The Saxophone (...caused more bankruptcy than you’d imagine)

never shot an opening oh he never shot an opening all right well this is the opening my name is David I am associate curator here and then kind of teach you a little saxophone today take you through a couple of hundred years of saxophone innovation and about let's go we're getting into some saxophone history right now I don't know really much of anything I really can't play any horn instruments yeah I do lessons we'll see how I'm gonna master it yeah so this is a serpent going back to the 16th century was used in churches as a base instrument you can see there's holes for the fingers it has to be windy because there's no keys at this point so in order to get a long tube to make low notes it had to be bendy moving on from the surface though most of my experience with the saxophone is being on tour with Joe to George Harry and the Potters he's incredible seismograph and Ron Swanson it's pretty much to where my saxophone knowledge that's Ron Swanson's a good place to stop if you like there's a lot of places to go the serpent's isn't really a great bass instrument by the time they started working with keys brass instruments and ophicleide was invented before the tuba so this became the sort of primary bass instrument it's a keyed conical instrument with a brass mouthpiece and you just might notice that it looks a little bit like the saxophone this is the horns if you think of like the tuba the function that it serves now the tuba existed after the ophicleide so just replace the ophicleide because it's a better low brass instrument so I'm talking about these kind of low brass instruments getting towards saxophone it doesn't make a lot of sense until we walk over to the Adolphe Sax exhibit so saxophone comes from Adolphe Sax yes yeah totally so okay yeah he loved his last name and used it copiously if he made sax horns Saxo Trampas all of these instruments he put his name on he's putting his name on everything yeah and it became a big problem for him it ran out nicely because why well the saxophone is great it still exists maybe it actually worked out well because we still know his name as we know the saxophone but by naming things a sack horn and a sack so Troma that were essentially improvements and innovations upon pre-existing brass instruments but Pat's have seen them in his own name and then getting monopolies with the French government to supply bands with sacks or Troma's sacks horns etc it made he basically went through the orchestra and just made his own version and then put his name on yeah yeah kind of band brass instruments I mean to be fair he was a brilliant innovator and he did improve these instruments make new versions of them but in many cases they were sort of variations of a pre-existing thing and so other manufacturers started suing him because they're like that's just like my horn but you called it a sax horn he ended up dying bankrupt because of how many lawsuits he went through in his life at least three different times he declared bankruptcy the saxophone was his one real success in terms of actually being debatably a brand new thing I had no idea the saxophone history had so much bankruptcy in it yeah we're going through it with you thank you man a tall sax when I was laid off sax around yes I used born in 1814 here's an Adolphe Sax saxophone it's from his factory built around 1862 these instruments also are Adolphe Sax instruments so we like to display that he had these innovative different brass instruments as I was mentioning along with his saxophones he had a number of different innovations he did his father had an instrument workshop in Belgium so he grew up around there it's a miracle that he even lived through it there's all these chemicals around a workshop and he apparently ingested many different poisons and fell from great heights multiple times and somehow survived childhood at the age of 20 he had innovated the clarinet fingering system this is just around the time he work starts to be rather than those things yeah inventing an instrument is kind of a weird concept we don't think of someone as the inventor of the flute because people have been playing flute like instruments in fields for thousands of years there's no inventor of the drum how can you invent a saxophone or a new instrument in the nineteenth century but he tried and then put his name on he puts his name on everything and claims them all as inventions the saxophone is his best bet though but it's still really just a variation in my opinion of a Norfolk life you look here at the patent drawing the only difference is this mouthpiece here which is more like a clarinet mouthpiece so he played clarinet really well had maybe a Norfolk lied that he had made was like what does this sound like if I put this mouthpiece something over the sax a pen wow that actually is pretty good and that becomes the saxophone in fact the first mention of the saxophone and in some sort of writing by the famous French composer Berlioz he called it an offical I'd a BEC which means and ophicleide with a mouthpiece and in French soon he made sure people weren't writing that anymore he was very good at getting people to write about how nice the saxophone was and clearly I've never heard of a Norfolk lie before yeah and put a clarinet mouthpiece on there and suddenly you have a keyed conical horn with a single reed which is basically a description of a saxophone made out of metal he patents in 1845 a whole array of saxophones and he gets them into the French military band stationed all over the world so the saxophone starts finding performances in England America all over the place to be honest the saxophone is a kind of easy instrument to learn the very basics of unlike the clarinet which has a register key that jumps you up a twelfth the saxophonist has an octave key so you have the same fingerings for low notes and higher notes just pushing a button okay oh yeah it turned out people kind of liked the saxophone Adolf's idea they say sometimes in the literature that this was how he was developing an instrument for this purpose but I think it's a post-hoc explanation he said the saxophone would be a perfect thing in the orchestra to bridge the woodwinds and the brass and the strings that can play extremely softly it can play loud and powerfully kind of like a brass early oast was like yeah I love that but then he wrote all these orchestral pieces with no saxophone and it's because there weren't good saxophonist so first he needed about 50 years of people learning how to play the instrument decently Adolphe Sax became the first saxophone professor at the Paris Conservatory he was a very talented player I thought I might play you an early ya excerpt of a saxophone piece this kind of a showpiece get the vibe of the type of music that Sachs was trying to get out there to show off what the saxophone can do i totally new to born instruments do you have so you say you have an octave key so you have two octaves on this it's about two and a half octaves fingered there's a couple of auxilary keys for the lowest and the highest notes if I finger a G and then I push this button it's a G an octave above without having to do anything too different which is pretty convenient and one of the few instruments that does something like that so easily which makes it easy to teach to kids because they don't have to think that many because I'm gonna have it about five minutes I'm not a very good music stay you're good [Laughter] [Applause] how are you getting for broto with my jaw a little lightning but like real small and fast so what are you doing like if you're not without the saxophone there what are you what are you doing kind of like a quick chewing it's more like loosening and coming back to your embouchure so I literally teach the phrase wah wah wah wah wah to students let's just do the little bit of finale because it's a little more fun [Music] [Music] all right I probably wouldn't have gotten that snot a great thank you whale on the sacks how many keys do you have 12 an octave 20/20 it's not as simple as like you know here's one note and then half step half step half step half step there well you can see the half steps are by each key that opens so if I do a chromatic scale you'll see that I'm doing different fingering patterns but essentially what's happening in this one hole up the tube opens every time and then once you press the octave key it restarts and then eventually give these highest holes so the tone like a brown one whichever pitch is open so if I'm playing the highest note with this highest thing open the pitch is coming because of this highest opening and that makes the tube very short versus when it's fully closed you get the lowest note yeah we'll be clear on that for people who might not be familiar with saxophone like me it just simply works by it's tube with holes in it and then you're opening and closing those holes and they're different sizes and totally but it's a complicated key system that Adolphe Sax was pretty innovative and and getting sorted out but it's also a lot like other woodwinds so it's not super foreign to clarinet or flute playing either they have they have similar fingering systems and there's all kinds of tricks you learn as you go along infinite amount of nuance what is the octave key word yeah it's a nicely and all the way down an octave with one key it brings it up an octave moves it up and yeah so you'll see this lever at the top races which is this little tiny vent that raises it [Applause] but there's a second one here with other notes same button but if I've got different fingers down it opens through the side so you open this it brings it up an octave and that's because it's it's letting out half of the pressure its opening a hole like really high up so it's shortening the two but it's a much smaller hole than these others I mean it's really enhancing a harmonic so I can playing a low B flat play through the harmonic series the way you might you know play harmonica tar so that is cool so you can do like trumpet type things it has all the same you know harmonic series as other instruments and so what this is doing is by venting open a little note it's making us that you automatically jump up above ya the fundamental that you're on to the next octave the first saxophones actually had like four octave keys this is a mechanism that after it was invented other people started messing around with it waiting for the patent to run out and then they're like oh I figured out how to only have two octave keys and now the next person figured out how to only have one and you'll just see that just on the first saxophone there's a whole lot less he's on the side then my saxophone so it was kind of a process of adding different keys finding that you sometimes need to go from this note to this note and it works a lot better if you have a little roller so that it works mechanically together is to help you get these pinkie keys it's like a sweep motion yeah your shred guitar better motion the hardest thing for most saxophonist to get good with I'm right-handed so my left pinky is definitely my least coordinated thing and has to press down the lowest notes do all this kind of weird rolling around that like my more coordinated fingers don't have to deal with Sarah Longfield would hate the sax she doesn't use her pinky she's a guitar player moving along I wanted to show you one of the highlights of our saxophone collection yeah made by the LeBlanc company so 8'o sax dies bankrupt his that was brutal but his saxophone lives on dude saxophone players like refer to a tall saxophone in a loving way if you're yeah I went to a international saxophone competition that's held every four years in the non Belgium his birthplace so plus he's like such a character he's both a difficult person who many people hated and also a quite brilliant innovator and to try to suss through like I see a good person or not I know it's just a interesting subject cool so I wanted to show you one of our collections saxophone collection highlights it's a very interesting instrument made in the early 1930s by the LeBlanc company ants as simple as just blowing into it it's not like a trumpet where you need your embouchure takes some time to get used to you'll I guess you'll find out how yeah it can be frustrating if you have kind of not the right embouchure set up it can be a sort of ugly sound essentially you just put your lip over your teeth and you use your top teeth on the mouthpiece you're hiding them hinged together your muscles around your mouth so that it air is not leaking out and then you look so this instrument is called the rationale saxophone this is serial number 23 they didn't end up making a whole ton of these but it's a beautiful instrument made of nickel silver I love these uh the sweet buttons but my saxophone I've got this one and this one I don't have this ski LeBlanc company had a head acoustician named Cheryl who finagle and he was like you know what the saxophone is deficient in some ways and he wants to solve all of the problems another thing he wants to solve is making it so that all of the keys below whatever your fingering are naturally open on my saxophone some of these keys rest closed whereas on the rationale they arrest open acoustically is supposed to have better intonation just better tone response makes this really complicated saxophone there's a few different keys there's all these different key couplings I think it says in literature there's seven different fingerings for C so I can play if you swipe through the scene yeah that's cool the most complicated see we called that this big Leon Doh and the saxophone despite being actually quite brilliant didn't catch on it sounds too like there's it would really throw off your muscle memory to even change the buttons and whoa yeah that's like the QWERTY keyboard yeah this is like whatever it's been around in 1860 and then everybody was like oh that is better than all of us would be playing saxophones of this system but by 1930 it became not super viable this one's not super virtuosic is just pretty this is the second movement of pictures at an Exhibition the old castle [Music] [Music] so that's just a pretty version of what could have been for the orchestra if only Adolphe Sax have been born like fifty years earlier dad that would probably be an English horn solo or something so this last little bit I have ten minutes to learn how to play it yeah I've got a brand new read for you cool thanks you don't share reads I mean there's a read you like if you're close friends do you share read with someone I will share a saxophone with someone but I will always have my own mouth yeah a reed is just a thin piece of wood yeah piece of cane so you're gonna want to put that in your mouth and get it way like this ends so the thin end is the one that vibrates all the sound comes from the vibration of the reed there the length of the tube is deciding what rate it vibrates at but that's actually the sound producing mechanism so this is where getting your harmonics from exact yeah everything comes from your Reed vibration like that yeah so you need to just get it away you don't want to suck on it because you can warp it but you just want to like drool all over it it's nice they have flavored ones for kids saxophone is delicious yeah so then let's hook you up here do you feel like it is sufficiently wet that is not good I don't know you okay oh it's not gonna work here we go the way you were trying to put your read on I have no yeah no idea here's what we do take off okay put the flat part on the mouthpiece Reed is basically even with the end of the mouthpiece all right then you put the ligature over you want to get the ligature down a little bit basically onto the base of the Reed nice and lined up I didn't realize that the vibration is such that's like your string almost this amp this ball changes the pitch everything needs something to vibrate so yeah so tremendous your lips yeah a single Reed it's the reed the vibration of course that's why the Trumpy you have to go like yeah like that exactly the air on its own will do nothing that you ever played just read and you play gesture you can practice your vibrato or I've practiced circular breathing that way while like driving in my car which is totally not safe okay yeah that sounds like what Public Enemy song is that how do I hold this thing so you're there you go you're gonna put one there one there the / there you go got it bring it a little bit closer to you so the mouthpiece actually like comes towards your mouth and you don't know where do I put my thumb here oh just right there yep over your teeth it's no oh yeah yeah exactly uh-huh yeah that's it take a big breath and below see what happens you're biting too hard maybe okay then Oh ma'am I don't normally do that I know it's I wear a little piece of like tape on my teeth because it hurts my lip don't bite too hard but blow a lot that's pretty [Laughter] loosen up a little bit and blow a lot of air well out of air don't do this note and then open it up you've got be a C sharp so that's a whole step okay and then is it just like like does that make sense you don't want to push on that key it's a different one okay - too complicated so be a and then G and it felt like that yeah [Music] it's really hard to like really but a lot of air into it without biting yeah that's it's like hard to separate those two classic now that [Music] [Applause] I got kind of some something someone musical here that's not the active key is that this guy yeah I wish I have more time with this if you had one week with the saxophone and a fingering chart you would have some tunes that sort it out it's really not that difficult and could be fun yeah it would be fun well that's a good that's a good note and on that if you want to learn the saxophone apparently expert right here it's not that difficult oh maybe I'll just get a good a honk and then we'll go right to the end screen thank you so much for being here as much as I can doing this time thanks to the musical instrument museum here in Phoenix Arizona thanks so much for the lesson subscribe to my channel if you would like to I'm sure this isn't the last time I embarrass myself on the Internet's and we'll see you next week so our 10th anniversary here at man we come the museum there's concerts all the time and always great instruments to see I'm kind of starting to get this yes you want to put this finger there you have to go okay yeah we have to go alright well thank you so much

Channel: undefined

Views: 409,765

Rating: 4.9717355 out of 5

Keywords: Rob Scallon, music, musician, guitar, guitarist, saxophone, mim, musical instrument museum, adolphe sax, history of the saxophone, quick saxophone lesson, saxophone basics, reed, mouthpiece, Ophicleide, bankruptcy, saxophone lesson, how to play saxophone, wind, how to play sax, sax, song, playing, musical instrument, pipe organ, theremin, carillon, history, horns, jazz, ron swanson, saxophone guy, saxophone music, saxophone jazz, saxophone cover, solo, dance monkey, instrumental, meme, bass, octobass

Id: WzJKPvTfum0

Length: 23min 10sec (1390 seconds)

Published: Sat May 09 2020