experiment with a piece of ribbon placed inside the sax neck

[Anonymous]

Interesting experiment –
using a piece of ribbon (the stuff you wrap presents in),
it was measured 10 inches long by 1/8th of an inch wide.

I put it inside the sax neck, so that a little bit was hanging out the bottom
of the neck, and about 2 inches was hanging outside the top of the neck.
Then i put the mouthpiece on, leaving the ribbon inside the neck.

Checked the tuner, and guess what the needle wasn’t flicking widely to the
left and right when i went through the c scale, sort of dampened the waves.

so i recorded a bit of pink panther, that michael inspired me to try out

[Anonymous]

Hi James

What kind of effect to the sound were you expecting to happen?

Practicing alternate days on the Tenor and Alto is really helping me develop a better tone on the Alto sooner.

I’m loving the Tenor sound too.

[Anonymous]

jeffrey – i was hoping it would soften the sound.

Then thinking about it later on, its a great idea for absorbing the
spit when you play from being sprayed around in the body of the sax,

i will have to try a full length ribbon through the whole sax body,
to soak up the spit going down the sax, after playing wring it out.

And if theres any sax designers out there reading this – HAVE YOU
EVER THOUGHT ABOUT PUTTING A LITTLE GUTTER DOWN THE WHOLE SAX TUBE, TO
CHANNEL THE SPIT DOWN THE SAX, INSTEAD OF HAVING THE SPIT SPRAYING ROUND THE SAX TUBE, BEING BLOWN OUT THE HOLES AND RUINING THE PADS?

[jake]

I don’t have any comment as to the effect of the ribbon but I can say WOW, your tone has DRASTICALLY improved James. I can tell you have been putting in the work. Hats off to you!! So smooth and even sounding, very pleasant to the ears.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Jake, its not so much the tone, its the control of the phrasing that makes the piece.

i showed the pink panther sheet to my tutor, and told him i couldn’t play the sheet properly as it was too difficult to play the notes properly, so i said what i’ll do is play through it and skim through the notes not playing them correctly in time, but in time to how i imagined the tune to go from memory if the pink panther tune, so thats basically how it came out.

I’m only a grade 2/3 pkayer, and he said the sheet i had was equivalent to grade 5, so theres no way i would be able to through it in one take, its one of those piece i would have to learn bar by bar, which i don’t want to do, so i will come back to it when i get to grade 5 standard, then i should be able to play it straight off in a couple of gors.

[Author]

Posts