Geez, when I click "New Posts" I see 5 threads all started by prosax with one response each by Ed. Lol.
You will find that to a certain degree in all reeds, even the synthetic reeds.Actually some reed companies make bad quality reeds. The first time I was planning to buy reeds, I bought these reeds from china and each one of them were different. They guy of course said they were 2.5 but some were a little thicker than other. Burt they were the same length though. which made it harder to play. one reed is easy to play but the other one isn't. Another reeds would make it really hard and it would take a lot of air to blow to make one note sound the proper way.
You will find that to a certain degree in all reeds, even the synthetic reeds.
If you find a brand which mostly works for you, consider yourself fortunate.
Don't disregard all off brands either, some of them might be very good. Probably not, but you never know...
Do you know if the plastic made reeds work well? well one time in life, my dad bought the wrong clarinet reeds.
He bought alto clarinet reeds for my sister so i just decided to try them out on my alto saxophone and they actually make a pretty cool sound! I would say they make the same exact sound.
The guy who did my bas mouthpiece seems fond of Glotin on bass. I have a couple boxes, but since most of my playing is pit work, I've been using Fibracell or Bari, depending on how aggressive the tone needs to be.They may or may not work well with the mouthpiece you're using. (and yes, Alto Clarinet and Alto Sax reeds are roughly interchangeable).
Lately I've become quite fond of Selmer Primo (aka Gonzalez) reeds for my bass clarinet. They're very reasonably priced and very consistent from reed to reed.
Starting out it is best to stick with reeds from Rico or Vandoren. You can find reed strength charts at their websites but I would stick with Rico's. I've been playing for 30 years and still use Rico's.
Since you are new to the sax and you seem to have a passion for the instrument I would highly recommend that you ask your band director if he could recommend a private instructor. It's not always necessary but you may find it beneficial.
i do have a private instructor i actually play hard songs.