How to Choose a Sax Mouthpiece

[Music] really really [Music] [Music] welcome back and we are focusing on developing our sound one of the biggest things that we do in our process of sound development is choose a mouthpiece so in this video I'm going to go over some tips and some tricks some things that you should be doing when you decide to step up to a new mouthpiece alright let's get to it ideally this is what you want to do in the process of getting a new mouthpiece for the purpose of developing your sound increasing the quality of your sound so generally we start with the mouthpiece that comes with the saxophone first thing that we do as an upgrade is we actually upgrade our reads we go from maybe a one and a half or two and then we graduate up to a two and a half and then probably up to a three still using the same mouthpiece from there what people want to do is get another mouthpiece but we should instead actually move to a different kind of read because it's just increasing the read strength isn't really going to give you what it is that you want with the equipment that you have so you need to get some knowledge about what getting different reads are going to wind up doing for your sound and what different brands of reads are actually meant to do to increase the quality of your sound so for example when we were all in school and we were kids and we were beginners we started out with The Orange Box Rico reads we graduated up to getting a stiffer strength and then we wanted to move to a different mouthpiece however my recommendation Survivor Sax's recommendation is instead of going to a new mouthpiece first move to the RICO blue box I still keep calling them Rico Royals but I think they are officially called Royals by the Dario so going from Orange Box to the Royals by Daddario the blue box this is a much more logical graduation of equipment in order for you to help develop your sound from there then we want to stretch out to some other read Brands and make sure that all that time we are learning what we need to do differently with our embouchure in order to get the desired sound that we want now obviously you need to be listening to a lot of saxophoness not just your favorite you need to listen to saxophonists who play very well whose sound you don't like why obviously so you know what not to sound like but if it's coming from someone who's a great player then it gives you a certain appreciation for why someone has chosen that sound and maybe they chose that sound simply by virtue of what equipment they had and they just liked it now we want to step up to a new mouthpiece and generally for alto we step up to either a sea star if you're going in that classical direction or a mire for alto sax if you're going into jazz pop rock Funk Direction so in that case we now have the knowledge of how reads can radically change or sound in the feel when we are playing saxophone what is not so obvious is what we've learned from switching out not just read strengths but read brands read strengths across the brands can differ wildly from one another so if you're struggling it's like oh man I was playing a two and a half on this one and now I got to play a two on this one like am I going backwards it doesn't work like that at all I had this um one of these inexpensive Chinese mouthpieces this eyebay mouthpiece I got it and I used my regular wreaths with this lower tip opening and then I even switched to a stiffer read of my regular Reeds and I still just did not get the results that I wanted to so I switched to stiffer cut reads of the same strength that I normally play and that opened up the world listen to this clip [Music] foreign [Music] yeah it's the facing is just super super low [Music] [Music] [Music] laughs [Music] [Music] so be sure that you have a wide variety of reads when you are trying mouthpieces this is critical don't just play a mouthpiece with the same stuff that you were doing on your other one and then judge the mouthpiece you can't do that it doesn't work like that these mouthpieces they all differ wildly and how they are intended to be used every person has a different concept of what good sounds like in their head on what kind of response and what kind of feel they want from the mouthpiece so you cannot separate the mouthpiece from the Reeds they are paired together there is no mouthpiece that plays well by itself without a reed and no Reed's going to play without a mouthpiece so we should always be thinking of how am I going to pair this mouthpiece what reason am I going to use that can work best with this it's kind of like a chef who's going to pair an excellent wine with a meal or something like this okay let's move on what are the most important features and attributes of a mouthpiece that matter the most to us as saxophonists now normally you would think of the baffle the baffle right no the most important part of the mouthpiece is the facing curve the tip opening is part of the facing curve the tip opening determines the length of the separation of the Reed from the tip of the mouthpiece which is determined by the curvature of the mouthpiece the facing curve is everything I have an anomalous mouthpiece here that I'm going to show you and it actually has something of a high of raised baffle but it is a very dark sounding a mouthpiece I'll play this clip for you right now hahaha [Music] [Music] now I had some issues with the quality of this mouthpiece so I just flattened the table on it and now it's really good and this is the way that I want it so I'm not going to adjust it anymore even though it still has some issues it is an anomalous mouthpiece because number one I had no idea what this mouthpiece was used for just said Jazz I'm like okay well what kind of jazz is it's like a traditional kind of jazz is it like Smooth Jazz that's too general of a description for what this mouthpiece could be used for so going into it I had no idea what I was supposed to use this thing for so I wound up pairing the Reeds with it incorrectly even after I've fixed it I didn't have the right read for it so I wound up using one of my two and a half stiffer cut classical saxophone reads with it to get a really nice dark sound when we as saxophonists talk about tone and purely just tone what we're talking about is this core aspect in our sound that doesn't have any effects on it at all but unfortunately there are other aspects of our sound that are inseparable from tone I'm going to go over that shortly but first i'm going to focus on sub tone so what is a sub tone when we talk about a sub tone we're generally referring to a higher percentage of air that's flowing through the mouthpiece so when we play that higher percentage of air creates an audible type of hiss white noise or this is what we associate with a Fufu sound so when we have a high amount of that white noise in our sound we say that someone has a nice sub tone or sub-tone in their sound now because when you play there is air flowing through the saxophone which creates an audible sound and if you use a sub tone that's going to create an audible sound then sub tone is inseparable from your tone all of the core elements that I talk about in the book are inseparable from tone when we practice exercises that focus on these attributes of our tone we should be very well aware that these are the fundamental components of our sound we have tone articulation sub tone Dynamics and vibrato not necessarily in that order but those attributes are inseparable from our tone or our sound vibrato is pitch modulation you're actually raising and lowering the pitch slightly but I don't want to use the word modulation because it sounds like key change but technically vibrato is pitch modulation so vibrato or the lack of thereof vibrato is inseparable from tone and the other one is Dynamics you have to play at some volume level whether it's pianissimo piano Forte double Forte if you don't play with any Dynamic then you aren't making a sound so Dynamics is inseparable from tone this is why I have put these together in this book to really focus on your development of sound let's focus on sub tone and how this relates to mouthpieces so I have here this app is called tonal energy and I just want to show you what happens here when we play a sub tone sub-tone is often called Fufu because it emulates this onomatopoic sound so over here this is the high end frequency sound listen to what happens when I make the typical sound you can see all this high-end White Noise increase in volume so the volume of what is essentially white noise increases when we use the sub tone saxophonists like Ben Webster Johnny Hodges in the lower register Coleman Hawkins Stan Getz they play with a magnificent amount of what is essentially his in their sound so usually when it comes to a mouthpiece attribute that is most related to a subtone it's the thinness of the tip rail all of my mouthpieces that produce a really good sub-tone have a thin tip rail now I say in the book any saxophonist with enough skill and knowledge can make any mouthpiece sound like anything so like I said before if cigarasher took David sanborn's saxophone straight out of his mouth and played it he's gonna sound like cigar rasher but in understanding the attributes of a mouthpiece thin tip rail sub-tone okay wide side rails are more associated with having more resistance as opposed to thin rails as far as the baffle goes definitely the baffle can give you a brighter sound if there is a very high baffle like what we see in a lot of pop and rock type saxophone mouthpieces where you're low baffle your auto Lanes this kind of stuff is going to give you a much darker kind of sound having a high baffle on your mouthpiece can also make the tip opening feel like it's lower than what it generally is so people have traditionally Associated a high baffle with easier autismo but in reality the truth is a high baffle mouthpiece makes the tip opening feel lower so people wind up getting a bigger tip opening with a high baffle mouthpiece and a bigger tip opening will facilitate altissimo chamber size now it's not enough to just look at the chamber we also need to look at the side walls of a mouthpiece because when we talk about chamber we're really focusing on the inside cavity of the mouthpiece how open is it versus how narrow it is one of my favorite mouthpieces to recommend to people is actually the Ricoh metalite mouthpiece so this thing looks like something out of a video game Roblox robo blocks whatever this game is it looks like you can just build some kind of Tetris mouthpiece but it is very much associated with being a metal mouthpiece substitute from the time when metal mouthpieces were more associated with plain bright and hard rubber mouthpieces were associated with dark mouthpiece manufacturing today is phenomenal to where it doesn't really matter what a mouthpiece is made of the manufacturer can design the mouthpiece to play ultimately the way they want to this does not mean that the material doesn't matter if the mouthpiece was made of carpet it's going to play different if you're going to make a bright mouthpiece you can pair certain things together in order to get a more distinctive unique brand defining sound like you might find a mouthpiece that has a very thick side walls and a thick tip rail or a small chamber in order to get them more focused but yet the resistance is coming from a different place with the thickness of the Rails or vice versa these things can be very very mixed up personally I like my mouthpieces that do not have a lot of bells and whistles my main mouthpiece now that I use is this cheap Chinese mouthpiece that I went out and had plated [Music] hmm foreign [Music] [Music] the internal geometry is very simplistic brutally simplistic let's take a look at the features of these mouthpieces over here I have this Modern Vintage Auto Link we can see that it has relatively thin rails and a thin tip rail giving me a nice sub-tone very easy to play and it's got this open cavity here as a chamber very nice it's a little brighter than the regular Auto link with those features there see it from the back just that open straight tube open chamber mouthpiece here with the Van Dorn I got this vandoren T6 this is a small chamber it's very similar to the auto link except that this one has some thicker side walls here relatively medium sized tip Rail and you can see the inside cavity is much more closed off and this is a small chamber mouthpiece we moved to the Yana gasawa Here we have I don't know what this material is but we have relatively medium sized side rails tip rail looks kind of medium to thin give me a nice sub tone um we're looking at it from the back here you can see we got this squared off chamber and this is a pretty medium mouthpiece but I like that I can push it and play it brightened you can see the inside cavity there is closed off it's not open like these open chamber mouthpieces here I have something that's pretty exotic I have the kw-365 Tam from Gary Segal you can see that it has these very wide side walls and a pretty thick tip rail very aggressive baffle this mouthpiece with you know KW being Kirk Whalum is meant to emulate that kind of sound take a look at it from this angle here also on the non-metal sides I got the RICO metalite this is a classic here is a metal substitute another extremely uh unique inside cavity here you can see we got these flat side walls a very aggressive baffle here into a step baffle also a unique forehead that's right up on the front thick side walls thick tip rail there take a look at it from this angle here see what that looks like so here I call this thing the mouth Cannon this is the jumbo Java it's got the little elephant on the side you can see that it has this extraordinarily aggressive baffle here into a step we got thick side walls here giving me a little resistance there and a relatively thick tip rail very long table there and then just an absolute round small chamber there let's take a look at the classical saxophone mouthpiece the Selmer soloist you can see we have very thick side rails a very thick tip rail giving us that resistance that is typical with classical music classical saxophone and you can see that the side the inside is small it's not this open chamber type of mouthpiece and we take a look from the back here we have our typical classical saxophone French horseshoe chamber sorry that's blurry but I'm just kind of going through this and here we have this anomaly of a mouthpiece just by looking at it it looks like it has something of a weird step baffle that's right there with a high raised baffle you would expect it to play bright you can see that the rails the side rails are kind of thick this side is thicker than that side like I said earlier I had some issues with this mouthpiece but I basically just sanded the table and got it to play very very well I'm very happy with how it performs now and I have this thin tip around you can see like on this side right here it's a bit uneven but this is the pre Jodi aspina acquisition mouthpiece so I don't know how many more of these they actually have around but I want to play some clips for you of me playing these mouthpieces so that way you get an idea of what they sound like all right let's do it [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] hahaha [Music] [Music] ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha huh [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Applause] [Music] all right ladies and gentlemen so I do have my sound development book for saxophone I have my altissimo books for alto antenna and I have my diminished books also for any musical instrument that are available on payhip as a digital purchase only if you like this kind of content and you want to support the channel you can buy me a piece of cake it's like a Kickstarter patreon type thing that you can do to support the channel here alright ladies and gentlemen I'm going to keep it coming at you with all this informative stuff so thanks for tuning in that's all I got for you so [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: Sirvalorsax

Views: 15,165

Keywords: sax tone, sax sound development, choosing a sax mouthpiece, sirvalorsax altissimo, how to play sax, good tone on sax

Id: 7WcsKUuz-ao

Length: 25min 48sec (1548 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 23 2022