A couple of weeks ago I purchased a Slade saxophone from Amazon. Amazon is notorious for selling tons of junky Chinese saxophones in garish colors for low prices. These horns are often barely worth the brass and cork they’re made from, but parents looking for affordable horns for their kids buy them without knowing any better. The result is typically frustration with the instrument.
Yours portly desperately needed a reliable saxophone for some upcoming gigs, and repairs to my existing saxes (one alto and two tenors) are prohibitively expensive at the moment. Also, my repair guy is a cantankerous old Northern guy who lives way far out, and the combination of expense, inconvenience, and a Yankee tongue-lashing for not maintaining my horns adequately had yours portly running to the arms of our Chinese overlords.
Well, Slade makes a surprisingly good sax for $230. Typically these Chinese horns have all sorts of problems: leaky keys, pads that don’t seal properly, etc. Horror stories abound of purchases paying the equivalent of the horn’s price (or more!) to get it setup properly.
I decided to bite the bullet and try it after watching a video from Better Sax on YouTube, in which he compared one of the saxes to to his gorgeous (and $4000) Yanagisawa alto:
I ordered the cheapest possible sax, even though I could have spent another $40 or $50 for some cool colors. When the sax arrive last Tuesday night, I was pleasantly surprised to see they’d sent me the wrong sax—their blue model! It is an absolutely gorgeous instrument.
Check out that beauty! Such a beautiful instrument, of course, demands to be played, so I did just that.
The Portly Politico 