Saxophones Noblet Alto - Couldn't resist for the price, but a ton of work...

[peterpick]

i know a man here in france who tumbles saxes and sometimes dyes them blue. we both went to an instrument sale (as sellers) and he was almost assaulted by vintage sax afficionados. if one were thinking of reselling a vintage sax it would be wise not to destroy the finish with shotblasting or other violence. people complain about perfectly acceptable relacquering done years ago in the wonderful world of vintage. please be careful, you may be rendering a good little horn worthless.

 

[Stephen Howard]

i hate to disagree with mr howard, but i do. noblet saxes i have had (all made by beaugnier) have been good to excellent. i have a 'special perfect' by beaugnier and it's very good. i had a 'face' tenor by beaugnier from noblet and it was as good as any slightly not top notch sax i've had - say hohner president, dolnet bel-aire/royal jazz, couesnon monopole conservatoire etc.. it's not like a mk VI or an SML or a martin magna, but it's very good. i have had various leblancs which are the same stable, i judge. if someone is going to criticise all noblets on the grounds that a bass sax has poor intonation then i cannot argue about the bass, but other saxes in the same range do not necessarily share the same problems.

Vive la différence!
They've never quite been my cup of tea - I find them somewhat tiresome and perhaps a bit staid around the midrange - and while they're 'of a standard' I've always felt they lacked a certain 'fizz'. To be fair it rather sits with their intended price-point, but I still feel there are better horns out there for the money. But folks who own them seem to like them, and that's what counts in the end.

 

[DavidUK]

i know a man here in france who tumbles saxes and sometimes dyes them blue. we both went to an instrument sale (as sellers) and he was almost assaulted by vintage sax afficionados. if one were thinking of reselling a vintage sax it would be wise not to destroy the finish with shotblasting or other violence. people complain about perfectly acceptable relacquering done years ago in the wonderful world of vintage. please be careful, you may be rendering a good little horn worthless.

The chap who does the blasting is also a time-served metal polisher BUT his labour smoothing out the wire brush marks will be too pricey. The other option I have is to try the dremel polishing wheels @jbtsax suggested a while back.

They leave a fine satin finish, but this may still be too much to bear for original finish vintage lovers. Don't get me wrong, I'd rather this one hadn't been assaulted with a rotary wire brush in the first place and had just aged with a golden patina.

 

[JayeNM]

My Noblet bass was at least a half step flat on the top end and in the middle. It was impossible for me to lip it into tune. Opening the keys up made little difference. I had to learn alternate fingerings. Ergos were also terrible. Right thumb hook was so low I couldn't use it. Palm keys were impossibly high. I was constantly opening them accidentally. I'm a big guy, but these must have been designed for a giant.

Before you say it was me or my mouthpiece, I tried many bass mouthpieces which play perfectly in tune on other short wraps. Similarly, the ergos on those other basses were excellent.

On the positive side, the Noblet had a very nice tone.

Using a Bass as basis for how a company's saxes perform is an interesting yardstick. BTW I don't doubt anything you have written, above. And I don't really have any reply or suggestion that it may have been this or that...
Having done a slew of Altos, Tenors, and even around 10 baritones...IMHO probably a better sampling of what they produced, though.

 

[JayeNM]

Vive la différence!
They've never quite been my cup of tea - I find them somewhat tiresome and perhaps a bit staid around the midrange - and while they're 'of a standard' I've always felt they lacked a certain 'fizz'. To be fair it rather sits with their intended price-point, but I still feel there are better horns out there for the money. But folks who own them seem to like them, and that's what counts in the end.

I could understand that...they definitely are cut of a cloth where I can see then NOT being some folks' cup of tea.
And again depending on the era, they were sometines in need of some corrections. Beaugnier, over the factory's history, needed to be saved a couple of times to keep them going. But I still think they made some quite nice ones.

 

[JayeNM]

@JayeNM - I recall the Beaugnier Special Perfect alto as being one of a bunch of "iconic" sleeper horns. How does it differ from the Nobler here in your experience?

I mentioned the wet soda blasted 21 looked as though it won't tarnish. I have a scrap tenor with this finish on part of it, as a test before doing the Yamaha. I might brush some vinegar over the row of various finishes on it and see what happens.

Some models from Beaugnier were excellent, then some eras seemed to produce more excellent examples than other eras.
Yours looks like a basic Standard...and having done a bunch of those they ended up being very respectable.
Albeit not high in market value.

Is there any sign of remaining plating on the keys ? Because plating...is pretty darn difficult for a layman to remove from a horn, using layman's methods. I mean, it's possible (more so if silver than nickel) but it seems to veer towards 'unlikely' unless you see clear signs of some remnants of the plating here or there.

Yes I agree most Standard-type models I have seen had nickelplate keys...but the factory is legendary for mixing-and-matching things like necks, neck braces, bell braces, key armatures, keyguard styles etc. so often the same model horn could show different 'furniture'.

 

[jonf]

i know a man here in france who tumbles saxes and sometimes dyes them blue. we both went to an instrument sale (as sellers) and he was almost assaulted by vintage sax afficionados. if one were thinking of reselling a vintage sax it would be wise not to destroy the finish with shotblasting or other violence. people complain about perfectly acceptable relacquering done years ago in the wonderful world of vintage. please be careful, you may be rendering a good little horn worthless.

Re your acquiantances experiences at the sale - if I'd modified a sax - my own sax - and someone complained about what I'd done to my own property, they'd get a very short, two word response.

The comment about the impact on value is fair enough - modifying the finish on a sax is likely to render the value to anyone other than the person ordering the re-finish low. However, in this case I don't think the financial impact really comes into it, as this sax is currently of very little value. It's already knackered, and even if it were in good condition, these saxes don't make strong money.

 

[JayeNM]

Yeah it's one of those grey areas....little market value on the horn even in good aesthetic shape - and ugly as heck as-is.

So EITHER a bead-blast finish OR a strip-and-polish up to shiny bare brass finish ....IS gonna be some sort of aesthetic improvement, at least initially.

I am just not a fan of bare brass, due to upkeep required....but even bare brass which starts to patina and even spot a bit...might look better than what it is currently.

 

[DavidUK]

Yes it does have "STANDARD" stamped into the body.
There is clear evidence of plating on some of the guard edges. I'm thinking whoever tried to remove the plating didn't do a comprehensive job. They may have started with sand paper, found it tough going, then thought "I know... a drill with rotary wire brush should get this silver stuff off."

I've had to deal with this before, on my MkVII Bari where there were some suspicious gouges in the area where the serial and patent numbers should have been...

...and brass swarf accompanied by wire brush wires in the case...

...but that was just one small area which was dealt with using elbow grease and emery paper to make it smooth and shiny. The rest of the horn had been de-lacquered so that now it doesn't really stand out.

 

[peterpick]

i can see that's quite nasty. but if you didn't want to sell it i'm not sure what real benefit there would be in stripping the plating. i do believe (without proof) that a reverse electroplating process is possible to remove silverplate. people object to relacquering on the grounds that heavy buffing removes metal from the body and alters the tone of the instrument. like many things in the world of vintage this is almost certainly theological rather than factual, but it has real financial effects.

 

[DavidUK]

Perhaps the "stripper" knew nothing about saxophones and just wanted an arty item?

If the silver/nickel was patchy they may have preferred and all brass look, hence the wire brush and drill came out.

So little silver coloured plating is left now it's pointless un-plating what remains. I may be off to my tech soon with another horn so I'll stick it in the car and see what he makes of it.

 

[JayeNM]

That a Noblet standard had silverplate keys, though....is really unlikely in and of itself....unless the whole horn was once silverplate...

And again, honestly...removing plating from keys without having a significant rig set up to do it chemically...is gonna be a hassle....I mean even with a wire brush and bench motor, the effort approaches obsessive-compulsive....

Poor horn....

 

[DavidUK]

I'd think one of the little scotchbrite dremel wheels would make short work of what's left.

 

[JayeNM]

I'd think one of the little scotchbrite dremel wheels would make short work of what's left.

Might as well go for it, I mean it'd look silly with remnants of the silver/nickel.

 

[turf3]

My Noblet bass was at least a half step flat on the top end and in the middle. It was impossible for me to lip it into tune. Opening the keys up made little difference. I had to learn alternate fingerings. Ergos were also terrible. Right thumb hook was so low I couldn't use it. Palm keys were impossibly high. I was constantly opening them accidentally. I'm a big guy, but these must have been designed for a giant.

Before you say it was me or my mouthpiece, I tried many bass mouthpieces which play perfectly in tune on other short wraps. Similarly, the ergos on those other basses were excellent.

On the positive side, the Noblet had a very nice tone.

It appears the Noblet bass has a short scale requiring a large chamber MP to be pushed far onto the neck. Otherwise the short tube notes are flat and the long tube notes are sharp. Such is the case with mine. I get pretty good results with a Selmer bass MP, but those tendencies are still there.

I generally have to lightly modify the key touch locations on horns, and this one certainly was no exception. Actually it went a bit beyond "lightly". The bell brace was woefully inadequate and I fabricated and installed a new X-shaped one like a Conn, plus I soldered the joints on the original.

Why do all this? Well, because I wanted a key range to high F, I wanted the convenience of handling of the short wrap, and if I'd bought a Buescher or Conn I'd still have been doing a bunch of ergonomic modification anyway.

But bass saxophones got so little development after the 1920s that you really can't use a bass as much of a proxy for the commoner voices. By all accounts the Selmer Mark 6-labeled bass really sucked, unlike their higher voices.