Veggie Dave
Sax Worker
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Can't you leave your sax onstage?
As there isn't a Eureka fix, which is more than a little disappointing, I'm going to try leaving the horns onstage. I'll warm-up about 30-45 mins or so before the show's supposed to start for 15mins or so and then put them on stage to acclimatise to the stage temp. A few minutes before the show's supposed to start I'll tune them in the wings and put them straight back onto the stage.
Assuming it's safe to do so, anyway.
more about experience of having played them in different conditions and getting a feel for where on the cork they play in tune at different temperatures
I can basically do this, so that it's close enough that you can comfortably lip up or down if you need to, as long as you can hear the other instruments. I wouldn't say I placed the mouthpiece with any true accuracy, though.
Off on a related tangent again:
My most recent discovery has been that when you write horn parts for a song that's to be played as part of a larger performance, you should really consider this when creating the parts. It's all well and good writing parts that sound great, with long high notes and long runs/melodies that can only just be played with a single breath, but when you're already an hour into a performance, where you're playing at an exuberant volume, and you then have three songs back to back, which are all long, high notes and long runs in the upper register with no real rests in the song, you realise that you may have made a mistake because your embouchure will be destroyed by the end of the third song ... leaving you with another hour of playing to go, that includes at least four more songs with similar scores, except they also include much faster passages.
Over the last 6 weeks or so I've found that having to lip up even a little bit while playing the R&B/soul set I've written for the Soul Vipers is the difference between finishing the set knackered but still with an acceptable technique and finishing with more air escaping the side of your mouth than is going through the mouthpiece. The trumpet player has found the same thing.
I don't want to have to change the sheets any more than I already have (some of the songs became so much easier to play by simply removing a single crotchet here and there - surprisingly so to be honest), so I have to make any other issues less likely to cause problems. I've had to change mouthpieces to one that's much louder, with far less resistance, which has helped massively. The only other thing I can do now is make sure the tuning is as close to perfect as possible, which is how I came to start this thread.
or with tunings different from A=440Hz.
This is a situation I haven't really had to deal with yet. Well, apart from one jam with a bagpipes player, which was really fun.