SAXOPHONE : PROS & CONS (2nd Part)

 Now’s the time for the inconvenients of saxophones, an overall look at the things that gives headhaches and stresses me and my colleagues sax players along the several years that we’ve been living with those fragile and temperamental musical instruments:

CON’S :

1 • To achieve the sucessful results I’ve talked about in the first part, you’ll need several years of daily effort on exercices, practising, studying and listening to a lot of sax (and not only sax) music.

      Right, you can say the same is needed to play well ANY other musical instrument, but the sax, dealing with fingers, hands, lips, mouth, embouchure, jaw, tongue, troath, glot, larinx, lungs, and diaphragm (crucial organ!), is a very, very demanding one! Coltrane said once that to get there, it’s necessary 10% of inspiration and 90% of perspiration…!

2 • If you’re going to start with the sax, prepare yourself to struggle for about five years before you begin to obtain a decent and a barely pleaseant sonority, and finally leaving behind your back that irritating inconsistent kazzo-buzzing-like sound with a fluctuating tune, too sharp on the high range, frequently out of precision and control over the low octave, too much oscilatory and vibrato on the long notes, the kind of sonority that you usually hear on the circus, when the clowns play a sax (anyway, their job is making people laugh, not playing like Paul Desmmond...). When I talk about those five years, a friend of mine, Zé Menezes, also a sax player, quickly corrects me: «- Five? Ffffff!…You should say better twenty-five, it’s more like it! ». Anyway, I’m not as critical as he is, but surely it takes some ammount of real practice time, before we can hear from some people knowned by being “connoisseurs” or specialists, that we got a great sound on our saxophone…

3 •  Regular maintenance (too regulary, for my taste) :

      There’s some components of a saxophone that are perecible, it worns gradually over time. We’re talking about reeds, pads and some other shock absorvers, mechanic helpers and adjusting materials, like cork, rubber, and springs. 

      a) Reeds - are made of cane, not just any cane or bambu, but one species originary from the south of France, le Midi, near la Côte d’Azur, that is flatened, dried out by the sun, soaked in special products, and later cutted out in different sizes, to match the mouthpieces of all the members of the saxophone family, and diverse strenghts or hardness. The rule normally applied is that the more open mouthpiece is, the softer reeds you’ll need, and vice-versa. Reeds are quite expensive (if we think that’s just a little piece of wood…), very easily breakable, not very well normalized (in a box of ten, if you get 2 or 3 instantly usable, you’re lucky - 4 other reeds you have to soak, sand, and process them before you can play with, and the remaining ones… forget about them, they’ll never be playable, no matter what you do...).

      Their life time is short, because the human saliva contains a lot of “poisons” for the wood: the acids that are responsable for processing and transforming the food we eat, and a variety of chemical substances that have origin in cigar smoke, beverages (alchool, sugars, etc...), and food itself. If you want to give your reeds a long life, don’t smoke, drink, eat, kiss, before you play your sax… but I think it’s asking too much sacrifices, and… if you don’t eat and drink you’ll have no energy to blow! Plasticover or synthetic reeds are one solution for that problem, but… I really don’t like the sound they produce… too sharp and rispy.

      No big dinners : try to have your digestion completed before a concert. The reason is simple: if you have your stomach full, the diaphragm can’t do the job properly, and you can’t use the full lung capacity. Sometimes you even risk a digestion arrest ( it happened to me in my musical begginings, during a show… they took me to the hospital, I never felt so bad in my life). Now, I eat only soup or a salad, if we dinner just before the concert, and sometimes, if we’re on a restaurant, I ask the waiter to put my food on a tupperware, and when I’m back home, in the end of the night, I’ll warm the food in the microwave… Sometimes it’s hard, to look at your guitarist, bassist, drummer, pianist, eating so happily before your eyes, and you just can’t…. (normally I just drink the wine and eat a piece of pudding - some sugar for energy - being aware that eventually it’s going to ruin my best reed, but… ).

     b) Pads : pads are round coushins, that fill the interior cup of the keys, and they perform the same job that the tips of our fingers do when we play a wooden flute, witch is, covering and uncovering the holes. Like our fingers, the exterior covering of the pads is made of good leather, a very thin one, like the one we can find in good gloves - the interior of the pads is made of a 3 milimeter thick disk of felt. Leather from different origins can be used, and recently the more durable pads are made of canguroo skin.

      I’ve used the word “durable”, because, once more, like the reeds, pads have a limited life. Longer than the reeds, hopefully, but also them are receiving certain ammount of saliva (that’s why they stuck, once in a while), and the consecutive and repeated shock of the leather against the metallic borders of the hole is going to make a depression ring in the pad, and with time, it’ll cut the leather and originating a leak, because the air is going to escape trough the felt below, and with annoying results: detuning the sax, increasing the effort the player has to do when blowing the notes situated above that particular hole/keypad, and, mainly, it’s going to ruin the normal operationalityof the horn. The worst part is, most of the times, to discover the exact spot where the leak happened… We can’t do the same way we use to find where’s the hole, in a bycicle with a flat tire, just filling the rubber wheel, dropping it on water and observing where the bubbles come from… can’t put the sax under water and blow… just not pratical..!

      So, some people use smoke (after covering the bell hole, of course), some others a light in the extremity of a long and flexive tube, seeking the leaking where the light gets trought the leather skin cut… but perhaps it’s better to take the sax to the repaiman, at the end…  

I have a Selmer Mark VI tenor, that I bought new, back in the late 70’s, and recently the leaks become so frequent I decided to substitute all the pads with a new set from Selmer, and repair every spring, cork, level all keys, etc… just to have the horn fully operational again (I had a recording session for our new cd, so, it was the right timing to do…). Can you imagine, I spent about 350 € (euros, almost the same that in dollars) to have a full renoval of the perecible parts. More than the price of the sax back then, when I acquired it : 300 € ! Well, because it’s a Mk 6, it worths a lot of times more, now, but anyway…! The result of economic inflation over all those years… Well, moving forward with the con’s…

c) Cork & Springs : In order to silence noises originated by the key mechanism, where there’s some mettalic parts collision, they beat against each other or at the tubular body of the sax, there’s a lot of little shock absorbers, made of cork. Without them, we’ll hear a lot of clicks, clacks, toinngs, and other inconvenient sounds along with the melodies produced by the sax. Some others are made of rubber.

     Cork is a natural heat and sound isolant material, but like almost everything, with the repeated use, variations in humidity and temperature, looses thikness and becomes more stiff, or sometimes, as it’s placed with contact glue, falls off, so, it has to be replaced. Also the extreme of the sax neck, where the mouthpiece joins the sax, is covered by cork, to permit a leak-free junction, although giving some room to adjust the position of the mouthpiece, for tuning pourposes.   I don’t go deeper into details or repairing tricks and tips, because it’s not the objective of this article, but in the future, if some readers may think it could be useful, I could write something about that matter (although I suppose there’s some members of Saxophone People that have larger knowledge and experience in woodwinds repair than I have.)

     Springs have the responsability for the key action, making the ammount of tension to make the keys come back to original position, after they’ve been preesed by the player’s fingers (and palm of the hands). The mechanism is a little complex, and some keys do move a second, or even a third one, when they open or close, so we’ve got several springs of different strenghts and dimensions, and they are similar to needles, so if you are going to desmantle some keys, even just for cleaning, watch out for those needles, it’s very easy to stick one into a finger! (My experience speaks again…). It’s very painful, my friends!

      Just another tip on springs (a very basic one, but nevertheless…) - always carry some rubber bands on the sax case, because springs choose to break a lot just before the concert starts, and the rubber bands are the quickiest way to solve the lack of tension in a sax key.

 In resume, reeds, pads, cork, springs, all need to be replaced periodically. Reeds can last 2, 3 weeks ( in my case, playing everyday and with concerts almost every weekend ), pads can work well during months or years (the little ones worn faster than the big ones, because they are closer to the mouthpiece, then getting more ammount of saliva than the lowest ones). Cork & springs more than a year, but it can vary: I have a friend that only replaced a pair of springs of his alto sax, in 28 years… But one thing is absolutely granted:

     Material failures are going to bother you, sometimes in critical moments (on stage, during a solo…), other times you notice that you must blow harder to get the usual sonority, or suddenly you can’t get the lowest notes anymore, or the sound isn’t as good as it was the day before, you start to be upset, irritated, blaming the reed, or the sax, or the heat, or the cold, or your girlfriend, or the drummer, or even…yourself. Not to mention the time spent to find where the problem is, the price of a box of new reeds, so, prepare yourself… there’s a lot of con’s!

 d)  But it doesn’t end here, there’s a lot more I can remember, like the saxophone is a very fragile instrument, otherwise anyone could think, being made of metal: if it falls on the floor, you’ve going to get a bump, or a depression on the surface of the body, or even one or two keys or part of the mechanism does bend or break. To start a leak, it takes just a single hair, or little tiny bit of paper, or fingernail, bread, some fibers of a cleaning cloth.   The fitness of the muscles around our mouth, (embouchure), is very hard to achieve, and if you don’t play for a week, the summer vacations, Christmas hollidays, it’s gone… lost. You must spend hours playing to recover that warm and round beautiful sound you so hardly manage to acquire…sometime ago. Don’t read that as a machist comment, because I’m not the type, but the sax it’s just like a woman: if you don’t care of her, don’t invest in the relationship, she’s gonna… leave you! It’s the same with the horn!

      Even when everything seems to be ok, the sax just came from the repair shop, it’s sounding great, as never, you did find a very good reed, it can happen that hours later, or the next day, you can’t play with the same good sound, it seems that the diabolic thing has a bad temper or it’s own soul… ( I must advert that now I’m not comparing anymore the horn to a woman, whatsoever. Please. Don’t jump into conclusions… ).     

      It’s true, the fun of playing sax then it’s gone, you start thinking. « - Why? Why didn’t I choosed the harmonica, the bass guitar, the trumpet, any other musical instrument that isn’t so susceptible and have a easier maintenance?

      Saxophone: can take you to heaven, sure, but it has a terrible habit of finding the door leading to the secret passage right to hell…

  Rui Azul

(portuguese professional saxophonist and cartoonist - http://www.myspace.com/ruiazul)