tommakesgames
Member
- Messages
- 8
- Location
- London
Hi there,
New member, just introduced myself over on The Doorbell, but then saw I should ask questions elsewhere, thus - this!
I'm a 'returning player'. Played in school, left it for 20 years, still got it, moving from a flat to a house with garage - therefore opportunity to get back into sax.
I have two questions:
I opened up the case and the saxophone is pretty dirty. I never really looked after it that well as a kid. Bits of green in the bell and neck, lacquer bits missing, dust and dirt in the mechanisms etc. It does all work absolutely fine though.
I enquired of sax.co.uk and it would cost me about £200 to have it all deep cleaned. It's a B&H 400 Alto sax. A bit of digging (from other threads here) that it might have been made by Amati and stencilled for B&H. The serial number is 190902 - which I think (according to that very long vertical chart you can find on that .pdf of serial numbers) means it dates from 1961/62?
So, question number 1 is:
Is it worth getting this cleaned up? Is this a reasonable saxophone? Or would I be better getting one of the cheaper 'starter sax kits' off Amazon which I understand are not too bad these days?
(I'm leaning towards cleaning it up anyway, just in terms of non-wastage and I have a kind of 'all musical instruments are sort of special...because music!' kind of mindset)
Question number 2 is:
Given the saxophone and the mouthpiece (a Yamaha 4C, which I understand is perfectly okay), can I still get a good tone out of this?
(I'd like to play jazz - more straight ahead stuff rather than rock/80s fusion/smooth - more Sonny Rollins/Charlie Parker than Weather Report, if that makes sense?)
My tone back in the day was not that great, but upon doing some reading now I wonder if it's more to do with embrochure and technique (taught mainly by classically trained woodwind teachers whose specialty wasn't saxophone) rather than anything else.
Thought this would be THE place to ask! Thanks!
New member, just introduced myself over on The Doorbell, but then saw I should ask questions elsewhere, thus - this!
I'm a 'returning player'. Played in school, left it for 20 years, still got it, moving from a flat to a house with garage - therefore opportunity to get back into sax.
I have two questions:
I opened up the case and the saxophone is pretty dirty. I never really looked after it that well as a kid. Bits of green in the bell and neck, lacquer bits missing, dust and dirt in the mechanisms etc. It does all work absolutely fine though.
I enquired of sax.co.uk and it would cost me about £200 to have it all deep cleaned. It's a B&H 400 Alto sax. A bit of digging (from other threads here) that it might have been made by Amati and stencilled for B&H. The serial number is 190902 - which I think (according to that very long vertical chart you can find on that .pdf of serial numbers) means it dates from 1961/62?
So, question number 1 is:
Is it worth getting this cleaned up? Is this a reasonable saxophone? Or would I be better getting one of the cheaper 'starter sax kits' off Amazon which I understand are not too bad these days?
(I'm leaning towards cleaning it up anyway, just in terms of non-wastage and I have a kind of 'all musical instruments are sort of special...because music!' kind of mindset)
Question number 2 is:
Given the saxophone and the mouthpiece (a Yamaha 4C, which I understand is perfectly okay), can I still get a good tone out of this?
(I'd like to play jazz - more straight ahead stuff rather than rock/80s fusion/smooth - more Sonny Rollins/Charlie Parker than Weather Report, if that makes sense?)
My tone back in the day was not that great, but upon doing some reading now I wonder if it's more to do with embrochure and technique (taught mainly by classically trained woodwind teachers whose specialty wasn't saxophone) rather than anything else.
Thought this would be THE place to ask! Thanks!