Adventures with mouthpiece pads

I have teeth issues. My upper left incisor is dead. I Had root canal treatment over 30 years ago after some hideous toothache. It was probably the result of one of the punches in the mouth I suffered as a young man. Anyhow. That tooth has slowly turned grey/brown over the years and has become a tad wobbly.

So to protect it I do all my biting and gnawing on the right. The result is a right incisor that is much sharper.

This is a long lead up to saying I gnawed quite a dent in my alto mouthpiece. I tried not to put too much pressure on, but it just happened. So I tried the standard commercial black mouthpiece pads. They work. But up to a point. It's not long before I'm spitting bits of rubber while playing.

Then I tried the white ones, thinking that they may be made out of different plastic. I may be wrong ( I've not carried out scientific tests here) but they do seem to offer more resistance, and last about twice as long as the black ones.

This is no hardship, really. These things are pretty cheap, but the frugal voice inside me does rail against the ongoing expense. And the "spitting rubber" stage can be a bit annoying.

So I've had a go at making my own. I found a couple of double-sided sticky pads in a drawer and used one to stick a piece of plastic milk bottle to the mouthpiece.

This one has lasted ages. It's become dented and marked, but I've not bitten through. The sticky has become a bit detached at the lead corners after playing, But so far I've managed to push it back and re-stick them.

I'm pretty happy with this, especially as my current tenor mouthpiece is a vintage one. (It has its own story that I'll tell you about anon). So I'm not worrying about damaging it.

I know. I need to work on my embouchure and not bite so hard. But in the meantime...

Pimping my sax case #1

This post is a bit of a rambling story where I get to wallow in a bit of nostalgia. I was having a bit of a sort out when I discovered a stencil that I made many, many years ago...

In my slightly impoverished youth, in 1979 I think, I moved into a shared house in Caldecote Road in Coventry. One of the people I was sharing with was Mike Collins who was in a band called "Machine". They practiced in his bedroom.

At that time the band consisted of Mike (guitar, vocals), Julian Bell (keyboards), Nigel Mulvey (bass, vocals) and Silverton Hutchinson (drums). When I moved in, Mike had a Gibson Les Paul in bits in the living room and was painstakingly spraying the body black, and T-cutting the finish to a shine. The story was that he'd smashed a shop window to steal it and had to remove the distinctive black-and-white design.

My bedroom was the downstairs front room, so when they started gigging and coming back in the early hours with a van load of kit, I figured I'd better join them. So I became their roadie.

Mike had a Marshall 4x12 speaker cabinet that another band had made off with following a gig, and he'd followed them all the way to Llanelli to get it back. They had removed the rexine covering in an attempt to disguise it, so it was just plain chipboard. Following this experience, Mike was keen to have some kind of ID on the band's stuff.

So I made this stencil out of one of the plastic covers you used to get for LP records in those days. What amazes me is that I cut it out with a pen knife and a pair of nail scissors.

The typeface is my own design - I still think it looks pretty cool, in a retro kind of way. I think the rose was Silverton's idea - he felt it softened the starkness of the word "machine".

Anyway, following a number of iterations in membership, the band changed its name to "Hot Snacks" a few months later, so my stencil became obsolete.

So after about 35 years in a cardboard box, I've decided to resurrect it.

There are some scuffs and holes on the front pocket of my case where I think the original label had been removed. So I thought I'd stencil on to a patch and sew it over the top. First of all I used spray glue on the wrong side of the stencil to hold it in place. Then I used some matt white spray paint. There's a little bit of blurring around the edges, but not too much. I've left the bottom open and intend to put a bit of velcro there to make a sealable pocket. There's room enough for a paperback or a DVD case in there.

I'm pleased with the effect, it's a nice reminder of old times and the sax inside the case is also of course my "machine".

How I ended up with a Jazzlab Saxholder

Some years ago my back went while I was fishing socks out of the washing machine. It resulted in a lot of pain and many visits to the chiropractor.

So taking up a hobby that involved hanging several kilos of metal from my neck did raise some concerns for me. The alto seemed manageable - especially the Jericho which is lighter than the the Carmichael was. At first I put the idea of playing a tenor in the box labelled "too much for me". But watching Marino Ikemura (see previous post) play tenor made me think, "she's not very big. And she can dance around with that thing. maybe I could do that..." (I know, she's half my age and I should know better).

Then, having got the tenor (and the Gear4Music is not a light one) I began to suffer for my folly. The weight on my neck pulled my head forward and made me play with a kind of stoop. Not a good posture. To counter this I tended to try to lift the horn with my right thumb, which left my hand aching after playing for any time at all.

Looking around, it seemed I had a number of options.

1. A harness. Perhaps the lower cost option. Though it seemed to me to be a bit of a faff in terms of getting it on and off.

2. A more neck-friendly strap like the Cebulla or the B.Air Bird Strap. These distribute the load better an have the advantage of looking totally cool. Also Marino-san uses a Bird Strap and I want to be her when I grow up. On the down side, they are still neck straps, and as far as I could see, the forces in play would remain the same.

3. The Jazzlab Saxholder. One of the tenor players in my sax class had one and was pleased with it. I liked that it looked as if it distributed the weight differently. but at £30plus I continued to um and ah about it.

So I decided to fake one up to see what it'd be like. So with some 9mm copper pipe, a key fob and some other junk from my shed, I fashioned this steampunk item. I'm especially pleased with the U-shaped adjuster.

Anyway. Believe it or not, this worked wonders. The sax seemed almost weightless. It did stab me in the back a bit, but some judicious duct tape and minor bending alleviated that. The downside is it doesn't store away easily. At all really.

But then, ebay, in its wisdom, offered me £10 off any "collectors items" I wished to buy. And for reasons best known to them, the Jazzlab Saxholder was indeed a collector's item. I love you ebay. For I am that collector.

Since using the real thing, I've found that because it presses on my back, I tend to lean into it and so improve my posture and ability to blow the low notes. I now use my right thumb to push the sax away from my body, and hardly make contact with the thumb hook at all and don't use it to carry the sax. And even if I'm not actually playing, I can groove along to the beat and massage my shoulders at the same time. And, unlike my creation, it folds away neatly and slots into the bell of the sax.

BLACK WAX - VIGOR

I had to do a lot of driving last week and played this CD over and over again. It invigorated me in the morning and exorcised the stresses of the day as I drove home.

When I started playing the saxophone I searched out Youtube clips of some of my jazz heroes from way back in the 60s and 70s. But as much as I loved them, they didn't speak to what I wanted to achieve. One that did speak to me was Cannonball Adderley. So in that fortuitous way of the internet, Youtube offered me a video of Black Wax playing Mercy, Mercy, Mercy. It was something I wanted to play, and was played in a way I wanted to play it.

Black Wax hail from Miyakojima, a small island that's about as far as you can get from Tokyo and still be Japan. The band members are the Ikemura sisters (Marino on Saxophones and Ayano on keyboards), Tetsuya "88" Ogino on bass and Mikio Okuhira on drums. They play funky reggae and bossa nova versions of classic standards along with some of their own compositions and jazzed-up versions of traditional Miyakojima folk music.

Vigor is Black Wax's fourth album and all these elements are there. The band seamlessly weave their own numbers between Dizzy Gillespie's Manteca and A Night in Tunisia, plus Bobby Hebb's Sunny and Jackie Mittoo's Drum Song. Then they hit you with the traditional Agaizato - an arrangement that is so full of love for their island home, it brought tears to my eyes. I think it was John Coltrane who once said that Sonny Rollins could take any tune and make it his own. Black Wax seem to have this talent.

There are about 30 Youtube videos of the band out there - you can track their progress from being a bunch of talented young people in 2011 to today's formidable ensemble. As a starter, here's a link to their newly established Youtube channel, which includes a trailer for this album. And if you want to buy it, I've found CDJapan to be a pretty quick and reasonably-priced supplier.

A case of sax abuse

Well, I'd got a tenor saxophone that could play. The question was, how did it sustain the damage to the thumb hook and Eb guard? This wasn't an idle question, cuz you know what they say about lightning striking the same place twice? If you don't do something about it, it probably will.

It wasn't long before I found my first clue. I shut the horn back in its case and lifted it by the handle. There was a clunk as around 4 kilos of brass slumped into a more comfortable position. Not a reassuring sound. It wouldn't take much of a drop to cause the damage.

My first thought was to follow the example of this guy and re-engineer the innards of the case. It involves cling-film and polystyrene spray, but isn't quite as kinky as it sounds.

Anyway, I went for the lazy man's option and bought this second-hand case.

I've seen some older Trevor James horns in cases like this, so thought it would probably do a good enough job. As it turned out, it's a nice snug fit.

It did require a small amount of work however. It had taken a knock to one of the bottom corners and the plywood sides to the inner shell had come adrift from the corner post. And it was missing all but two of its little feet. Plenty of glue and a piece of sheet aluminium around the bottom end of the shell made a nice repair and gave me a base to screw some replacement feet to.

I haven't bothered replacing the feet along the long side. I don't think it needs it.

As it was cheap and slightly shabby I will have no qualms about pimping it which I will no doubt post about in due course. And the ABS case the horn came in has been boxed up and put in the loft to be offered in pristine condition when I come to sell the horn.

... and I puffed

This post is about the low-cost Chinese saxophones I've been playing over the last year or so.

My first sax was an A.Carmichael alto from Karacha.com who are based in Northern Ireland, I think. It's a Conn-Selmer Prelude copy (maybe even a stencil if the invoice is to be believed).

This is the one.

I found it a solid. consistent horn, though perhaps a little lifeless. Also it had something of the feel of a manual typewriter about it - my fingers just felt they were doing too much work. Looking back, I'm sure a saxophone technician could have sorted that, but there you go.

Then around October last year I saw a Jericho alto sax for sale on ebay. I'd read good things about these horns, so I had a punt and bought it at a bargain price. (top tip for ebay sellers - don't end your sale on a Tuesday). Compared to the Carmichael this horn is light, bright and fast. So I sold the Carmichael which more than covered the cost of the Jericho.

So of course then I started hankering after a tenor. So about 6 weeks ago I bought one of Gear4music's damaged stock that they sell off through ebay.

This one had sustained a blow to the back that had squished the Eb key guard flat and pushed the thumb key into the body causing a leak to the alternate F# key. (I put this damage down to the inadequate case, but more of that in another post). I straightened the key guard and sealed the F# with sticky tape and it plays nicely.

These are the two horns.

Next step is to have a tech look at the tenor to see what the damage is financially. I can live with the dented  body, so if push comes to shove, a properly sealing F# would be good enough.

I huffed...

My wife bought me a sax back in 2008, and as is often the case with these things, it sat in its case for years and did nothing.

But then we noticed the local adult education centre was hosting a day-long "play the sax from scratch" workshop. It was full, but I managed to get on the third or fourth iteration in May 2014. These workshops are run by Ian Hill, a man of great charm and patience. So if you live in the Rugby area and always fancied blowing one of these things, I'd recommend you try one of his workshops.

Anyway - that got me kick started and I've carried on with it over the last year or so with a bit of help from 3 or 4 extra workshops that Ian does for people who started in this way. I can see that this is a bit of a middle-aged-bloke thing, but it's a lot safer than getting a motorbike. More than that, I'm hoping that it'll prove mind-expanding (in a good way) by pushing my mind into areas quite different to the "ordinary" intellectual activity of my education and work life. A kind of talisman against dementia, or so I hope.

 So. My aim with this blog is just to have somewhere I can gather all this musical stuff and try to make sense of it.