Using 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. How do I pick a good reed? Say I'm looking at this at a store. What am I going to do? This is a kind of a delicate procedure, but the first thing you're going to do. Okay, so here is the techniques for picking a good reed. One, you've seen one with a double cut, nice tiger stripe. And now, we're going to start really inspecting this reed. This looks like one we want to check out. I'm going to do this rolling action and it's by putting one finger under the reed and holding it down, not too hard because if you break it in the music store you have to buy it. So you just kind of roll the reed on the table and what you're looking for, if there is a split in the top of this reed, by rolling it, it'll force it, I'm using my hand as the reed, will split like this and you'll see the table through it. And you know that if that's split, you don't want the reed. Give that back to them and say thank you very much, it's got a split in it. You can even show them. See? So that's step one, look for splits on the edge of the reed. And you just kind of run your fingers along these two to make sure everything is cool nothing major league, you know, about it. Now, that's one. Now two, I'm going to have to take you to the white board to show you what I'm going to look for. Okay, so I've just checked on the table for any splits on the end of the reed. The next thing I'm going to do is hold the reed up to the light. And I'll show you what I'm looking for. It's kind of hard with the camera so we'll move to the white board and I'll show you. This is for me, what I found to be a good way to pick nice reeds. So, as I hold this reed, this is a couple of examples, we'll just start with the first one. Here's my double cut and there's the base of it. So this is the end of the reed that you've just checked to make sure there are no splits or anything like that by pressing through. What you're going to look for is a nice dark shadow from the light that's showing this nice, curved core to the reed. So here again is the cut, you'll see a little halo inside the reed. You want this to be as nice and uniform as possible. If you end up picking a reed and there's nothing there, this reed is going to be really thin at the top and it's not going to serve you in the long run, so you want a nice big shadow. That's the first thing you look for. So once you find a nice dark shadow, the second thing you're looking for are these little veins which is where the nutrients actually came up through the bamboo to feed it. Sometimes you'll have these little blotchy sections where it'll be sort of thin and then there'll be a couple and then there'll be no lines in it. What you're looking for is nice strong lines all the way up through to the end. It's a little hard to describe it. When you pick up a reed you'll see it, especially when you're in the store, comparing reed against reed. If there's only a couple of veins, again that's going to be a reed that's not going to serve you in the long run. So a couple of ways of picking out a good reed, nice dark heart, lots of veins in the reed.

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