I almost started a new thread, but since this one is still going strong, I'll just add to it. I've been playing a Fred Rast 7* which I love, but it requires very soft reeds to make the low notes speak. It can sub-tone nice, but I'm getting some funny looks when doing that in concert band
... I've been trying to drop down in tip size without falling back into the never-ending mouthpiece quest that I managed to finally get out of.
Just this weekend, I was going through my shoe box of old gear, and I came across a garden variety STM that I forgot I even had. I think it came in the case with a used tenor I had at one point, but I never played it because it was badly tarnished, it smelled awful, and the floor has the infamous ***** in it where the two halves come together.
It's marked a 5* so I decided to clean it up with my wife's jewelry polish and give it a blow. Well I was completely surprised by how good it was!!! I'm not saying it's my new holy grail - in fact it could get thin and a little nasally up top, but that was easily controllable - it was really just a matter of getting used to the smaller external dimensions of the metal piece compared to the HR. This is the only metal Link I can remember playing, and it immediately struck me has having lots of potential. It didn't seem at all stuffy, even with the comparatively small tip. Intonation - great. Easy altissimo, and I can play down low with out sub-tone cheating.
But of course, as a recovering gasaholic, I immediately start thinking; I wonder how much better another STM might be…? Or… what about those New Vintage..? Or, maybe I should have this 5* refaced……but then the plating gets messed up, so maybe I should just get a Tenney Select…but then if I'm paying that much anyway, how much better would a Barone Jazz be….?!?!?! And now what was a garden variety STM 5* has turned into another quest for something I didn't even want in the first place, when I should have just stuck with it for at least a year.
Sweety,
What you're experiencing is very common. First, saxophone players experience gas because there isn't very much on the market that's very good. The market is filled with c**p otherwise we wouldn't all be scrambling to find a better piece all the time. So, we're constantly looking and finding more c**p, playing it for a little while before getting frustrated and looking for another piece and buying something different with the hopes of it being better only to discover a week down the road that we bought MORE c**p, and on and on it goes until we give up. People think sax players are nuts for doing this but they're not, we're just trying to find something that's halfway decent.
I've never seen one of Fred's pieces but I imagine that he uses someone else's blank and doesn't make his own and that seriously limits him. If you can't sub-tone that may be due to a number of reasons. It could be that either the facing is too short or the baffle is too high around the tip area or the chamber is too small or a combination of all these things OR you're not taking enough mouthpiece in your mouth. Try taking more mouthpiece in your mouth, cover the whole facing from where it breaks on the side rails and remember that it won't sound pretty at first. It will however get better in a matter of a few days. In my case it drastically improved in a half an hour. It's not as simple as I'm making it sound, you may have to drop your jaw and experiment with your throat before you get the hang of it. If the mouthpiece is defective in some way then nothing you do may work. Cleaning a hard rubber mouthpiece in hot water can warp it and even shorten the facing.
Now, your preconception of the link sounding stuffy is just the opposite of the what really happens. More closed facings are bright as opposed to more open facings. If it had been a 7* or an 8 it would have stood a greater chance of being stuffy. A simple rule to follow, more open mouthpieces are darker than more closed mouthpieces when the chambers are the same. Also, more closed facings play the high register easier and more open mouthpieces play the low register easier, again, when you're dealing with the same chamber. This is why it's always better to play medium tip openings. Ninety-five percent of my sales are seven star and eight facings and for good reason. These are what work best but of course there are exceptions to any rule. Sonny Rollins had arguably the greatest sound of all time on two Links, one was a 10 and the other was a 10*, both with #2 Rico brown box reeds. This is when reeds were reeds.
However, facings have very little to do with how a mouthpiece sounds. This is a myth that continues to prevail in spite of my constant posts and lectures to customers. Re-facing is a complete waste of time if you're looking for a dramatic change in the sound and I seriously doubt that you'll even feel a difference in ten thousandths of an inch. The star facing depicts a half. In other words seven and a half and also depicts five thousandths of an inch. You can barely see it with your eyes and when you factor in reeds and the inconsistency of them, that measly five thousandths disappears. Nothing gives me a better laugh as when someone tells me they're playing a .107. It's hysterical especially since I can measure that tip opening and get a different reading on different parts of the tip-rail and what one guy will measure as .100 another guy can easily measure as a .110, even more. Sometimes the tip-rail is on a curve so the further out you go on the tip the more open it gets. I also haven't seen a decent tool for measuring tip openings except for the one that I use.
I have to add, in addition to the market being inundated with dozens of different brands all made with the same blanks which results in nothing but the same mouthpiece with slight differences, a host of "mouthpiece techs" have sprung up declaring fantastic results from minor alterations and "perfecting" minor cosmetic flaws in a mouthpiece that are all eclipsed by the incredibly inaccurate, asymmetrical and poorly made reeds. Smoothly out a table or truing up side-rails and making everything look nice does nothing more than just that, it makes it look nice.
There used to be a guy who sold mouthpieces house to house. I can't remember his name but he was involved with some really shady stuff and I heard that even the FBI was looking for him at some point. He would charge you to work on your mouthpiece and what he would do is take your piece and with the table and facing side down, slap it into his pant leg repeatedly then wash it off in the sink then hand it back to you and say "Okay, try it now". This new "perfecting" thing, well, uh……it's may be a little bit more useful in that it may have a psychological impact that could cause one to play better if the mark feels that the piece looks better. But it doesn't last like any placebo.
Making dramatic changes in the sound of a mouthpiece requires going into the chamber by a qualified expert and they're few of them. It also requires something else, that the expert be a good player, not just an okay player. You don't have to be a good improviser but you have to have a really good concept of embouchure, diaphragm support and most importantly you have to have great taste in sound. I get people calling me and saying that they think third, forth, fifth and lower tier players are "great". In my book great is few and far between. But, I was fortunate to live in NYC where there are a lot of really fine players. I also studied with some heavy hitters and I always picked the brains of my customers, even the ones that couldn't play as well as I did.
Now, choosing a mouthpiece isn't as hard as you think. What do the finest players use on tenor? Links, they ALL used Links, period. Beyond that you have to learn how to play them. That means playing them the way links like to be played and that's with a lot of mouthpiece in your mouth and BLOW, blow hard. One of my first teachers told me once "Whenever you play, whether it's very loud or very softly, you always want to fill the sax up with the same amount of air. It's just a matter of how fast you're putting the air through the horn. When you want to play louder you put the air through faster and when you play more softly you put the air through more slowly" This is brilliant. Now whether this is really true I don't know, it's just a metaphor for filling up the mouthpiece and horn all the time.
Your Link can be made into something fantastic as long as there's some material to work with, something you'd never felt compelled to switch from unless you just wanted to try something else for the heck of it. My Jazz, and the NY and Hollywood models are the Links everyone dreams of but they never really made. They were accidents, they're freaks, they shouldn't do what they do but somehow they do. They're dark, all to varying degrees yet are extremely responsive and that just doesn't happen. They also can get brighter, also to varying degrees, as you lean into them. I didn't intend them to turn out like they way they did. I was trying to copy the models verbatim but what came out was truly a major breakthrough in the industry.
Unfortunately, I can't make them fast enough and I don't make much money on them so people have to wait and they don't like that. Recently a few customers canceled orders because their pieces got stolen and they'll have to wait a bit longer. So, off they go again, into the never ending cycle of mouthpiece limbo. Phil Barone