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Home Alt › Forums › Mouthpieces › how to make the sound bigger
sxpoet.check out the photo, you can see the two Vamp Stock reeds on the left and right hand side inside the ligature, they are both touching the base sides of the vibrating reed.
on top of the vibrating reed, is another hard Vamp Stock synthetic reed.
As you can see from the photograph, the ligature is way too fat for the mouthpiece barrel
I don’t like tight fitting rovner cloth ligatures, they dampen the sound and make the mouthpiece sound darker more suited for classical music.
i’ve tried a metal ligature, and they don’t inspire me.
The other thing you can’t see in the photograph.
i’ve cut large rectangle holes out of the sides of the rovner ligature, so if you were to look along both sides of the ligature, you would see the sides of both Vamp stock reeds.
Cutting large rectangle holes out of the sides of the ligature has not weakened the holding strength of the ligature, and has removed the large cloth area damping effect of the ligature coming in contact with both Vamp stock reeds.
depending on the ligature you use, can transform your overall Pitch from a Mouldy to a clear pitch sound, and can also transform your overall Tone from a Dark to a Bright Sound. So there are 2 factors to listen out for, getting the balance right between both factors makes a hell of a lot of difference to how you sound in your head when you play.
Getting the tip distance between the mouthpiece and reed, will make a vast difference in your harmonic range, a wider gap will make altissimo easier and give you a brighter sound, but needs more blowing power, the opposite will give you a darker, less harmonic softer classical sound.
if you have good hearing, then you should listen to the same note played on a dark mouthpiece and then played on a bright mouthpiece. On a dark mouthpiece you wont hear as many harmonics in the pitch as you will hear on a bright mouthpiece, as other pitches try to compete with the main pitch.
In fact when a Pro Sax player changes to a different design of a dark mouthpiece. The first thing he will hear is if there are any extra harmonic sounds in the pitch of a note, this will result in him changing his embouchure over the following weeks to remove those unwanted harmonics in the pitch, to get back to the sound he is comfortable with.
This is stuff for the Gods and not for the likes of me.
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