As you know, I require my university woodwind students (oboe, clarinet, bassoon, saxophone) to grow their personal listening libraries by a minimum of one recording per semester. Here are this semester’s picks. They are all available from Amazon on CD or MP3 or both (links provided), and also on iTunes.
Carolyn Hove: English Horn & Oboe
Oboists get some key English horn repertoire this time around, as performed by the reigning queen.
Repertoire: Burgmüller Duo; Finzi Five Bagatelles; Baermann Adagio; Saint-Saëns Sonata; Pärt Spiegel im Spiegel; Reade Suite from “The Victorian Kitchen Garden;” Poulenc Sonata
Martin Kuuskmann: Nonstop
I was taken by Kuuskmann’s virtuosic playing, but also by the cheeky programming: Bach followed by Berio, and his convincing interpretation of Jobim is a pleasant surprise on a bassoon recording.
Repertoire: Bach Partita BWV 1013; Berio Sequenza XII; Pärt Spiegel im Spiegel; Schnyder Sonata; Körvits Song for a Distant Friend; Kertsman Nocturne and Lullaby; Randalu Rignana; Jobim Inutil Paisagem
Timothy McAllister: In Transit
I usually try to stick more or less to established standard repertoire, but my saxophone students hopefully get their horizons expanded a little this time (though the Albright Sonata may qualify as a standard at this point).
I’ve been trying out the Rico single and double reed cases. These are plastic cases that can optionally accommodate Rico’s “Reed Vitalizer” packets, which, according to Rico, help keep your reeds at your desired humidity level. The single reed case holds eight reeds, baritone saxophone or smaller, and the double reed case holds five double reeds, oboe or bassoon. (I found contrabass clarinet reeds to be just a little too large for the single reed case. The double reed case holds English horn reeds just fine, but doesn’t work for oboe d’amore or contrabassoon.)
Detailed review follows, but here is the quick summary:
Price
reasonable initial investment; pricier if you regularly buy additional Vitalizer packs
Looks
handsome
Humidity
undecided
Design
flawed
Price
Current street price on both the single reed case and the double reed case seems to be about $20. This includes one Reed Vitalizer pack. If you choose to use the Reed Vitalizer packs on an ongoing basis, they go for about $5 apiece, and Rico says you will need a new one every 45-60 days (so, up to around $40/year, not counting tax or shipping). Read More “Review: Rico reed cases”
It’s a new semester, so it’s time again for required recordings. I think I’ve got an exceptional group of recordings picked out for my students (and myself) this semester: lots of beautiful, virtuosic playing, and great repertoire.
Enjoy:
Joseph Robinson: Principal Oboe, New York Philharmonic
Repertoire: Saint-Saëns Sonata, Piston Suite, Poulenc Trio, Nielsen Two Fantasy Pieces, Dring Trio, Shickele Gardens, Still Incantation and Dance, Martin Petite Complainte Read More “Required recordings, spring 2012”
I mentioned in my recent review of the new Rico Reserve clarinet mouthpieces that Robert Polan, Rico Product Manager, was shipping me a few additional samples for comparison. I received three X5 mouthpieces this week, and I have been inspecting and playing them side-by-side with each other and with the one X5 from the original shipment.
As far as visual inspection, I think the best thing I can do is show you a photo of the tables. You can click for the high-resolution version (warning: it is large and may download slowly). Check out the tips and rails especially.
I’m certain that I have never seen a mouthpiece in this price class with this level of consistency. With the mouthpieces I’m accustomed to using, I would expect at least two out of four to have immediately-obvious asymmetry in the tips, and at least two to have rails of obviously different widths. The Reserves are visually much, much more symmetrical and even. If you look very closely at the high-resolution image of the Reserves, you can probably pick out a few imperfections—but it does require looking very closely. My sense is that Rico’s claims about precision and consistency are justified, at least so far as is relevant for relatively inexpensive mass-produced mouthpieces.
Do they play identically to each other? Not 100%, but probably at least 95%. Of the four, there are two that I find to be virtually interchangeable in terms of tone, and a third that feels just barely purer in tone (or less rich, if you prefer). The fourth feels like it has a slight brightness (or presence or “sparkle,” if you like) that sets it slightly apart from the others, but only slightly. I say that these mouthpieces “feel” purer or whatever because I wasn’t able to capture the differences convincingly on a recording, and I suspect that beyond the clarinetist’s personal space even another clarinetist would be hard-pressed to tell one mouthpiece from another. (I do think the differences might cause the clarinetist to play a little differently, and that might be audible.) And the differences between the mouthpieces are, to me, less noticeable than, say, the difference between my two best performance reeds.
Response (more important than tone in mouthpiece selection) is all but indistinguishable between all four mouthpieces. I could easily keep all four in my case, pull one out blindfolded, and perform on it without any worries about response or control. Any one of these four (six, really, counting the X0 and X10 from the original review) is at least as good as, and perhaps better than, the best cherry-picked examples of other mouthpieces in the same price class.
I can also use reeds interchangeably between all four mouthpieces without any issues. I usually recommend using different reeds for different mouthpieces (even of the same model), as the reeds tend to take on a slight imprint of the mouthpiece’s window, which can cause leakiness if the reed is used on a mouthpiece with a window of even slightly different dimensions. No significant concerns about that here.
My conclusion about these mouthpieces is that some clarinetists may find (as I did) that the Reserve is a better mouthpiece than others in its class; allowing for differences in taste, some may legitimately prefer to stick with what they’ve got. But the killer feature of the Reserve mouthpiece is its replaceability. With the Reserve series, I can get a fine mouthpiece without having to sift through a pile of them to find “the one.” If I break it, I can essentially grab the next one to roll off the production line and expect it to be very, very similar. I can recommend it to my students knowing that theirs will play like mine does. Those factors, to me, are what make these mouthpieces a really exciting development.
After my recent glorious victory in the Saxquest trivia contest, I had a gift certificate burning a hole in my pocket and I decided to get a new stand to hold my saxophones and perhaps some other woodwinds in my office and on gigs.
I had been tempted previously by SaxRax stands, which I continue to hear good things about but haven’t been able to try out seriously in person. I find it difficult on SaxRax’s website to find out exactly what products they are currently making; I had to use their contact form and wait for a response to determine that their single alto and tenor stands can no longer be joined with a special connector, and the double flute-clarinet peg is no longer made (though some old stock are apparently still available). I had hoped to buy a single saxophone stand and eventually build onto it with a second, but now you have to buy a combo alto-tenor stand, and that is currently out of my price range.
Click for larger.
Next on my list were the stands by Hercules, which are more expensive than the various cheap stands but considerably less costly than the SaxRax. Hercules’s website is very clear about what products they make. I settled on the DS538B, which holds alto and tenor saxophones, and includes a soprano saxophone peg and two flute-or-clarinet pegs. Saxquest currently sells them for USD $69.95, plus a fairly steep shipping charge (the stand is a little heavy, I guess).
Many moons ago, I did some mini-reviews of various stands, including the Hercules DS543B flute-piccolo-clarinet stand. I had a complaint about it, that holds true for the DS538B as well:
It has yellow trim. Not on the pegs, which might be useful in the dark, but on the base, where its only function is to call attention to itself (and perhaps provide a little free advertising).
I got in touch with a Hercules representative, who pointed out a functional reason for the bright trim on the base:
The reason we make the yellow trim eye-catching is to prevent stumbling over the stand or instrument on the dark stage.
The DS538B appears as though I could disassemble it with an adjustable wrench; it’s tempting to attempt this and spray-paint the yellow parts black. (I can only assume that attempting something like this voids applicable warranties.) Read More “Review: Hercules DS538B woodwind stand”
I like mouthpieces that are easy to play, especially in terms of response and tuning. But I also really like something easy to replace; I don’t like the idea of a mouthpiece that is so expensive, variable, or rare that if I drop it I can’t just order a new one, have it in a few days, and expect it to play like the old one.
A few years back I did a fairly detailed review of the Rico Reserve clarinet mouthpieces (in two parts), and have been happily using the Reserves as my main clarinet mouthpieces ever since. The Reserves are, in particular, astonishingly consistent from specimen to specimen, presumably due to the very precise tooling that obviates the need for hand-finishing (which sounds cool but ultimately means a relatively high degree of variability).
The pro-line products formerly released under the Rico name are now D’Addario Woodwinds products, and they now include some alto saxophone mouthpieces, the Select Jazz series. I was pleased to hear from a contact at D’Addario Woodwinds who sent me some samples to try out.
My point of reference is the various Meyer-ish alto mouthpieces I have played for about the last 20 years, most recently the V16 series from Vandoren. I used the A6/medium chamber for a number of years, but more recently switched to the A6/small chamber, which gave me a little more bite in my sound that works well for me in louder situations (like big band lead playing, or blues gigs here in the Mississippi Delta) without having to strain as much.
The new D’Addario Select Jazz alto mouthpieces are currently available in three flavors, the D5M, the D6M, and the D7M. Larger numbers in the middle correspond to larger tip openings (details at D’Addario’s website). I got a couple of each to try. Each one says “medium chamber” on the box, so maybe D’Addario is considering other chamber sizes. At the moment street price seems to be a little higher than the V16s, but still basically in the same class.
If you read the second part of my Reserve mouthpiece review, then you won’t be surprised to see that the Select Jazz mouthpieces are extremely consistent. Check out the very even and symmetrical rails and tips.
L-R: two each of the D5M, D6M, and D7M. Click for higher resolution.
As mentioned in a couple of otherreviews, the Select Jazz mouthpieces have an unusually tight fit on the neck cork, and they chewed up my aging cork a bit. Cork grease!
The mouthpieces have individual serial numbers, like the Reserve clarinet mouthpieces. When I asked about this during my clarinet mouthpiece review, the Rico/D’Addario rep told me there might in the future be some way of registering your mouthpiece online, maybe to access some kind of members-only content. I haven’t seen anything happen along these lines, so maybe there’s a more logical explanation, like that the numbers are just for quality control.
Here is a sound clip of each of the six mouthpieces I received, plus my two V16 mouthpieces for comparison. For all the sound clips I used the same inexpensive fake-leather-type ligature, but different reeds, a D’Addario Select Jazz filed 3S and a filed 3M, depending on which worked best with each individual mouthpiece. The V16s and the Jazz Select D5Ms worked better with the 3M reed, and the Jazz Select D6Ms and D7Ms seemed to prefer the 3S reed.
D’Addario Select Jazz D5M, specimen #1
D’Addario Select Jazz D5M, specimen #2
D’Addario Select Jazz D6M, specimen #1
D’Addario Select Jazz D6M, specimen #2
D’Addario Select Jazz D7M, specimen #1
D’Addario Select Jazz D7M, specimen #2
My old Vandoren V16 A6M
My old Vandoren V16 A6S
The differences are minor at best, and really in a pinch I could make any of these eight mouthpieces work, but here are a few observations:
The Select Jazz mouthpieces have noticeably more stable intonation than the V16s, especially the D5M. This is a bigger deal than tone, which is more malleable and more subjective.
The Select Jazz mouthpieces are, again, very consistent. This is the killer feature of D’Addario’s mouthpieces. I found the two D5Ms to be virtually interchangeable in terms of tone, response, and tuning, and the two D7Ms too. One of the D6Ms (#2) has, to my ear, just a tiny bit of an edge that I find unpleasant. I suspect that this one is slightly “off,” but the difference between the two is still quite minor compared to the differential in hand-finished production mouthpieces.
I do still want something with some edge to it, and the V16 small chamber still feels like is has more of that than any of the seven others, but not by much. The Select Jazz mouthpieces seem to have a bigger core and body to the sound, plus a bit higher volume, so I’m thinking it may be an acceptable tradeoff as far as making my presence known among the electric guitars.
Overall, I find the Select Jazz to respond better both down low in the staff and up above it than the V16s do. I didn’t play any altissimo in the sound clips, but I find the Select Jazz to have a slight advantage in that register as well.
The D5M and, to a lesser extent, the D6M, seem to be the best fit for my style and needs. The D7M doesn’t work as well for me—it has the louder but more spread tone and less-stable intonation you might expect from a larger tip opening—but it’s still one of the best mouthpieces I’ve played in that category, and it’s really only slightly large, not nearly as extreme as the tip openings offered by some other makers.
I think the Select Jazz D5M is going to be my new mouthpiece. (I’m keeping a D6M in my case for now too until I can try them both on a loud blues gig, but so far the D5M has worked well for small-group jazz.) The combination of solid intonation, pretty-but-gutsy tone, budget-friendly price, and amazing consistency make this a solid, versatile, and practical option for a working saxophonist. They are great for educators, too—they are easy to recommend to students because they are so easy to play and because they are so reliable in quality (much less need to order a half-dozen on approval and hope there’s a “good” one in the bunch). A great all-around, no-nonsense alto jazz mouthpiece.
I look forward to more offerings from D’Addario Woodwinds, perhaps alto mouthpieces in other chamber sizes, or mouthpieces for other saxophones.
I’m a little late to the party on this, as the ReedGeek has been around for a number of years now and has been widely reviewed, but I finally picked one up (at ClarinetFest) after a long conversation/demonstration with inventor Mauro Di Gioia. I have been using mine for a few months now and wanted to add a few points to the conversation. Here is my take.
The ReedGeek isn’t completely replacing my traditional reed tools, but, I am using it for some of the tasks that I used to do with those tools:
Flattening the backs of single reeds. This seems to be what the ReedGeek does best, and it is now my go-to tool for this procedure (by far the most frequent adjustment I make to my clarinet and saxophone reeds). I used to do this with wet-dry sandpaper on a piece of glass, and with flat files prior to that. Using the ReedGeek is faster and neater, doesn’t remove as much cane unnecessarily, and leaves a nice smooth non-shredded finish even on wet cane. I had also experimented in previous years with using knives for flattening, which is fast and leaves a nice finish but is risky because it’s so easy to gouge out chunks of cane by accident. The ReedGeek is much safer.
Smoothing out oboe reed windows. I still like my double-hollow-ground knives for carving out oboe reed windows, but I do have a tendency to leave the windows a bit rough and craggy (like from knife chatter). That’s fussy and time-consuming to fix with a knife, and if not handled delicately a knife can actually exacerbate the problem. But the ReedGeek cleans up my windows pretty quickly and easily, with much less risk of making the gouges worse. I mostly use the squared-off end for this.
Scraping bassoon reed channels. The concave parts of a bassoon reed blade are all but impossible to get at with a straight knife, and I find round files or sandpaper to be only a little less clumsy. The ReedGeek’s slightly curved tip works very well for this. Mr. Di Gioia describes this as being similar to using a pencil eraser—you just “erase” the cane you don’t want.
I’m not currently using the ReedGeek for:
Balancing the corners of the tips of single reeds, though it certainly can be used for this. I’m still used to sandpaper and glass, which at this point feels more controlled to me. If I have both tools available I still grab the sandpaper but if I’m away from my reed desk and traveling light, the ReedGeek will do the job. The ReedGeek can, I think, be used effectively to target specific spots on a reed’s profile (using either the square or the curved end), but I personally do very little of that.
Double reed making. (It’s fair to point out that the ReedGeek isn’t exactly being marketed as a tool for this anyway, though the company does publish a document on its website that provides some instruction for double reed players.) For one thing, the ReedGeek is quite small, and for reedmaking I like big, chunky, comfortable knife handles. A handle would also get my hand out of the way, which was a problem for me when I tried to use the ReedGeek for some fine tip work on oboe reeds—it was hard to get everything angled so I had control and could see what I was doing. I spoke to Mr. Di Gioia on the phone while preparing this review, and he hinted at a soon-to-be-revealed, more double-reed-oriented version of the ReedGeek, with some kind of extension for increased leverage (though he shied away from calling it a “handle”), and with scraping surfaces tailored more for double-reed applications. Because of the ReedGeek’s extremely hard alloy, it may be tougher on reed plaques than a traditional knife, but if you’re planning to use the ReedGeek in that way, the price difference between the ReedGeek and a good knife will buy you dozens of plaques.
The ReedGeek is very portable, won’t be confiscated at an airport security checkpoint, and doesn’t need sharpening like a knife or replacing like sandpaper. (When I spoke with Mr. Di Gioia he joked that he has to hope that people lose them so they will have to buy more.)
The ReedGeek has a hole drilled though one end (visible in the oboe reed picture), which I thought might be a way to attach some kind of handle, or perhaps to put it on a lanyard or keyring. In my follow-up call with Mr. Di Gioia, he explained that the hole has to do with the ReedGeek manufacturing process, and that keeping the ReedGeek on your keyring would likely damage your keys as it is much harder than the metals keys are made from. Also, the ReedGeek’s edges feel sharp to me, but not really in such a way that I would cut myself on them; Mr. Di Gioia recommends handling it with care but isn’t aware of people injuring themselves with it. He has an idea for a sleeve or sheath that may become available at some future date, and that could make carrying the ReedGeek in your pocket more feasible.
The verdict: for me, it’s useful and I will easily get my money’s worth out of it as long as I don’t lose it. For a single-reed player, I think it can realistically replace most or all of your tools. For a double-reed player, it’s currently a supplementary tool at best, but stay tuned for a possible new product.
At the time of this writing the ReedGeek goes for right about $50 from the ReedGeek store; some retailers also carry it.
The DS538B appears as though I could disassemble it with an adjustable wrench; it’s tempting to attempt this and spray-paint the yellow parts black. (I can only assume that attempting something like this voids applicable warranties.) 
I totally with your comments on the Kuuskmann recording!