Saxophone

Sax shopping time

I am an amateur player and due to a big reorganisation at work that took a lot of energy and time

to change from a pure technical type of job to a sales job, I stopped playing.

During holidays this year (2012) the music microbe bit me again, and I decided to start playing saxophone again after years of inactivity.

So I went on a sax hunt, and started reading on different sax forums,

and got some advice of a few pro players who are also conservatory teachers.

As I played a Yani baritone sax before and was very happy with it, Yanagisawa was first on my whishlist,

I visited a few music stores to test play a number of different horns though

So her is a my (subjective) judgement about the horns I played:

    • Buffet Crampon: nice tone, but bad key placement (low C and B keys felt unconfortable)

    • Keilwerth: OK, but not for me, don't know why

    • System 54: WOW, nice tone, good key placing (I kind of fell in love with this one)

    • Played very well, keys felt as if they were made for my hands,

    • stock mpc did play extraordinary in the low register, but very poor in the high register (probably my poor embouchure)

    • The Keilwerth stock mpc played perfect on this horn

    • My pro advisors did not recommend to buy this horn because while I liked it very much,

    • they told me that there might be deregulation problems in the future and it probably

    • does not have the same excellent built quality than a Yani.

    • Yani B901: OK, perfect key placement also but regulation was not so good (I played 4 of them in different shops)

    • Yani B991: played very wel, Key placement ok, perfect regulation, highly recommended by my pro player advisors

The result was a Yanagisawa B991 I bought at http://www.music-company.be/.

Back to playing

I was surprised that after all these years of inactivity, I still had a bit of a decent tone on my old setup

(selmer SA80-F with N°3 vandoren bluebox reeds) in the shops when I went playtesting.

But once I got the sax at home, it was a bit of a dissapointment that after 5 minutes of playing, my lips

got tired and my tone was not so decent anymore.

So it was back to basics (long tones, and slow exercises) until my embouchure gets back in shape.

As the Yani stock mpc is more closed than the selmer F, it also felt more confortable, so I am playing

on that one for the moment.