The Parts of a Baritone Saxophone

Video Transcript

For Expert Village, I'm EJ John Erickson with Vital Flame Productions and thank you for joining us on our sessions focusing on the baritone saxophone. Okay, before I get too far into the inspection, let's talk about the main sections or pieces of a saxophone. Obviously, you have your bell piece and it comes down. You can see the hinge here, which comes around, this is a U-joint, looks like a U, it's kind of self-explanatory. From here is the body portion, and then from the top from the body portion comes out to the neck. They call that the neck. And the mouthpiece, of course we've got that portion, piece as well. I also just like to say there's a top and a bottom. The back section of a saxophone. The keys are all on the other side. This is mostly blank and bare. And the front of a saxophone which has all the keys on the front section. Those are your basic parts. There's two basic sides, I like to call, there's the back side of the saxophone which doesn't have as many keys, mostly it has the rod portion. And then I call it the front side and the front side has all of the keys. So starting with the bell, working our way, we'll start with the back. And you just want to go and look for all these posts. Make sure that the bell, anything, there should be nothing moving as far as these major hinge posts and kind of check. I like to wiggle back and forth. The keys are supposed to go up and down, but if you also do it left and right, you can tell if there's any big play in the rod sections as well. Also, just check to make sure that your pads look like their seating. Now what does that mean that a pad is seating. I'll kind of describe it with my hands. The different tone holes that open up create a rim and the pad comes down and it has a rim inside of it that actually goes like this and it seats right on that rim. Now, if the pad is off and that pad isn't lining up, that's going to create leakage, which means you won't be able to play it very well. So, one of the things I'll be checking for is making sure all those pads are seating on those tone holes. And also through the process as you're going through it, you can check, when I push a key down, I can see what happens where it's up here. So now, I can start to control this. This is getting to know your Bari. Every hinge, it's a good thing to kind of know what part connects to what part and what key pushes it. I can't tell you how many saxophone players I know that have never sat down and looked at the mechanics of basic joints of how keys work. So many repairs you can fix yourself just by knowing about your saxophone.

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