if you like your sound & your ligature – i would stick with it!
Johnny’s daily practice routine + the 1st two lessons of his Altissimo course which i do daily as a warm up – made a vast difference to my sound. A much
cheaper alternative to getting a
cracking sound than pond hopping
around various mouthpieces/ligatures/reeds.
The proof in that – if you look at student sax players in their teens, they can only afford very
basic setups & they sound GREAT.
In terms of getting the right setup? Seriously – take a Pro sax player along with you, tell him the type of sound you want (classical, jazz etc.) try out the
new setups, play a simple tune and get his feed back! In the long run, its cheaper to pay for his advice than troll through lots of setups.
Thats what i did, and he picked out a mouthpiece which sounded to me awfully dull – i would have overlooked looked it for a brighter sounding mouthpiece! Against my own judgement i took his advice, bought the mouthpiece he liked the sound of – within a few days/weeks – got a good classical tone which i love.
In my case it works better for me to get feed back about what my setup sounds like from experienced sax player, as i think my mind can play tricks on me about how i feel my sound sounds like – hence i have to rely on a tuner, or another sax sound around me to compare to.
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