I had a case of GAS the other day so I bought a no name Chinese C melody that I have no real use for, in part out of curiosity about the C melody and in part out of curiosity about the quality of these no name horns. In many ways it has exceeded my expectations. It looks great...matt silver plated with brass keys, plays pretty well top to bottom, has decent tone and seems to be pretty well adjusted. My one complaint is that intonation is worse than I'm used to with my two Yanagisawas. Tuning it to high G and keeping my embouchure as neutral as I could, I get the middle D sharp by about 30 cents and middle C sharp flat by about 25 cents. Not having played all that many saxophones I'm wondering if this is really terrible, or somewhat typical of older and / or cheaper horns.
Thanks in advance for sharing your experience.
Try mouthpieces of different inner chamber air volume. In general a mouthpiece with small chamber wants to stick out more on the neck cork, while a large chamber wants to go further in. In either case you can get one note to sound in tune, but all other notes get affected by a different amount between these 2 positions. Depending on the sax design, you will get the full range more or less in tune on one of these situations more so then the other, or at least your challenged notes will probably be different ones. Figure out which of the 2 evils is the better one.
If you start with a large chamber, you can also experiment adding material inside with putty or something temporary.
A few years back Chinese instruments were mostly quite bad. These days there are (among some surprisingly good ones) still plenty that aren't so good, but of the of the ones I've tried, the intonation is not the worst aspect, even with the worst. (Except the soraninios)
I have found my Buescher C melody is very picky about mpcs and their effect on intonation
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