Maintaining Your Alto Saxophone

Maintaining Your Alto Saxophone
Hi! My name is Leslie Burnick and I’m speaking on behalf of Expertvillage.com. Today I’m going to talk about proper care of the saxophone. Even though the saxophone is made of brass, it does have pads underneath each of the main keys. These pads should not get overly wet, they are certainly made to get a little bit damp when you are blowing, but you don’t want to get them too wet. So just be careful not to. Really should not be playing out in the rain, although certainly with marching bands you do end up getting stuck in the rain at times. You may want to get some kind of a polishing cloth to keep in your case, just to keep your sax a little bit shinier. When you are done playing you’ll be taking the reed off. I will go ahead and show you, we’ll take the reed off and again this is one of the main things that you want to be doing with your saxophone in the proper care. They do sell these little swabs, they are all a little bit different. You can do this with the mouthpiece off if you wish and just run this through, this will help dry out the inside of the mouthpiece and then you can also use it on the neck and again they have all different designs with this. So just run that through each end. With the saxophone swab they have, the swab itself generally has a little sort of a plastic insert thing, which helps expand it inside the saxophone. One end of the string will have a weight, you drop that into the saxophone and then the string comes out of the other end and then you just pull that through. That way you are going to keep your saxophone nice for a long time.