The Alto Saxophone is a single-reed musical instrument that was invented in 1846 by Antoine-Joseph (Adolphe) Sax. Adolphe Sax was born on November 6, 1814 in Dinant, Belgium. During his childhood, he studied the clarinet and flute at Brussel’s Conservatory. His father was a renowned maker of musical instruments during that time. Since Adolphe grew up with his father making instruments and studying the clarinet and the flute, it was obvious that he would end up following in his father’s footsteps. The first instrument that Adolphe decided to look at was the bass clarinet; he wanted to improve the tone of the instrument. He came up with a single-reed instrument constructed from metal that had a conical bore and overblew at the octave, which translates to the saxophone.
The very first saxophone was called the C bass saxophone, which was Adolphes first creation derived from the bass clarinet. He had tremendous success with this instrument so he went on to replace the oboes, bassoons, and French horns in military bands with Bb and Eb saxhorns.
In 1846 Adolphe obtained patents for his 14 variations of saxophones. Among them were: E flat sopranino, F sopranino, B flat soprano, C soprano, E flat alto, F alto, B flat tenor, C tenor, E flat baritone, B flat bass, C bass, E flat contrabass and F contrabass. In 1881 Adolphe extended his patent for the saxophone; while doing this he also made some improvements to the instrument by lengthening the bell to include Bb and A and extended the instruments range to F# and G using the fourth octave keys. In 1886 the saxophone underwent changes again, this time adding in the right hand C trill key and the half-hole system for the first fingers of both hands. In 1888 the single octave key for th...
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• This website is a website of learning and educating people like me. Therefore, I assume that it is reliable and this information is verified because it is teaching about music.
Fletcher and Rossing, The Physics of Musical Instruments (2ndEdition), Springer, New York (1998). Chapter 16 Lecture Notes on Woodwind Instruments.
Wolfe, Joe. "How Do Woodwind Instruments Work?." Music Acoustics. 1994. 2014. Web. April 13, 2014. .
• This website is reliable because it is from an institution of higher learning, more specifically The University of New South Wales and their school of physics department.
Wyman, F. S. "An Acoustical Study of Alto Saxophone Mouthpiece Chamber Design." Dissertation Abstracts International Section A: Humanities & Social Sciences 33. (1972): 1775. Music Index. Web. 13 April. 2014.
The clarinet is a woodwind instrament consisting of a cylindrical wood, metal, or ebonite pipe with a bell-shaped opening at one end and a mouthpiece at the other end, to which a thin reed is attached. The clarinet has five different sections, the mouthpiece, the barrel, the upper section, the lower section, and the bell. The length of the entire instrument is 60 cm long. The mouthpiece section consists of a slotted cylinder, to which a reed is attached by a metal clamp called a ligature. The mouthpiece plugs into the next section which is a barrel. The barrel is simply a connecting cylinder to which the mouthpiece and the upper section plugs into. The upper section is a cylindrical pipe consisting of 4 holes and 9 keys placed in different locations along the pipe. On the back of the pipe there is a hole and a key that is used by the thumb. The lower section plugs into the upper section and is also connected via a special bridge key. This piece consists of 3 holes and 8 keys. On the inward facing side of the pipe, there is a protruding piece of metal called a thumb rest, which supports the entire clarinet. The bell plugs into the lower section. It consists of a cylinder that flares out into a bell shape and ends the clarinet.
The saxophone was created by Antoine Joseph Sax, but more popularly regarded as Adolphe Sax in 1846. The Saxophone is the most recent woodwind instrument to have been produced and accepted into music. In 1814 Adolphe Sax was born in Dinant, Belgium. At a young age he learned from his father, who retained his own instrument crafting shop how to make instruments himself. He studied the Flute and Clarinet at the Brussels conservatory in Belgium, and in 1840 Adolphe decided he would make an instrument to cover the middle range of military band music. He wanted a sound similar to the Clarinet, but also with the Brass tone of the Trumpet. He made it a hybrid using a Clarinet mouthpiece, and key work resembling the Oboe’s. In 1842 Adolphe moved to Paris to finish creating the instrument that was soon be appropriately named, the “Saxophone”. He finished making the Saxophone in 1845, and it was soon picked up by several French Orchestral Composers in 1846. Thereafter the Saxophone was being played in many small ...
1. D. Halliday, R. Resnik & K. Krane, Physics, vol. 2, 4th ed. John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1992.
Next we come to a point in time where a great leap had to be made. Musicians had made positive steps forward in the way of pitch and time but of only one or two notes at a time. What was needed was an in instrument that gave players control of many pitches simultaneously. The mechanism ...
In 1953, someone accidentally fell on John's trumpet. The bell was bent backwards. After John played it, he discovered that he liked the sound. From that point, he had trumpets built for him with the bell pointing upwards at a 45-degree angle. The design was John’s trademark and more than three decades, he was the only major trumpeter in jazz who played such an
Coltrane received his first musical instrument, the clarinet, when he was 12 years old, and soon started playing in the high school band. Even though he became proficient at the clarinet within a year, even becoming the first clarinet of the loc...
trumpet or flute. It was the right hand corner that filled in the material during the rhythmic
The theremin was invented in 1921 by Leon Theremin (nee Lev Termen). It is one of the most important musical instruments of the twentieth century because it is the first electronic intsrument. Leon Theremin first came up with the idea for the theremin when in high school. He noticed depending on how close a person stands to a Tesla coil, the coil hums in different pitches. After its inveiling in 1921, Theremin toured his instrument around Russia, sparking the curiosity of almost everybody who saw it.
Jules Demersseman was a French flautist and composer. He was born on January 9, 1833, in Hondschoote, a small town in the north of France near the border of present-day Belgium. When he was eleven years old, he studied flute at the Paris Conservatory in 1844 under the tutelage of Jean-Louis Tulou. He received a series of prizes from Paris Conservatory and became a teacher, soloist, and composer upon graduation. Demersseman became friends with Adolphe Sax and started composing saxophone music under Sax’s influence, becoming one of the first French composers to write music for the newly developed saxophone. Demersseman wrote some of the earliest pieces for Sax’s instruments. Many of these pieces were even published by Sax himself. Unfortunately,
There are many different kinds of saxophones, but only a few are commonly used. The most common ones include the alto, baritone, tenor and soprano saxophones. Most tyros start on the alto saxophone. After learning the rudiments of the alto, players then can transition to a different kind of saxophone. One motif of the saxophone is that all of the finger positions are the same no matter which type of saxophone one is playing.
"The Physics of the Acoustic Guitar - Body." The Physics of the Acoustic Guitar - Body. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 May 2014. .
At a young age, Bell started to recreate the sound of the human voice, “At the age of 16, he built a talking machine from rubber and strips of tin. He could make the device’s tin strips vibrate and produce bl...
The most common model of the ancestral hearing aid is that of the simple ear trumpet. This was a small, pipe-looking device which was carved from either bull’s horn or seashell, and was held up to the ear in order to amplify sound. The audible result of such would have been much like cupping your hand around your ear.
Exton, Peter, “The Room Acoustics of the Guangzhou Opera house”, Harold Marshall Group Consultant 2010, Marshall Day Acoustics
...te. In old times, most flutes were made of bamboo, which allowed even common people to play it. By covering the holes and blowing through the side hole while moving the fingers flexibly between the six holes, a sound will be produced that is leisurely and mellifluous like sound from far away. This always reminds people of a pastoral picture of a farmer riding on a bull while playing a flute