Conditioning Baritone Saxophone Reeds

Video Transcript

"For Expert Village, I'm EJ John Erickson with Vital Flame Productions and thank you for joining us on our sessions focusing on the baritone saxophone. Okay, so we've picked a reed from the store, we've brought it home and we're ready to start playing it. So here's what I do to condition and get my reeds ready for playing. Okay, so if you actually take a reed and hold it on its end, it's very porous, lots of holes running through it. That's actually what those little lines were on the top of the reed. So if I sort of draw an expanded out version of the back of the reed, it looks like this if I were looking down the butt of the reed. And in there, there's these little holes. And again, that's where the nutrients and so on flowed through the bamboo to give its nourishment, so there's the plant. So, if I flipped it over to the other side, now remember it's been cut, these holes still exist, but they've been, well if I showed you the block of wood this way, the cut is like this. So those holes still exist and that's what we're going to plug up and condition. So, if you don't do that, those holes stay open and, as your spit starts to get on the reed, it starts to get filled up with spit and basically break down the reed. What we want to do is we're going to go ahead and close up those holes in the reed and pressure it down to give this reed a little bit, like a plastic cover, but a little bit more longevity. And you can do that with cork grease. So, let's show you that. Okay, so we're going to condition our reed. So you'll need your cork grease for this and your reeds. Just a quick side note, you notice I have an A, T and B and S, which would be here, I don't have an example of that, but that's soprano, alto, tenor, Bari. It just keeps them in order for me, it's a little trick. Also, I know what reed this is if I'm trying new brands. I can do sizes and whatnot. So, anyway, I just wanted to make that note when you see these little scribbling on there, that's what I'm showing you. Now, for conditioning reeds, if you bought a plastic cover, you don't need to condition it. It's already conditioned with the plastic already on it. So it's good to go you don't need to do that. But, for my jazz reeds, I do want to condition them."