Background
When I first got my first bass saxophone in October 2000, things were A LOT different in the saxophone landscape:
- The bass saxophone renaissance we are currently experiencing had not begun—at all.
- The bass sax was still seen very much as an outlier in the saxophone world.
- If you wanted to play a bass saxophone, your choices were basically limited to a:
- Vintage American horn like Buescher or Conn
- Vintage American style like Keilwerth
- Vintage French style like Beaugnier or Selmer
- New Keilwerth or Selmer.
- Julius Keilwerth and Selmer were the only real sources of new, modern, quality-made pro-model bass saxophones.
- Cheap, new bass saxophones made Chinese companies were not even on the horizon yet.
- The Internet was still a toddler.
- Social media was still in its infancy.
When I flew to New Orleans to pick up my bass from Paul, Wayne, and Steve, they all gave me great tips, and passed on information on how to tame the great beast that would be my cabinmate back to Fredericton, NB. They taught me the simple alternate fingerings to use to work around my Buescher’s tuning and venting quirks.
Prior to the Internet age, that is how bass saxophone players learned about the instrument: in real life. Sure, they might have spoken on the phone, written letters, or used whatever other means of communications existed at the time, but at the end of the day, musicians of all stripes shared their knowledge in person.
Shortly after I got my bass I thought it would be handy to develop a bass sax resource site, and the first incarnation of Bassic Sax was born. At the same time, Paul Coats and Steve Weinart founded the Bass Sax Co-op.
Over the past 22 years we have seen more and more bass sax resources pop up as the instrument has once again made its way into the mainstream of the saxophone world. (More on current bass sax resources below.)
In the earliest stages of my foray into the online bass saxophone world, I received a number of emails and communications from other bass saxophone players who shared their knowledge and experience with me. Those early communications were very helpful, since they formed the earliest foundation of my bass sax education.
A fingering chart for vintage American bass saxophones
This week I poured through 20+ years of electronic communications and my hard copy bass sax resources. This was all in an attempt to compile a fingering chart specific to vintage American-made bass saxophones—this task was made infinitely more difficult since I no longer own my Buescher. 😉 Although the Couf-branded Keilwerth I now play is an American-style horn, it does play and respond very differently to the vintage/antique Buescher.
Given the Couf/Buescher differences, I just chose to put together all the fingerings I did use, as well as the others I didn’t necessarily use, into a PDF chart and get you—as players of vintage American bass saxophones—to test them out and see what you think. Which ones work? Which don’t?
Just as importantly, if you have fingerings that you use that aren’t listed in this chart, please share them with me. Either via email or as a comment below.
Current bass saxophone resources
Although the Bass Sax Co-op is now just a fond, distant memory, 😥 there are many other bass saxophones resources that have appeared on the Net. Just Googling bass saxophone results in a dizzying amount of results. Quite different from back in the day when my site was only one of about three or four that would appear in search engine results. 😉
However, how many of these estimated 32,000,000 bass saxophone results are actually quality resources? That’s a good question. I would argue that most of them are mostly irrelevant. Like most of the time when searching for stuff on the Net, we now get so inundated with search results that we often forget what we were looking for to begin with… But I digress.
Depending on what you’re looking for of course, but if I had to narrow it down for you, here are the places on the Net I suggest you check out. These are the places were the actual bass sax players from around the world can be found:
- The Bass Saxophone group on Facebook. With over 3,000 members it really became the go-to site for bass saxophone players when the Bass Sax Co-op’s platform was no longer supported by Yahoo.
- On Sax on the Web’s Forum you have the following:
- Bass Saxophone sub forum
- Mouthpiece discussion area
- And please, remember SOTW has a search feature. Enter whatever bass sax parameters you want. For this example, I just entered bass sax.
And just like with the fingering chart, if you have other bass saxophone resources that you frequent and you believe would be helpful for others to know about, please leave a comment, or send me an email. Thank you!
Awesome and thank you so much.
I bought my Conn Bass back in 1995 to be in a Mummer band. After I moved from Philadelphia, I never played it for 20 years because I couldn’t find a mouthpiece that made it fun to play in any other context.
Thanks to your work and website, BassicSax, I found a new mouthpiece, and I’m off and running again.
Also, thanks to your great page on H. Couf horns, I bought a Superba Tenor, which I play every day.
Thanks again.
Hey Brian, thanks for the comment, and your kind words.
I am always so glad to hear when the research presented here is of help to someone. The fact that you’re also a Couf player means that you have extraordinary taste in saxophones. Both bass and JKs. Well done!
As Always , some interesting and informative reading
Thanks Bill!
Great work as always, Helen. I love seeing more bass sax content. Thank you so much. I wish there were some way to resurrect those old co-op posts. While I’m grateful the current facebook group(s) and reddit exist, there’s not much action. I personally left Steve’s bass sax facebook group a while back as his posts had gotten quite divisive and political. This is a friendlier more socially oriented group, IMO, and is run by a very nice Mummer from Philly, the city with likely the largest concentration of bass sax players in the world.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/9212983978
It would also be nice to see more activity on reddit, as that group is also pretty dead at the moment.
https://www.reddit.com/r/basssaxophone/
Nice job on the fingering chart. Have you seen the fingerings for both long and short wrap in this paper? Those would extend your chart far into the altissimo. Most of them work really well for me on my Chinese short wrap. Luckily, I never have to use any alternate fingerings in the normal range since I got the modern short wrap and raised several key heights on it as well as slightly modify the octave pip.
https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/gb19f696t
Hey there AllAboutThatBass, thank you so much!
I completely blanked on the thesis. I remember I saw one a couple of years ago, and had it downloaded it. When I wrote this article, I was thinking about it in the beginning, but then lost my mind towards the end. 😳 I had spent so much time Photoshopping individual fingerings and double, triple, and quadruple checking them for errors, that I forgot the thread of my original article.
Idiot…. I am an idiot… 😆
Thank you for the new Facebook and Reddit links. Both are new to me.
I did check Reddit, but didn’t find the one you mention here. I do belong to a bass group on Reddit, but it is really not all that helpful IMHO—at least not in the way I would classify a resource site for players.
Re: the design of new bass saxes (Chinese & non-Chinese). I am not exactly sure when, but Keilwerth redesigned their horns so that many of the alternate fingerings are not necessary at all. As for altissimo, I must admit my bass chops are rather rusty ATM, so I am not sure if my altissimo fingerings for the bass would hold up for others. 😉
I have never had the opportunity to try a short wrap—either vintage or modern. I would love to know if the vintage Selmers et al suffered from venting issues like the long wrap horns did.
I am not surprised that your Jinbao-made horn has not got any real venting issues, since even the much more cheaply-made Jinyin fixed a number of the venting problems we saw in the original, vintage American basses.
I am currently in the process of trying to figure out how to re-do the entire bass saxophone section of the website. Resources are going to be key to this new section. I am just not sure what to include, and how to include them yet.
If you have any ideas, I would love to hear them. Thank you!