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The first Saxophone was created as the first saxophone: it was actually invented by Adolphe Sax in the 1940's to be a 'Saxophone'.

Sax sought an instrument with the carrying power of valved brasses and the musical facility of key-fingered woodwind instruments.

Fingering of the nearest candidate, the Clarinet, had an interesting acoustic characteristic: instead of overblowing an octave, it overblew a 12th (an octave plus a fifth). That meant that it needed extra keys to cover the gap between the highest normally-fingered note and the overblown lowest-fingered note. The solution to this was to make the bore conical instead of cylindrical.

Sax had experience with building bass clarinets and ophecleides. The latter was a brass-mouthpiece instrument made of brass with keys and a conical bore. What Sax did was to marry the single-reed mouthpiece of the Bass Clarinet with the conical brass bore-and-keys of the ophecleide. The result was a very loud instrument with 'normal' fingering, i.e., the second octave's fingering was identical to the first.

He built saxophones in a 'family', with instruments from very low to very high, pitched either in Eb or Bb (like the clarinet family). The instruments caught on quickly, because their sound could simulate strings, but carried over great distances and blended well with the established brass instruments.

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17y ago

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