Using a Baritone Saxophone Mouthpiece

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, we got our reeds, so in this session we need to get it on the mouthpiece and start making some noise. So this is a good sign. Now, remember when we pulled this neck out of this particular used Bari, I was a little worried that this mouthpiece was on the neck. Normally, you want to take them apart so, I'm a little worried about what we might find under here. But we need to be bold and take it off the neck and see what we find. And we have a mess, a disaster. And what do I mean by disaster. So this cork here is broken from here and it's missing all the way up to here. You'll notice there's no cork at all. This immediately needs to be taken to the repair shop and fixed. But say you're impatient like me and you want to play anyway. Well, there's a work around for this situation on the neck and we'll get to that in a later session. So, let's do first things first and now we'll work on mouthpieces, reeds and one additional piece which is a ligature. So mouthpiece, reed and it's held by a ligature. So let's start with this. What are the basic pieces, areas of a mouthpiece? The tip, we call this the plate, it depends on who you talk to what this is called, it is called several different things. I call it the plate because it's the nice flat piece that you're going to cook your reed on and you can tell that they match perfectly from side to side. So how do you position your reed? That's really the first step. And what you want to do is if you look right up here, I'm not sure if you can see that too well, is you want to slide this reed up until you see just a hair of black coming over the top. And this should be lined up with the plate, so left and right it should be centered and then you put your ligature on. And there are several different types of ligatures and maybe, I'm going to pause real quick and show you the different types of ligatures that you might run into."