Year: 2022

Ok, I had some time to do some songs. Here is one of them.

  As It Was by Harry Styles for Eb Instruments (101.6 KiB, 7 hits)
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  As It Was by Harry Styles for Bb Instruments (101.0 KiB, 2 hits)
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There is a huge need for a simple, yet effective pedal that every sax player needs on their pedal board. That is a microphone preamp with FX loop. There are several out there, but saxophonists really need something more. What if they also play a wind synth but want to use their pedals with it?

The solution I found was using the Eventide Mixing Link. Except the problem with this is that you cannot separately adjust the gain on either input. So say your mic needs to be at 1 O’Clock, but the wind synth needs to be at 4 O’Clock? You’d have to adjust the levels, and hopefully remember to do it again when you switch again. And how do you mute the microphone? You can’t really (unless you get a passthrough on/off plug or something).

There is another pedal by Zorg called the HornFX Blow! While it looks great, it doesn’t have any sort of ability to address the problem.

Enter the Elite Acoustics EAE StompMix 4. This is a very interesting pedal that is also a mixer. It looks like it would totally allow you to have a stereo effects loop, stereo output, and two microphone/line inputs. Very interesting…….

You hear the term, dB. Decibel. But do you really know what it means? Here is a GREAT post about what it is.

The first thing to understand is that zero decibels does not mean silence. Instead, it refers to the quietest sound that humans can hear, which is roughly equivalent to the sound of a mosquito from ten feet away. All other decibel levels are multiples of this reference intensity.

ethanhein.com

There are a LOT of “sax enhancements” you can buy. Some, like ones made by Oleg, are great. I have used the Oleg palm key risers since the 2000s. Highly recommended. These type of enhancements fix a functional issue with the saxophone.

Then we get to that are…..well……..subjective. The weighted screws, the “tone tablets”, and the Klangbogens of the world. Do these work? I have no idea. Perhaps. I’m not really keen on blowing a lot of $$ to find out. Some of the theories on how they work seem rather suspect.

However, I did come across this tonight, and this actually makes a lot of sense to me. The Mr PS is a little half circle you put on at the TOP of your saxophone neck pipe. That little “dead” area before the cork starts. The area that essentially should be a small “gap”. You put either a metal one or a plastic one there, and then you have a transmission source from the vibrations of the mouthpiece to the rest of the horn. Now that actually makes a lot of sense to me.

Here are some videos about it here.

This is a great video. LOVE John Williams. He’s 90 now, and I hope he lives to 180.

Very cool but not practical instruments.