Sticking Your Neck Out

Recently, I've been entertaining some moderately unorthodox thoughts about my tenor sax. Overall, it's a fantastic horn, and I really like how it sounds... but every once in a while when I'm playing, I feel like it's going to get away from me completely. It's hard to explain -- maybe some of the sax heads out there can understand what I'm saying -- but the horn is so free-blowing that a lot of the time I feel like I'm about to lose control. This unsettling feeling, coupled with some intonation issues that have always been the case with the horn and the fact that a previous owner obviously put the horn through some seriously hard service, has led me to believe that perhaps I should look into replacing the neck.

There are two stand-by makers of aftermarket saxophone necks out there: one is very expensive, and the other is moderately expensive. Both would require me to spend a good deal of money on something that I might not like, even though both products get great press. I am a saucy fellow, but doing that sort of thing makes me nervous.

As I was thinking about this a few days ago, I remembered how G$ had once told me about a conversation he had with our college sax professor about trying different necks back in the day... which rang a bell about a later time in the same conversation when G$ had told me about different necks he auditioned when he bought his luscious Reference 36. That led me to do further research -- the substance of which is neither here nor there -- which led me to believe that the neck of a Selmer Reference 54 might fit my 1959 Buffet Super Dynaction. I further realized that the store in which I teach unwashed, farty urchins to play flute has a Reference 54 gathering dust in its stock room.

This afternoon, after lunch, I swung into action.

The Reference 54 neck is somewhere in the neighborhood of half a millimeter too small for the receiver on my horn -- something which, I'm told, can be easily fixed -- but I got several pitches and their octave-up brothers to speak... and I was astonished. The same core sound was there, but that edge-of-oblivion feeling was gone. The octaves were perfectly in tune. It was exactly what I was looking for.

So, now I have to scrape together the funds for a Reference 54 neck. I'm also interested in trying out one of these, and I have a new classical mouthpiece/ligature combination for my alto arriving shortly in the mail, so keep your eyes open for an evaluation of that. Right now, it's all about getting my sax priorities in order. Not a bad place to be.

You Shall Know Them by Their Bass

In response to The Mayor's gracious request, here is my bass and its best friend in the world, my amp. The bass is a Fullerton Ventura 4, featuring active electronics and, as you can see from the picture, a MM+J pickup configuration. Check it out.


The amp is a dinky little Peavey Max 126. It puts out ten whole watts of power, which is really all I need. The neat thing about this little amp is that it's got a vintage compression switch, which lets me switch from a clean-sounding, more modern sound to a more compressed-sounding tube-ish vintage sound. And the amount of vintage tube-ish compression can be controlled with a separate dial. For a little amp, it's pretty sweet.

The bass is lots of fun, but if I get particularly serious about being a bass guy, some things will have to change. My only complaint about the bass as it is right now is that the pickups don't treat all the strings equally. That is, the E A and D strings all sound one way, and the G string (heh, heh) sounds another way, almost more acoustic than amplified. My instinct and some research leads me to believe that this is due to the pickups in the bass being sort of cheap, so I'm kicking around the idea of putting some different pickups in. G$ seems very satisfied with his Bartolinis, and I hear good things about Nordstrand pickups too. We'll just have to see.

But there you go. There's my bass. And with it, I can rock you like a mountain.

All Strung Out

With student teaching over and summer employment yet to begin, I've had lots of time to practice playing my new bass. At the suggestion of many of my dear friends -- G$ chief among them -- I picked up some light-gauge strings at a going-out-of-business sale a few days ago, and threw them on. I don't know much about bass strings, so I bought the only set of lights that the store still had in a four-string set, and they turned out to be these. I'm not sure what kind of strings my cheapo bass came with, but man, what a difference these new ones made.

First off, the sound is a lot brighter. Associates and internet resources tell me that some of that brightness will go away as the strings get broken in, but I think a lot of the brightness will stick around. Along with being more bright, the sustain is much more pronounced. You might even say that you could go out and get a sandwich... and then come back and they'd still be going "wah."

Secondly, these strings cause much more of a sympathetic vibration in each other which, because I am lazy/no good at muting the strings I'm not playing, add all sorts of interesting overtones to the notes that I am playing.

I have to say, I didn't really like the new strings at first, but after an hour or so of playing with the settings on my amp and messing with the onboard preamp knobs, I think I have something pretty cool. Next up in the string experiment will be some sort of flatwound string... possibly from Fender or DR (once they come out with their flats). The neat thing about playing bass for me so far is that messing around with the instrument itself to get different sounds is MUCH cheaper than trying to do the same thing on saxophone. Reeds don't make all that much of a difference (in my experience), and good mouthpieces are so outrageously priced most of the time that you can't just try one out to see if you like it. And I don't even want to talk about pad/resonator/key-height voodoo. I don't understand those things, and I don't have an extra $800 sitting around to find out.

Bass is fun. Everybody should get one. Right now.