Clyde

didn't post yesterday - too busy being excited by the new arrival!

The tenor sax arrived with a nice UPS man about 10mins before I had to go & teach, so I only had time to put it together, assemble its accessories and emit a few honkings and tootings on it before I had to go.

It's a "matt gold" finish on it - which gives it a monochromicity that teeters on the edge of making you think "hmmm"(I don't think Liz likes his look much!), but feels lovely and satiny to touch. It seems like a nice little horn actually - although I have to admit I can feel the quality of the Yani alto next to it - but that's not to deprecate the tenor in any way - don't tell him, you might hurt his feelings!
I've decided to call the tenor "Clyde" - due partly to the sounds that emit from the low tones at times, and partly because Jim at the saxophone.co.uk and I were in NYOS, and the Clyde's in Scotland (obviously).

Got in from work around 8 last night, and went straight upstairs to do some saxophoning. Took the boys up, the music-stand, the sax-stand, the music... I'll get fit just getting up & down to the loft!
I alternated the two (had my first ever duff reed on the tenor actually - most exciting! I tried everything to get a semi-saxlike-sound in the lower registers, not wanting to just say "oh, it's the reed's fault!" - but I thought I'd switch over and try the other one - and it was immediately better! Have scored out the word superieure on the duff one so I know!) doing bits of exercises (a la previous descriptions) and tunes - first on the alto, then on the tenor. Interesting feel - but good interesting rather than bad interesting. The tenor's bigger mouthpiece showed me that I have a really tense lower jaw - all the time it transpires - so I'm trying to looooooosen it up a bit!

Suddenly a voice said "hello" as I finished a tune, and I nearly left my epidermal layers on a pile on the edge of Liz's bed with the muscle-skeleton combo having lept at least 6 feet in the air (hard in a slope-ceilinged loft!).
It was Liz - back from the Nordoff-Robbins course - which meant it was around 10 o'clock - and by the time I'd foisted a tenor sax performance of "The Pink Panther" & "Strangers in the Night" onto my long-suffering captive audience , it was around 10.15.


How did that happen? I felt like I'd only just started.

I like practise like that - when you wonder where the time went (in a good way, rather than in an "aarrggh, still can't do this @£&$"* passage way).