Caring for a Baritone Saxophone

Video Transcript

For Expert Village, I'm EJ John Erickson and we're finishing up here some details with the baritone saxophone. Hope you've been having fun through these sessions. I have for sure. And now, you've played, you've done your gigs, time to put it away. Let's talk about some basic maintenance and taking care of and talk about tools of the trade. So you've finished up, obviously you want to take your, the neck out of the neck piece. Go ahead and wipe it off, get all the moisture off you can and also down in the hole on the neck. Just to keep the spit out of it. And then your rag is, of course, your best friend. Just go ahead and wipe it down. I'm not doing it here specifically. But a lot of times, you'll get some build up of spit that's come out of your mouth or so on. Obviously, this is an older horn, so there's a lot of decay there, but always wipe down your horn. And then, we'll go ahead and pull this over to here. You're going to take your mouthpiece off and I'm going to show you that little hack from earlier. So this is a situation where the cork here was decayed and broken off. I was in a pinch because I had to do a gig and so I needed to do something. I used a paper towel, just wrapped around a bunch of times to put the mouthpiece on. Now, obviously, I'll take this off and get it to a repair shop and get it fixed right away. I can't live like that. Now one note when you're getting your cork or your neck re-corked, is make sure they have the mouthpiece with it because they'll trim and sand that to match the shape of the mouthpiece. Otherwise, if they're not together they won't know how thick to make it. So just a quick side note there. Also, your cover, you always want to leave this on. I can't tell you how many times I've not had this on and people have walked up "I love your playing, man" or something and they break the reed and then I'm in a bind for the next set to get it fixed. So just always leave your mouthpiece cover on. Of course, always have your cork grease or, in a pinch, you can use Chapstick. When you're done with the reed and you know you're done with it, do that to it. Get rid of it. I can't tell you how many times I've mistakenly put a reed on that I thought was a preconditioned one. Just throw it away and get rid of it. You don't ever want to deal with those. For cleaning, you always want, if you want to get detailed, especially in areas you can't reach with your rag, is use Q-Tips. And for the most part, just using a little bit of water is great to get some of that caked up condensation that's around key holes and areas that you can't reach into. All you really need is to use a Q-Tip and go ahead and scrim. You'll see some of that green already starting to come off of there. Again, this is an old Bari that I just got but, if you do this constantly, keep it clean when it's new, you'll never have any problems with this kind of corrosion. So just Q-Tips and water and a rag. Also, for polishing, they do make special polishing cloths. So I do recommend getting one of these. I usually keep this with me on stage at gigs to just areas that are getting a lot of condensation or spit. We can just wipe that off and polish it on stage.

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