Photo posted to Flickr by Greg Wass<\/a> Source: Flickr<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n When I took a closer look at the photo today, I was suddenly no longer so sure what kind of sax this was. You know what the say about real estate: location, location, location. Well this horn’s location made my mind automatically see a C melody.<\/p>\n However, being able to tell the difference between Bb and C pitched tenors is not always so simple\u2014especially when dealing with vintage B&W photos that have been converted via a scanner from film to digital. Furthermore, the saxophone in this photo is not the focal point, which adds to the blur, and therefore can’t be cleaned up in Photoshop.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, if you look at the photo at full size, some of the horn’s features are identifiable:<\/p>\n After spending more than half an hour scouring the Internet looking at images of Conn New Wonder C mels, I am not any wiser. Trying to ID a sax from only 1, vintage, grainy, B&W photograph is really a fool’s errand. So let’s just leave it up to individual imagine.<\/p>\n Me? I’m going to go with the old real estate adage of location, location, location<\/em>. Since this was a family’s front parlour in 1922, and it was set up in such a way that it could be used for entertaining, I’m going to say the horn in the B&W photo was the then-\u00fcber-popular C melody saxophone\u2014one like depicted in the following ad by rival saxophone company Buescher.<\/p>\n Update June 2024:<\/strong> Since this post was originally written, I have written an article<\/a> on how to distinguish a C melody saxophone from a tenor or alto.<\/p>\n![\"Winnipeg-1933,](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/bassic-sax.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Winnipeg-1933.jpg?ssl=1\")
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All of this brand research\/speculation is interesting, but is it a C melody saxophone? Or is it a Bb tenor?<\/h2>\n
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