Reed Testing

[terry wells]

great, sorry I missed the video…where did you upload it?

[Mike Potter]

interesting, I don’t hear much difference in my tone when I play a copper or a select jazz 3S but they do have a different feel. I’ve tried hemps in the past and found them to be very stuffy for me. I’ve heard folks say the copper is much brighter but I haven’t experienced that in my setup, I find the cane reeds I use are equally as bright on my mouthpieces but as noted they do have a different feel.

[Anonymous]

i’m uploading privately to people who give feed back on my playing.
It’s pointless uploading without feed back.

I’m still testing out these synthetic reeds, and i still keep returning to using the cane reed.

[RockinRobin]

My go to reed is the medium onyx reed in one of my 7* mouthpieces, Theowanne slant 2 or MBII fat boy

[Anonymous]

i’m currently testing an Onyx reed M/S strength and a Copper reed M strength and comparing them to my Ddario Jazz Select Unfiled M/H strength reed.

The Onyx reed sounds clearer than the Copper reed, whereas my cane reed sounds in the middle of the onyx and copper reed sounds.
In terms of sounds the synthetic reeds are reasonable to my hearing.

However in terms of playing all the keys up and down the sax, the synthetic reeds are failing. Some of the higher keys are not playing as well in terms of blowing the key note and there are some gaps in the altissimo range of notes where the notes just won’t play properly at all. When i use the cane reed everything plays perfectly. The only thing i can think of is the synthetic material doesn’t behave equally at different pitch vibrations compared to the cane which is consistent every time. The only other problem with these two synthetic reeds, is i find everything from middle F upwards is playing way too sharp compared to the cane reed. It could be that they are designed for a specific style of playing, and i need to use a different synthetic reed for my style of playing, just like there are different cane reeds for different purposes.

Anyway thats my opinion so far, i do know my Pro has said in the past you need to try something new out for a couple of weeks, before you finally decide. I’ve not given up on synthetic reeds yet, but hope to try the other types of synthetic reeds to see if they suit my style of playing as i’m more middle of the road music playing, not extreme honking screaming rock or extreme dark classical playing.

[RockinRobin]

I was blowing a MS onyx reed. The reed sometimes stopped vibrating. Johnny told me to stick with the medium onyx and the Medium began to blow just right. i have a medium copper (2.5) and it is a tough reed so I went to a #2 copper reed. I prefer the medium Onyx reed. I consider the copper reed to be a rock and roll reed.The copper reed takes a lot of wind/air to hold a tone. That’s me. My mouthpieces are Theowanne slant2 7*. and onyx 7* MBII fat boy.

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