Posts Tagged ‘woodwind’

Do you have a number of mouthpieces you’d like to display? While I pretty much stick to one mouthpiece, I periodically like to go back and try other mouthpieces that I’ve collected over the years. Here’s a cool looking display you make relatively quickly. I’ll step you through the steps.

The Mouthpiece Display Stand

I started with a nice piece of solid maple, about 12 by 18 by 1 inches, leftover from a shelving project. I had in mind what I roughly wanted, so I also picked up a 3 foot long piece of 1/2 inch dowel. My friend Lon has a wonderful woodcutting studio, so I started by cutting the maple down to roughly 8 by 18.

We then routed the four sides of the maple, giving it a nice professional look.

Next I used the drill press and cut 1/2 inch holes, about 1/2 an inch deep. I picked a spacing of 2 inches (front to rear), and 3 inches (side to side). This would allow me to mount three rows of six dowels, or 18 total.

Next I cut the dowels. I cut six for the back row (sized for tenor mouthpieces), six slightly shorter (for alto), and six even shorter (for soprano).

The next step is to use a grinder to nicely finish the ends of the dowels, taking off the sharp edge.

Now it’s time to oil the maple for a nice finished look. I decided not to oil the dowels, since my mouthpieces were going to be on them. I used Teak Oil for the maple base, and it came out very nice.

Once the maple base was oiled, I mounted the dowels, long ones in the back and short ones in the front. I used just a touch of wood glue to make sure they wouldn’t wobble or come out.

All in all, a very easy project, and I know I’ll get a lot of use out of the stand!

See the photos below for more details of each step.

I’m frequently asked what someone should do if they want to get back into music as an adult. Perhaps you played through college, but now have put the saxophone (or whatever instrument!) down for ten years or more, and you want to start playing again.

If you’ve read my other posts, you’ve seen that I believe there are four areas to practice on the saxophone (or any woodwind instrument): sound, technique, tunes, and ear. So if you’re just starting back, what should you do?

Well, here are a few things, in each of those four areas, that you might work on. Within each area, I have listed these things in roughly what I think is their priority of importance. So here we go…

Sound Production

• Longtones (without vibrato)
• Recording yourself and listening to the quality of the sound
• Practicing a nice vibrato on half and whole tones with a metronome

Technique

• Scales
• Pentatonics
• Major, Minor, Aug Triads
• Triad Pairs
• Learning a few keyboard basics

Learning Tunes

• Memorizing tune melodies and chord progressions
• Playing through tunes, in rhythm, with no backing track
• Playing triads or other patterns through tunes

Ear Training

• Playing along with the radio
• Transcribing
• Matching tones with a keyboard

I have covered some of the items listed above in other lessons. But if you have questions, a good instructor could help save you some time.

Practice hard, you’ll see the results!