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Re: Mouthpiece and legere reeds

Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2018-08-28 22:10

I have gotten to the point where I can provide, perhaps, some helpful info:

Firstly I think the title of this thread should be LIGATURES and Legere Reeds.....

but more about that later.

To address the original poster "Yador," I am finding that the Legeres are less forgiving on a few fronts, one is 'overblowing.' When Yador mentioned "whistling" above, I had that image in my head the next go around of reeds and sure enough into the trial about 30 seconds I got that sound (to which I sort of became habituated like the ticking of a clock in the room). With a little help from some of you Board guys on another thread, I was able to ascertain that the Legeres can easily pop up one to three harmonics between middle line "B" and top line "F."

My first suggestion to help that is to actually play INTO the "squeal" and find out exactly what it feels like to intentionally play the harmonic. Once you get that in your head, it is easier to avoid them when you don't want them (which is most of the time).

The next thing I noticed was with regard to ligatures. If the ligature is placed LOW on the Legere (line up the bottom of the ligature with the bottom of the reed) the reed is more vibrant and less likely to "squeak."

Next is tightness. If you apply very little pressure with the ligature, this gives you yet another level of resonance and surety.

This brings me to aggressive tightening. Since I tend this way naturally it was an easy part of the trials to really crank down on the Legeres to see what happens. In addition to stifling the sound somewhat there is a tendency for the traditional ligatures that wrap around the mouthpiece/reed to cause stress fractures in the butt of the Legere reeds (along the sides that protrude past the table). I did this to my European Signatures using a Bay ligature.

This brought me to the conclusion that ligatures that have an 'insert' configuration (and one that runs longitudinally.......Bonade style) would work best. The leatherette BGs are good for this. I did not have a BG Traditiona in my collection and therefore needed to wait for that.

Here's where it gets interesting.

For some reason (the length of the rails?) the BG Tradition not only puts the compression on the middle of the reed rather than the sides, but it also lends even more resonance to the Legeres which quite honestly does not make apparent sense to me. With the BG Tradition there is still a slight difference in the response between "cranked down" and loose, but it is more a preference with this ligature as opposed to being more of a necessity.

And finally with regard to the Signature Soprano Legere reeds:

I found that for my exceedingly short facing (14mm) the equivalent strength to a 3.25 European Signature is a 2.5 (Euro 3.25 = Sop Sax 2.5). So I believe that there is a strength "curve" to equivalent strengths so that the longer you go with facings, the closer the strength differential would be.

But the bottom line is that European Signatures and Soprano Sax Signature Legeres will work on any mouthpiece ..........with some re-training and sensitivity to how you clamp it down.

..................Paul Aviles

Post Edited (2018-08-29 00:58)

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Mouthpiece and legere reeds new

Yador

2017-12-21 04:12