Reviews

Under Yamaha YDS-150 Digital Saxophone review The Yamaha YDS-150 Digital Synthesizer in a Saxophone Body There have been plenty of demos and discussions about this, and much of the discussion has been negative. I do not consider this a saxophone at all, any more than my midi keyboard is a piano. There are now 20 audio tracks, and a few YouTube videos after several days with the YDS-150. I have had about two hours total to play around with this, and I intend to do several other tests...

I bought one of these from Amazon. Last time I performed Lily Was Here was a disaster as the drummer, bass and keyboards for some utterly bonkers reason, played it in half time. Least said about that the better, they are still searching for a body in the case of the keyboard player so I do not want to get into too much detail. Well, it aint gonna happen again. Hitherto I have used a tick tock metronome and been mocked for my quaint machine, even though it has a purple ring. Gimme dat gimme...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00923G9Q0 I bought one of these devices, and I find it very useful - it's about the size of tenor packet of reeds and about half as thick. The tuner works very well, especially on the higher notes - good with flute high notes. The metronome work well but only has the one sound. If you play moderately quite you can play along to the click. I like the tap tempo feature so I can quickly get an idea of the tempo of a recording. So far the battery life...

The world of home recording is quite a jungle: many brands specialized in ultra-cheap microphones. Following some threads about ribbon microphones, (on cafesaxophone and on recording forums) I ended up contacting this company from Belgium: NoHype Audio, Official Reseller for ADK microphones, Placid Audio Copperphone, Line Audio, TK Audio, Vintage Design, MBHO Microphones, Triton Audio, SOUNDELUX USA, MTR Audio, XQP Audio, the LRM and SRM series ribbon microphones. I usually prefer to deal...

Here is my review of the Academy ‘Phoenix’ clarinet based on my level of playing: I saw the clarinet pass around opportunity on the cafesaxophone forum, read the post a few times and it didn’t really cross my mind to get in touch to give it a try as I’m not the best at clarinet these days. However, after some consideration and an enjoyable ‘Jericho’ sax pass around last year I thought ‘why not?’ nothing to lose. So, a few days later one of the ‘Phoenix’ clarinets turned up for me to try...