpet mouthpiece should look like? The tolerances are tighter, and tiny geometry changes from models that work reasonably well for you may yield something much better…or something utterly unuseable. Thus, with a final bit of impetus from the venerable mouthpiece comparator, Doug set out to create an entirely new way of doing custom mouthpieces.
Roadmap for What's Ahead
Vennture is all about planning for the future.From continuously updating VennCAD to investing in new manufacturing technology to hiring the right people to help us continue to grow, Vennture is always about what’s next while never compromising on quality.
What are we thinking about for the future? In no particular order, we are considering the following:
- GREATLY expanding VennCAD™’s reference library by digitizing as many stock models as we can get our hands on. Contact us if you have a particularly extensive or special mouthpiece collection and maybe we can offer free mouthpiece(s) in exchange for a short-term loan of your collection. And keep your version of VennCAD™ up to date to take advantage of all this hard digitization work!
- Offering low-brass models. We have a plan for this, but it requires some minor tooling changes and process development to allow us to switch efficiently between different-sized mouthpieces.
- Offering other materials. Stainless steel? Lexan? Unobtainium? All on the table.
- Publishing VennCAD on other platforms. In the near future, VennCAD will be available for Mac OS X. Farther down the road, we hope to offer it on Android and iOS
- Adding better CAD modeling and visualization tools to VennCAD:
- better visualization of rim geometries where the references and your model are aligned vertically at the tangent point
- better auto-smoothing of curves when using the CAD tools
- built-in calculation of resonance, equivalent length, and acoustic impedance.
Do you have ideas or strong feelings about what Vennture should be doing or where we should be heading? Please let us know.