How to Improve Every Saxophone Reed

hey I've got my friend Kyle coming over he's a great saxophone player I brought him back a reed geek from the NAMM show and today I'm gonna show him and you guys exactly how I use this tool to make my Reed's play much better Jay Metcalf here I put a link in the description below where you can learn more or purchase a reed geek for yourself what kind of Reed care or Reed adjustment routines are you doing let us know in the comments section below if you play synthetic reeds of course you could just remind us that you don't need any of this but if you like saxophone tutorial videos like this one be sure to drop me one of these right now and subscribe to the channel if you aren't already yeah man I brought you something back from them oh not Vietnam but Nam like yes so Kyle doesn't have a reed geek and today we're gonna talk about reeds and I'm gonna show him how to use his new Reed geek and hopefully we're gonna get his Reed's playing a bit better so Matt show me what how you're using your what you're doing for Reed's right now Reed's currently right now okay so I've got this kind of dilapidated plastic bottle but it's an airtight container with like a little sponge in there i dripped a couple of drops of water every week in there I keep about three or four Reed's going in here a time and how's that been working out for you it's okay I think I got a I'm really crossing my fingers that I just got one of the bad boxes of Van Doren reeds these are Java Reds strength three and a half okay and what tip opening is your mouthpiece it's a seven and it's on auto link auto like so super master so which Reed did you take out most recent one I took it out at a gig a few days ago brand new have not done anything to and how's it playing for you on like a scale of one to ten it's definitely a seven and like for you a seven is like you can play it on a game I can play it it's it's a can you play it a little bit for us [Music] okay cool and how does that feel for you a little bright a little buzzy I don't know I think that my setup does a lot of the brightness for me and I like my read to kind of be on the darker side so this one's maybe already a little bit too it could already be too soft alright so first you just gotta always do the back I do it and every time I take a read out I do the back it's gonna change every time you take that read off you put it away you take it out for the next gig especially you're going on airplanes and stuff here I'm just applying light pressure going back and forth you can use any edge of the read geek for this and I do a few passes like this before every playing session on every read on the other side of the read I use the tip of the reed geek to adjust the rails often one side of the reed will be vibrating more freely than the other and our goal here is to even that out and get both sides to vibrate more equally put that back on you said it was a little bit buzzy and sometimes that can be the result of like just unevenness you know like one side is kind of vibrating more than the other and that kind of gives you an undesirable response so let's see let's see what happens with this [Music] [Music] okay it's still a seven uh I would say it's gone up to an eight now this is an a read for me it's more free blowing it's it's caused the reed to vibrate more okay awesome as you learn to use your we geek you'll learn if I take a little bit over this side I'm gonna get that seven going to an AIDS or at eight and a half you know well let's get a brand new read hopefully it won't be great and you try to get it from being so so - I got a much better oh yeah so now you're putting them back in those sleeves if you look at look at this do you see how warped that it's probably don't lay flat yeah I mean this is definitely that's this is what you know by any stretch of the imagination so if you're putting your read back in there you're almost guaranteeing it it's not gonna be flat the next time you put it on there I would recommend you get something like this one I really like this is the van Duren hydro case so cool because you can see the reeds in fact I think that's an a brilliant idea that they did I got this this is from a company it says bamboo this comes from Argentina and this is like check that out like a magnetized thing like it and this holds eight tenor or baritone sax reeds and I'm loving this okay so now normally when you take out a new Reed now that you've got a reed geek you're gonna do the reed ich on the back of it straight away but solutely for the purposes of our experiment you're just gonna slap it on the mouthpiece [Music] okay what number would you give this is perfect this is like a for what I'm gonna do I think this rail here is it has a bit too much material on it so I'm gonna take a little bit more off of this I'm gonna come take a little bit off of this side too and then I'm gonna go in here and try to really decongest this center area of course the first step is to flatten the table as always and once I've done that I if you know if you run your finger up against that you're gonna feel a nice smoothness a little bit more off at this side so just putting light pressure here and you can see you know this red geek is super sharp so with very light pressure you can see it's taking these ultra fine particles or that read off so I'm just using this rounded edge here for this work on the rails and I'm gonna take a little bit off of the other rail just not as much you can use this edge if you want over here that works too I like to use this this part here because you can really get in to the exact precise location you want to adjust so now I'm just kind of decongestant taking some of these fibers out if you imagine or even draw a v-shape around the heart of the reed this gives you a guideline of where to take away material focus on the area below the V basically I am taking off material there so I'm avoiding this very central area here because this does something else and I'll show you that in a second so now if you've got to read and it's really kind of too stiff even if you get the rails vibrating evenly and you take out this congestion around the heart but it's still just too stiff what you can do is is take some of the spine down and with this black diamond you've got this curved edge this is a nice addition to this design so you can use that this is just slightly curved to kind of evenly take down the the spine a little bit you can also use the flat edge that'll work and I do this in a backwards motion like this let's be clear it's it's rare you're gonna take a four and make it a ten I mean I haven't really had that experience but if you've got a seven you could and you and you know how to use to read geek well you could make it a nine you know easily an eight in in and you don't have to spend a lot of time you saw I was on it for you know a minute that's here [Music] it's definitely way better it needs more though it needs more you think from what I'm hearing your tell me tell me it's a it's it's a drastic improvement from what we did before the reader yeah it's it's more free blowing I get that out of it it was very stuffy before the read geek and now it's it's been freed up to vibrate more let me do some more let me do it put your play it again for a second and then I'm gonna do another one what would you what number would you give it this is up to a seven this ultraseven yeah okay great let's see if we can make it an eight uh yeah just getting the rege eke and using it a lot of people get these and they don't actually really use her or they only do the easy thing on the back you know don't be afraid to work with you read you're not gonna ruin them that was my fear in the beginning like oh I'm gonna ruin my reads with this thing cuz I don't know what I'm doing and I've never ruined to read that's usually all I'll do want to read I'll play it if you need something I'll I'll spend 30 seconds on it and then sometimes I do a second you know a second go at it and then usually I've got it I've got it where I want it to be [Music] yeah yeah that's a solid eight you just doubled that read from a four to an eight yes really really remarkable that's how easy it is to go from a four to an eight without even playing it myself congratulations on your new acquisition man and I hope you hope you get some really good use of it that should last you the rest of your life as long as you don't lose it I'm not gonna lose it one question can you fly with a read you yes I fly with them all the time I need TSA scares no you can fly with it thanks for being a guinea pig and doing this this is Kyle Robert go follow Kyle on Instagram he's uploading great content you can hear he's a great player it's at Kyle Roberts accent okay [Laughter]

Channel: Better Sax

Views: 159,674

Rating: 4.9469132 out of 5

Keywords: reedgeek, reed geek, reed adjustment, jay metcalf, better sax, bettersax, saxophone reeds, kyle robert, saxophone reed adjustment tutorial, how to fix reeds, vandoren java reeds, saxophone, sax, tenor sax, tenor saxophone, alto sax, alto saxophone, saxophone lessons, how to play saxophone, sax teacher, reed knife, parts of a reed

Id: Bxq1btuSH6s

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 04 2020