Inspecting a Baritone Saxophone

Video Transcript

For Expert Village, this EJ John Erickson and we're discussing the baritone saxophone. This is our third session and we've given you a little bit of background and now we're going to dive in. You got your Bari. You're excited, you want to rip it open, you want to play it. But, wait. There are some things you want to do to just kind of get to know your Bari and look at the pieces that it comes with. Now, if you're getting a new baritone saxophone, chances are from the music store, wherever you got it they're going to get you reeds, they're going to get you new cork grease, they're going to get you all that stuff that'll get you up and running. Full harness, neck strap, things like that. But, if you're like me, I don't have that kind of money yet, and I got a used one. So, and actually, this is truly the case with me, this is a used baritone sax. I have borrowed others and this is my first one. So, let's do it together and let's open up this puppy, and here's how you would inspect a baritone sax on your first time out. Okay, so diving in, before we even open it, we can kind of get an indication of its use just by looking at the wear on the case. And so, I've been forewarned that this Bari has been through some use. It's a King it says here on the outside. So, we'll just open it up and dive in. And everybody's first impulse is to grab the Bari and pull it out. But before you do that, just go ahead and pull everything out that's included. So here we have a nice mess of pads and straps and we'll take a look. Obviously, that's the neck strap for it. And we'll pull it out and, oh, here's the neck and it's already attached to the mouthpiece. That gives us some indication of its use as well, that they obviously didn't take the mouthpiece on and off. So this is our neck and then we'll scour for anything else. Oh, and we've got some reeds. Usually, you'll see some cork grease. Now this reed came with the horn. You probably don't want to use it. We'll throw away any reeds that come with it. You just want to get rid of those and start with good, fresh reeds. Another thing to do is just kind of move your hand along the bottom to see if there are any loose cables or neck strap pieces. Sometimes that can get attached and, if you're pulling it out and it gets attached to one of the keys, it'll yank it and bend your keys. You don't want to do that. So, I think we're getting an indication of what's here and what's missing. We're going to need cork grease. We'll talk a little bit about that in the maintenance section. But the first thing we'll want to do, is just do an inspection. So let's go ahead and pull it out and, for these big guys, you probably want to sit down. So, I'm going to sit right here and we're going to start the inspection. And I usually like to start at the bottom down, but you can also start with the bell and work backwards through the saxophone. And you'll just want to look at every single individual piece. So first of all, we can kind of check out the bell. Now, there's a lot of dents, a lot of the lacquer has been worn off, so this Bari's been used. But just because it's beat up and some dents in it, doesn't mean it's unplayable and we'll definitely check that out as we go through the process.

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