Nice Photo Gallery

pete

pete

Brassica Oleracea
Staff member
Administrator
Also notice the ENORMOUS baffle soldered into the bore of the Selmer Mark VI bass sax. These were horrible bass saxes, and the factory tried various ways to improve them.
 
I do know that they changed the design of the Mark VI bass either slightly before or slightly after the Mark VII came out. I've never had a large enough sampling of basses to get a real feel for the exact date.

It's somewhat amusing: 20ish years ago, there wasn't that much interest in the Selmer Mark VI, aside from the alto and tenor, because Yanagisawa made better sopraninos and sopranos and there were a few folks that you could argue made better basses. Then again, SML Gold Medal altos sold for only a couple hundred $ ....
 
I don't mean to criticize Selmer bass saxophones in general. The new ones are excellent. But in the 1950s and 1960s some of the Selmer bass saxophones couldn't play a low B natural consistently without searching endlessly for a mouthpiece.

Bass sax with bad low notes? Not good. The funny thing is, the old Selmer basses and the new Selmer basses look almost identical except for the extra high notes on the new ones.
 
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