sxpoet

William – all the tenor recordings with synthetic reeds sound great to me.

Unfortunately for me all the alto synthetic reeds that i have tried so far just didn’t sound right compared to the cane reeds especially higher up the sax, and a few keys were badly out of tune for me to embouchure them in tune. So i just can’t take to them.

i can’t say i…[Read more]

The life expectancy of a reed is directly proportional to how often you play the reed.

The less you less you play the reed, the longer it will last, similarly the more you play the reed will quickly shorten it’s life.

How well you store your reeds and rotate them will only give you a slight advantage in the life expectancy.

The comparison reed charts for Vandoren and D’addario are professionaly quite accurate!

Providing you know the Strength Number of the Reed you are accustomed to playing you can look it up on the charts and cross reference it with all the other types of reeds to get similar strength of reed.

When i went into my local sax shop, run by a profession…[Read more]

Reeds Technical Elements

All the reeds i just put them on my tongue for a minute or so, so that they were warm and wet. No reed preparation was performed on the reeds.

Bit i need to play my reeds on a rotation process, ex take 6 new reeds, and play each one for a maximum of 10 minutes each – start treating them more sensibly, so they get broken in properly. Then after a…[Read more]

i would definitely buy a few plasticover reeds, as an alternative to a plain cane reed, ideal for practicing.

But to reiterate, i need test the remaining 8 reeds in more depth, across different styles of music, all 8 reeds are contenders, the D’addario Select Unfiled 3Medium reed is a front runner with the rest closely following.

I have tried synthetic reeds on the Alto, and to date i haven’t found any brand that works well across the alto range. I found a lot of random notes dropped out badly and going higher up the sax, the notes sounded very false, squeaky and plasticky, like i was playing a plastic recorder.

The synthetic reeds definitely work better with…[Read more]

That was a very successful test, i tested all 11 reeds playing each one along to johnny’s Michele backing track (suitable track for a dark mouthpiece).

When i was buying the reeds, i did mention the fact that i could be picking a bad reed, however when i tested them, i found three vandoren reeds were hard to play – in fact they are ideal if i…[Read more]

He was also telling about the selmer mouthpieces, the reason why the old mouthpieces sound different is because Selmer lost the original moulds that they made the older mouthpiece from, so they had to start from scratch and create new moulds.

i was chatting to my local sax shop owner today, and he was telling about 20 years ago they they bought 5 brand new Selmers and they had to send all of them back to manufacturer, they hadn’t been assembled properly, and none of them could play in tune.
My jaw fell on the floor!