How loud is my saxophone?

[Groovekiller]

OK, This post will probably irritate a lot of players, but I want to express my ideas about real world playing and what I see on saxophone forums.

So many times I see the request, "Can you post some sound clips of the horn/mouthpiece in question?

For me, sound clips are absolutely useless, because they cannot convey the loudness of the equipment in question. Indeed, recordings in general don't illustrate the volume at which the artist operates.

For example, many years ago, I saw Joe Henderson live at the Village Vanguard, with Johnny Coles on trumpet. After hearing Joe on "Sidewinder," I thought he had the biggest sound anywhere on tenor. WRONG! Joe had a very small sound. I heard him acoustically from only a few feet away. The sound was gorgeous, and I'm sure Joe could have put out more volume if it were necessary, but sorry, the sound was not very loud. By the way, I love Joe Henderson.

Another example. One night I heard Sonny Stitt and Lockjaw Davis live in a small club. While I have a shrine in my mind dedicated to both players, I was amazed to find out that Stitt was eating the microphone, while Lockjaw stood over five feet from the mic, and Jaws absolutely buried the entire ensemble with his sound.

Anyone who stands in front of Jon Smith from Edgar Winter's White Trash will receive an education about how loud a tenor saxophone can be, but the lesson can only be learned live.

I'm not bowing down to the altar of sheer volume. Jon Smith and Lockjaw can also play with a lush, soft sound. But when you get stuck in the middle of eight brass playing full tilt, sometimes you have to re-evaluate your capabilities.

Like many others, I have boxes of mouthpieces that produce a gorgeous sound, and sometimes I use them for recording, but when I play live, it's a battle out there, and I have to be realistic.

 

[MartinMods]

Spoken like a true veteran of the Music Wars! I've played in some loud bands - 145db where I stood, without the PA engaged. One latin band was so loud, my bari wouldn't play anything other than the note the bass player was playing. There isn't a mouthpiece that will help you there.

If you live, and work in that world, then raw amplitude is important and you need those tools. That is fortunately, not the only valid way to make or appreciate music.

I witnessed a Louie Bellson drum clinic once, with Louie, Charlie Antolini, and Harvey Mason. Louie played first with his group, on his huge double bass setup, very loud and technical, very impressive. Eveyone's hair was blown back. Cool! I'm alive! Then Charlie played some nice, almost as loud, straight ahead swing with the great Roman Schwaller on Bobby Jone's screaming old Balanced Action tenor. Great! Then they cleared the stage and set up a small Gretsch kit, and Harvey Mason sat down. The room went silent. For the next 20 minutes, Harvey played the most intense, dynamic, soulful, tastefully technical, and funky drum solo, I have ever heard, and never played louder than mf. He went the opposite direction - absolute control, explosive intensity, incredible dynamics, from absolute silence to mf. No one in the crowd spoke or moved a muscle for 30 minutes. We sat on the edge of our seats, stomach cramped, muscles tight, fists clenched, such was the intensity of the performance. The place went nuts when Harvey finished. The meek little David had obviously decimated the huge bombastic drum Goliaths that day, and taught me a valuable lesson.

It's not how loud you can blow. It's how much music you can make.

Personally, now I choose my own playing arenas, and avoid loud gigs like the plague, but that's just me. I've had a few Saxophone/Guitar Jazz Duo formations which were very enjoyable and successful. Our thing was, How softly can we play and maintain the intensity? Putting those parameters on your music is demanding and takes you to some new and interesting mental states. The musical message becomes important, not just the energy level. Luckily, there is enough diversity in the world for almost everyone to find some venue for the type of music that they like to perform.

As for audio clips: The more information we have, the better.

 

[hakukani]

This is a very interesting question.

Projection on a sax is a function of how harmonically complex the sound is, more than raw dB SPL. There are two basic ways that the sound becomes harmonically complex.

The first is how hard you are blowing. If you're blowing at FFF, then you're getting a lot of upper partials. If you're blowing ppp, the sound becomes more flute-like (or more like a sine wave, if you will). Some horns you can overblow and get harmonic distortion, like overdriving an amp. Junior Walker and those other screamers were really good at that sound.

The second is what your mouthpiece is putting out at a given volume. Some mouthpieces will put out a more harmonically complex sound with less input from the player.

Of course there are other factors that will make you project. Our ears are 'tuned' to be more sensitive at speech frequencies--what sound guys call the 'midrange'. It's gonna be harder to project if you're playing down low (bari, bass, etc.).

Another factor is 'masking'. If there is a lot of energy at a certain range of frequencies, and you are playing in that same range, you're not gonna get heard.

As an old sound guy, a veteran of musicals where everything is miked up from the pit orchestra, to the vocalists, to the stage (yep, to amplify the taps), I've learned a few lessons.

1) It's much more complicated than 'turn the mic up or down'
2) If a certain sound is not there, you can't turn it up.
3) Just because a mic is there, you don't have to use it.

 

[jbtsax]

I would agree with everything that Hakukani wrote. However there is a new wrinkle that I am just learning about. Benade in his "Evolution of Wind Instruments" class notes writes that the peaks of the first few harmonics generate energy and pass it around among themselves reinforcing one another. He indicates that this is not true for the frequencies that lie above cutoff which do not become part of the standing wave, but are transferred out the bell. These frequencies do not have peaks to "talk" to the other harmonics and as a result do not produce energy. They constitute a drag on the system, and so act to keep the playing level from rising further when the player tries to blow harder.

This makes sense to me since I have played saxophones that seem to "max out" at volume levels lower than others. It also seems to explain to me why a bright and "edgy" tone can lack power and intensity. Vanessa Hasbrook's thesis showed that playing lower on the mouthpiece pitch can generate more higher partials to give a more characteristic jazz tone. Perhaps by increasing the oral cavity and mouthpiece volume at the same time as lowering the mouthpiece pitch it helps to offset the lost energy by increasing the energy produce by the added air flow. I would be worth further study and research to see what really makes a "full bodied" saxophone sound.

John

 

[MartinMods]

With a chamber design that lends itself to higher volume playing, the more open the tip, the louder you will be able to play, provided you can do the work to get there. The loudest players I have met, all played very open, Berg or similar baffled mouthpieces and were very large (200lbs+) men.

The greatest gain in volume and tonal complexity is from pp to the point where the reed begins to close against the mouthpiece. In this area, the harmonic resonances which drive the tone (harmonic regime) increase in amplitude exponentially, compared to the increase in amplitude of the fundamental. After the reed begins to close, the tone remains basically the same (the harmonics increase in amplitude proportionally to that of the fundamental) and the rate of amplitude gain for energy input, tapers off.