Ligatures for Saxophones

Video Transcript

For Expert Village, I'm EJ John Erickson with Vital Flame Productions and thank you for joining us on sessions focusing on the baritone saxophone. Okay, so this is our baritone sax ligature that came with it here. I just wanted to show you that there are different styles. This is currently my favorite style of ligature. It's a wire-based plate that shoves from the top down to the reed which I like. This is a little more common. This is a soprano ligature, but baritone ligatures are the same they're just obviously a lot larger. You can see the difference. Just a quick note, this particular ligature holds the reed by these bands with the screw being at the top. This one clinches the reed by the screws being on the bottom. So just make sure that you've got your orientation correct. The screws usually go to the right when you're looking down the saxophone. So my face is here looking down the reed. The screws usually go to the right. Just a quick aside to that. Okay, so we've got our reed set up pretty close to where we want it and just being held with my thumb here. I'm going to take this ligature and slide it over the top. Make sure to keep it away from the top of the reed. You just have to be careful about that. Pull this down so that it's, usually I like the place between the bottom cut and here. The ligature should be centered on that base. Not all mouthpieces are going to give you that kind of centering. That's just where I like to have it. And again, this can wiggle around a little bit because we haven't started to tighten it down. So, I'll tighten up until I feel it just start to catch which will give it a little bit of play, but it hasn't locked it down yet. So now, we can start to kind of wiggle it back and forth to get that nice hairline of mouthpiece peeking behind that reed. Now when I get it to that point, I know I'm good, I'll check the base. I'll lift it up and make sure that this base is sitting on the plate, nice and straight, all the way up and then I'm seeing that nice hairline of black. Then, I'll lock it down. Okay, and then I'll check it again, make sure it's nice on there, nice to the top. Looks good. And now, you're ready to make a noise. Finally.

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