Yamaha YVS100 Venova, aka, SaxToy

Holy crap have I not updated this blog in years?!

I'm still dabbling on and off with music, trying to do more electronic stuff but generally getting nowhere. Eh. Anyways, this post is about a new toy I bought, a Yamaha YVS100 Venova. Good friend and super talented musician/composer Patrick Woo sent me a link to it and I was like... omg. Want. Now.

Basically did some some quick looks on google/yt - it's an instrument with recorder fingering (baroque or german), tuned to A442 (eh) key of C (noice!). Uses a soprano mouthpiece and comes with a plastic reed of sorts. I'm not particularly enamored of the sound, it's sax-ish at best. Wish it was am octave lower and larger, but hey! It's affordable and I can wash it under running water so what's not to like.

So next morning, booked a car and drove down to the Richmond branch of Long-McQuade. I also bought a 2.25 Legere reed - same brand I use on alto, so, eh, why not. I must say it's bloody pricey the reed - 29.99 before tax!!!! Thankfully the Venova (aka SaxToy) came with a 10 dollar voucher and the staff kindly applied it to the reed.

So I got home popped the legere on the (4c?) soprano mouthpiece. The stock ligature appears to work fine but I'm really tempted to get a Rovner or one of those fancy Francois Louis ligs that I've been wanting to own for years.

It's marketed as a casual instrument, but I think there's nothing casual about learning it! First up, I must say I haven't touched my alto sax in close to 4 years, and my embouchure is basically gone. So read what I have to say below with a few teaspoons of salt (drink lots of water after!).

By default, the Venova uses German fingering, and by removing a black grommet you can switch it to Baroque fingering. The almighty google tells me Baroque is easier to play certain semitones in tune  but comes with a steeper learning curve. Since I've nothing better to do, I went with the Baroque setup.

I must say even with the baroque fingering, some notes were still out of tune, or very muffled (e.g. low F). Both are easy to address; the tuning can be adjusted with the embouchure, and the muffled F came alive in the same way you blow an octave D on an alto. For me I have to move my jaw downwards and perform some mouth gymnastics but I can get low F to match the surrounding notes.

The soprano mouthpiece is also extremely tiring to play with, but as with embouchures, I'm sure two weeks or so and I'll be fine. Things I've noted with this setup is that the low notes, C and D tend to jump the octave very easily by over-blowing if I'm not careful. Again, I'm out of practice for nearly half a decade but practice will easily sort that out.

What do I think of it thus far? I think it's a great fun instrument to play with. The price is right, it sounds somewhat saxy, and perhaps with a swap to a larger mouthpiece and good reeds it'll be a fun toy. I do hope Yamaha comes up with a larger version that's an octave lower :)

I'd be curious to see how a non reed player would take it up - it's not easy to get the reed to vibrate right and it takes some time to get your mouth to form shapes that you don't normally use in day to day use.