My Sax Equipment and Setup

The choice of saxophone/mouthpiece is highly personal. In effect, the saxophone (or any instrument for that matter) becomes a working partner in the creation of music. The equipment needs to synch with the player and allow her or him to express ideas without impediment. 

I tend toward gear that many consider to be less than ideal, which probably dates back to my formative years as a musician. In the fifth grade, at the age of 10, I got a Conn student alto, clunky as all heck, and stiff, but which I would play in many student rock bands before throngs of adoring 11 year old classmates. 

Later, in high school, the band teacher put me on their bari sax. It was an ancient piece of metal that leaked and was in bad repair.  It stunk. But, that's the horn I was given to play in an award-winning jazz band that made waves and would produce Grammy Award winners and famous bands like Fattburger. It was that, or nothing -- then, I was not a soloist. And so I made that stinking bari work, and likely with the same reed all year! Possibly this is why I tend to favor the uphill battle in my choice of instruments as you will see in today's blog post. 

There are many many fine brands of saxophones being made today; consider them all before you decide on purchasing a horn and a mouthpiece. Better yet, try every combination possible. Many music stores, Sam Ash for example, will let you do this to your heart's content. 

Today, my main tenor sax (I own two of them) is a Buescher True Tone that was made somewhere between 1923 and 1927, judging by the serial number. Satin silver finish (now vastly blemished) with the remnants of a gold wash bell. (The one pictured is not mine, but is nearly identical.)

My mouthpiece is a wide-open Otto Link Super Tone Master 10* that I found in a box full of used mouthpieces in a seedy old used instrument shop one day. I replaced the standard Link ligature with one made by Rovner. I added a couple of cardboard shims to the inside of the ligature.

I use Fibracell 2.5 or Legere synthetic reeds. With the STM, they are quite bright. Baffling with the modified Rovner helps tone that down a little. The benefit of this setup is the ease of playing in the altissimo range. I can also push this setup as hard as I want to get a full overblown Texas tenor sound, and I can lay back and get something closer to an acoustic jazz sound or a thick pop R&B sound.

  

I also fashioned a little homemade wedge and positioned it inside the STM, right at the point where the roll-over baffle falls off. I made it out of that sticky clay you can use to post things like photos on walls.

I got the idea for the wedge from listening to a fine sax player named Ernie Watts. I experimented with various shapes for years before settling on a design that resembles a step-baffle.  The little wedge speeds up the air flow and adds a little bite to my overall sound.

The True Tone blows freely and remains in tune through the octaves. It has a darker sound, possibly due to the age and manufacture of the horn. The older metal resonates and buzzes at a different frequency than my other tenor. I can feel it. 

For years, I played on a tenor sax made by the Olds Company in Fullerton, California. It has low serial numbers that make it very old in the company history. No one really knows how old, because Olds's records no longer go back that far. Olds was known for selling student-grade instruments, especially brass. 

I had the tenor re-padded, but even then, it still blew sharp or flat on so many different notes that it was work to keep it in tune on a gig. That said, I still love that horn to this day, mainly for the strong, focused, buzzy sound that it makes. It is not unlike that of an old Selmer cigar-cutter. In fact, many times on gigs, people have confused the Olds for one. 

But now, the True Tone is becoming my horn for all occasions because being of better design, it opens my playing up to more possibilities. So many sax players complain about the Buescher’s ancient ergonomics (key-work,) but that doesn't bother me in the least.  This is among the kinds of horns that our forebears in music (like Ben Webster or Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young) may have played in their time.

The True Tone has wide-open key work, and with the STM 10* piece, it makes a huge shock wave of tenor sax sound. Everything is in this horn, every tonal/sonic possibility. 

The added cachet is that I restored the True Tone myself. It came to me from a storage unit that I’m sure had flooded. The horn reeked of mildew and crabs. On a whim, I bought a set of very small screwdrivers, and I took it apart and discarded the old rotted pads. I soaked the works in buckets of machine oil for weeks and gently scrubbed away the crud buildup. Buescher’s snap-on pads made the job of replacing them much easier than seating modern pads with shellac would have been.

A bona fide repair tech adjusted the key heights. This is one of those jobs best left to a true pro. In fact, restoring a sax is not something you can do by watching You Tube videos.  It is an exacting job, one that requires skill and training and experience.

Still, I’m glad I did the cleaning and the restoration and the re-assembly myself. Why? Because if for nothing more, I understand this particular horn in a way that I can’t adequately describe. Having the parts spread out on my dining table for six months, and now playing it at gigs, well, that’s a bit of history I have had with no other saxophone I’ve ever owned. 

tenor sax, Buescher True Tone, Olds tenor sax, sax restoration, saxophone equipment, Otto Link