Any comments? .......................Dare I ask.:shocked:
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I'm a raw neophyte at playing the sax. So my comments are going to be extremely limited in terms of experience. Just the same, I feel an overwhelming desire to convey some of my experiences with reeds and wetness.
I like a fairly wet reed to play. So rather than just wetting it with my mouth, I tend to lay it in a small dish of water. I actually have a small glass "candle holder" that I use just for wetting my reeds before practice. Sometime I do use mouthwash instead of water just for the sake of killing any germs that might be on the read. I typically wash the mouthpiece with mouthwash too.
Anyway, I don't submerse the entire reed. I just place the tip in the water and let the body of the read stick up out of the dish. Water tends to soak up into the reed anyway. This method works for me pretty well. And the tips do straight out very nicely when the reed is wet. Typically I don't need to leave them in the water for very long.
In fact, that's my next point. I actually got distracted and had to leave. I was gone for several hours, my reeds sitting in the water. When I came home I sat down and played using these "waterlogged" reeds. They actually seemed a bit "dead", and not as lively as normal. So I concluded that leaving them in the water too long is actually not good. (mind you I didn't turn this into a repeatable scientific experiment) So this was just from this fleeting experience.
But since that time, I've notice (or possibly imagined in my mind) that if a reed is left in the water for too long it becomes unresponsive. I've also noticed that how long the reed is left in the water seems to affect how it plays. So now I'm careful not to allow my reeds to soak in the water for too long. It's only take a very short time to get them ready to play (less than a minute actually). Although I don't think they start to become "waterlogged" until they've been in the water for quite some time, like possible 15 minutes or more.
In the meantime, I've been careful not to allow my reeds to soak for to long. If I'm playing one reed and I have another on in the water dish, I'll actually take it out and lay it on a paper towel after a few moments, until I'm ready to play it. I do this so that it doesn't become overly saturated with water.
I'm using soft #1.5 Rico Royal reeds.
Whether a read can become "too wet" I really don't know. But from my neophyte experience it seems to me that they can.
I could be totally wrong about this. Like I say, I am a neophyte saxophonist so I might not even know a good playable reed if it was staring me in the tongue.
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