Equipment

There are so many factors to which can influence the development of the saxophone playing. Practicing is definitely one of them but using the appropriate & working equipment, as well as taking a good care of them has a lot to do with the improvement your sound. There are mainly five different pieces that construct the saxophone: Body, neck, mouthpiece, ligature and the reed. When you purchase an instrument, body and neck comes in a set, and most likely mouthpiece and possibly a ligature comes with it as well. If you are a beginner, I would start with what came with it until you can get a decent sound out of it and able play some music.

Changing the Reed is the easiest and affordable upgrades you can make to your instrument.

With reeds, using good quality reed from the very beginning is extremely crucial. This is the part that should not be overlooked just because they are consumables and easily thrown out. If the instrument itself is our body, reed is our heart. Reed is what vibrates to make the sound. I highly recommend using Vandoren’s Blue “Traditional” Box or if you are on a budget, Vandoren’s JUNO reeds is nearly half the price of the Traditional. I personally use Vandoren’s Blue Box for alto and V21 for soprano and I must say, I haven’t found any other brands that satisfy my sound. I will be writing more about reeds in my future post.

There are so many brands of reeds out there today, especially synthetic reeds are on the rise. Each cost about one box of reed and it is said to last for a very long time. I would say, unless you are playing outdoors a lot where the climate changes, or where you would have to dance and move around that you may potentially break a lot of reeds, or you are asked to play loud but the timbre (color of the sound) is not the center of focus, stay away. There is something about the natural cane that can do that what plastic or synthetic reeds cannot do, especially a tone focused genre like classical saxophone.

More reed talks coming soon… stay in tuned!