Finish 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, you got your reed and you need some cork grease. I'm using Chapstick, just because I didn't bring my cork grease today. It's at home, but that's okay, Chapstick works in a pinch for sure as cork grease. They're virtually the same thing. In fact, you can use your cork grease as Chapstick if you need to. I have done that. Don't tell my wife. Okay. So, let's go ahead. What we're going to do, we've talked about those holes openings. We're going to take our cork grease and we're just going to go in one direction and that's up the slope of the reed. Sort of getting all that grease ready to be pushed up into those holes. So when I have a generous amount of cork grease on this reed, I'm going to go ahead and put that down, and I'm going to take, like one of the clumps on my finger, and I'm going to push down hard and ride it up the reed. And you'll feel it almost kind of pushing that cork grease right up into those bamboo holes, or veins, and it's pushing in there. And you can actually see that the cork grease kind of starts to go away, because it's actually being pushed up into those holes. So I usually do maybe one or two passes of that until it feels like it's getting pretty solid up into those holes. And we'll put another generous amount and we'll just go ahead and again push really hard down on the reed, pushing up the slope, jamming all that cork grease into the holes. Okay, so all the cork grease is shoved up into those holes. Now we seal it by just pushing down with our thumb, pushing it down, remember keeping this flat, and we're pushing out the excess cork grease that we pushed into those holes. So this is squeezing out the extra cork grease and sealing up those holes nice and tight. So once you've done, probably, I don't know, 15 to 20 hard press passes on it, just kind of pull it off, clean the cork grease off the ends. Okay, so your reed is conditioned. In the mouth, start soaking it, getting it ready to play. Um,um, and don't chew on it."