Alto saxophone questions, answered by our band repair team. Alto is where nearly every band student starts, and the questions reflect that — is it too heavy for a fifth grader, why is it squeaking, which reeds to buy. The single most useful thing we tell sax families: never pick the instrument up by the neck. It bends, and a bent neck is a real repair on a horn that was otherwise fine.
Yes, two ways. Yamaha is one of the manufacturers in our B Line, along with Jupiter, Selmer, Buffet and Gemeinhardt. We also rent a Premium Yamaha Line on five instruments, in the specific models school programs most often specify: the…
It depends on the line. A Line instruments are brand new, and they arrive with everything new, mouthpiece included. B Line and C Line instruments have been played before. Each of those is stripped down and restored on our bench,…
That is a reasonable instinct, and we would rather a teacher raised it than said nothing. Instruments do turn up in school music rooms that arrived from an online seller and cannot be played properly, and a teacher who has…
Less changes than it looks: the fingerings are identical, so everything your child knows transfers, and what is new is physical, more air, different-sized reeds, and a neck strap that suddenly matters. It is one of the most common moves…
The whole job takes two minutes. Take off the reed and ligature, run the mouthpiece under warm (not hot) water with a drop of mild soap, work a mouthpiece brush through it (the small tapered brush made exactly for this),…
Usually yes, but the honest answer is that it depends on the child, because every mouth is different and so are the braces. Most students play straight through, with orthodontic wax on the brackets and a few weeks of patience,…