General Questions Regarding our Saxophones and Clarinets

Can I play the Sunreed Bamboo Sax or Clarinet like a standard sax or clarinet? This type of 7 hole sax instrument, the bamboo or wooden saxophone, only plays one octave, then skips to 1 and a half octaves, like a clarinet, in the upper register....the only way to have continuity between registers is to have more holes, which we do offer in a ten hole design, like the bamboo/wooden clarinet, with an alto sax mouthpiece...it is more awkward to play with the ten holes, every finger needing to cover a hole... but it provides a full range of 2-3 octaves, depending on your blowing abilities. These saxes also play the pitches they state...there is no transposition...a Bb is a Bb (Bb "soprano" begins at Bb below middle C....Eb alto begins at a half octave below that....) Some makers have saxes one pitch apart and claim they are a soprano, alto, and tenor sax. This is incorrect terminology. The soprano, alto, and tenor saxes are pitched a half octave apart, as ours are.

Can I use my own mouthpiece? Our saxophone mouthpieces are removable. The fittings we use are so close to standard alto mouthpiece size, there is not room for actual corking...what we do is wrap the fitting with a few turns of tape, either scotch tape or plumbers teflon tape, to make an airtight fitting....most alto mouthpieces will fit this...but the reality is some are smaller or larger than others...some will need a little more of this tape/corking material, a few styles need to be bored out to fit my fitting....if you had an older mouthpiece which was too small and you didn't mind boring it out, this could work...again, most mouthpieces do fit, but some few do not... You may request a clarinet with removable mouthpieces. We make them with or without removable mouthpieces. If you use your own mouthpiece, it nulls our warranty, as the clarinet mouthpieces also have slightly different diameters. If you try to insert a mouthpiece which is even slightly wider than our own, there is a great risk of cracking the bamboo or wooden instrument. We recommend great care when inserting a new mouthpiece into this type of clarinet fitting. The wooden clarinets are less delicate in this regard than bamboo, with greater tensile strength.