... 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.