Choosing Baritone Saxophone Reeds

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, continuing on our path to play the baritone saxophone, this section will be about reeds and the mouthpiece. The two most critical elements in making your sound. And we'll start this first section off with reeds. Now the reed, if you'll recall when we opened up our sax case, we had, this is what we had. It was a neck and a reed. Well, this reed, we're going to throw away, obviously, because you don't really want to play on somebody else's. And we have a new, fresh set of reeds here, and we'll talk about just picking the right reed, how to pick a right reed, what makes a good reed, what makes a bad reed, and how that all affects your tone in the end. Okay, so here's a couple of sets of reeds. These first two here are tenor reeds. They're a little smaller than the baritone saxophone reeds, which are slightly larger. Reeds are about the same proportion all the way down the line. I just brought a couple of tenor reeds up to show you the method for picking a good reed. There's tons of different brands out there, Rico, VanDoren, and plastic covers, part of the Rico family, Java, and I mean you can get, there are so many, many different types. But generally, picking a reed usually, generally, is the same process. So, when I get a box, and you'll usually want to buy them in a box, if you can afford it, because, inevitably out of a box, you're only going to get four or five that are really, really good. So, one of the things you look for, and the reason I brought the tenor ones out here, was this sort of tiger shading on this particular reed here. That's usually a fairly good indicator that you're going to have the quality that's dried and seasoned versus the young. Again, you're going to have conflicting opinions on it. But what I've found for me is usually this will tend to get me closer to a consistency in the wood that has a little bit more tone, a little bit more vibrancy to it. A couple of other things to note, this particular Bari reed here, is a single cut. And how you know it's a single cut is this the outside of a bamboo shoot, literally bamboo, and it's cut once into it to create this shape for your reed. Now, it's only cut once. Over here, it's got that cut in here and its also got a second cut that makes a flat line. That's called a double cut. Double cut reeds tend to be a little bit higher quality than a single cut as well. So you'll kind of want to note, you know, take a look for that. Now notice these are black. I flipped these over, you know, they're black on the entire length, whereas this is the bottom of the reed here. It also gives the indication of the size. Two and a half is always a good starting rule, sometimes two if you're having trouble making noise. And if you make too much, you might want to move up to a louder, harder reed, three. I tend to stick around two and a half for most of my playing. It seems to be a good number. But these two, these black ones are dipped in plastic, that's why they call them the plastic cover. Now, a lot of saxophone players don't like them. They're a little bit brassy. Of course, I'm in an R

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