It comes in a pretty decent leather effect hard case, which is slightly plasticy, but seems to be pretty robust. One minor grip was that although I got an initial mail from the company to confirm the order, I didn’t get a second mail to let me know that it had shipped so I ended up missing the delivery initially. In terms of service you can’t do better than that.
I put my order in around 11pm on a Wednesday night, and the sax turned up on Friday morning with all of the order present and correct. I have an Otto Link on my alto and have been very happy with it, and the soprano version seemed to be a good choice. In addition to the sax I also bought:Įxperience with previous saxes has convinced me to spend a bit to get a good mouthpiece since this is probably the best way of quickly improving the tone of a sax. Purchasing through their web store was very straight-forward and went without a hitch.
Their collection of saxes is impressively complete and they have pretty good information for most of them, including video reviews for many of the more mainstream brands (not for mine unfortunately). I’d not used them before, but had a couple of friends who had bought things from them both over the web and in store and had had a good experience. At £559 it wasn’t the cheapest of the student saxes, but it was still less than a third of the price of a high-end soprano. I was particularly interested to see a number of players who had high end tenors and altos, but who had plumped for the Antigua Winds soprano. Reviews for all of the Antigua Winds range of saxes were generally good, but for the soprano in particular I hardly found anyone with a bad word to say. Antigua Winds seem to be a relatively new entrant to the sax market, but they seem to be making a name for themselves on the back of creating copies of high quality Yanigasawa instruments. My final choice therefore was the Antigua Winds SS490LQ soprano. Once I add to that the hassle of getting it through UK customs, which their opaque pricing and procedures, I reluctantly decided that it was going to be too much hassle, and once I’d added shipping, VAT and customs tax, wasn’t going to be as cheap as it first appeared. My only problem with this instrument is that currently there seems to be no one importing it into the UK, so I would have had to get it shipped from the states. This is an American sax made by a family company in Las Vegas and the reviews of both the sax and the company were universally glowing. The one I looked at long and hard, before ultimately rejecting it, was the Kessler Model 2 Soprano. There are a quite a few different ‘student’ sopranos available and when researching them I didn’t really find any that no one had a good word for – however there were a couple which seemed to get consistently good comments from experienced players. Add to this the fact that I’m a good couple of hours from the store I’d want to go to and I preferred to take a punt on a single well researched instrument and never go back to look at what I might have missed! It takes a bit of time to get used to a new setup, so quickly moving between several saxes would require a long time – probably longer than my lip would hold out – and making objective decisions between more than 2 or 3 saxes would be extremely difficult. I did this before when choosing a new mouthpiece for my tenor – and ended up buying the wrong one. I toyed with the idea of spending a few hours in a shop playing with the various models to see which I liked best, but decided against this. Choosing the saxĪfter I’d decided to go for a cheaper soprano I spent a while deciding which one to choose. I therefore ended up spending far less than I might have on my new sax, and having just had chance to have a really good play on it I thought I’d write up a quick review. I was surprised to find a large number of people who seemed to be very happy with what might be considered ‘cheap’ sopranos (something less than £600 or so). Having got to the stage where I might have been prepared to spend a significant sum on a good soprano I started to do some research.
I’d put off adding a soprano sax to my existing tenor and alto for a number of years since I had heard from a few sources that whilst it was possible to get a good sound out of a cheap alto/tenor that you really needed to spend a decent amount of money to get a half decent soprano.
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