The saxophone is a type of single-reed woodwind instrument with a conical body, usually made of brass. As with all single-reed instruments, sound is produced when a reed on a mouthpiece vibrates to produce a sound wave inside the instrument's body. The pitch is controlled by opening and closing holes in the body to change the effective length of the tube. The holes are closed by leather pads attached to keys operated by the player. Saxophones are made in various sizes and are almost always treated as transposing instruments. A person who plays the saxophone is called a saxophonist or saxist.
A Yamaha alto saxophone
Tenor saxophone mouthpieces, ligatures, reed, and cap
Adolphe Sax, the inventor of the saxophone
In a rare early inclusion in an orchestral score, the saxophone was used in Gioacchino Rossini's Robert Bruce (1846)
A single-reed instrument is a woodwind instrument that uses only one reed to produce sound. The very earliest single-reed instruments were documented in ancient Egypt, as well as the Middle East, Greece, and the Roman Empire. The earliest types of single-reed instruments used idioglottal reeds, where the vibrating reed is a tongue cut and shaped on the tube of cane. Much later, single-reed instruments started using heteroglottal reeds, where a reed is cut and separated from the tube of cane and attached to a mouthpiece of some sort. By contrast, in a double reed instrument, there is no mouthpiece; the two parts of the reed vibrate against one another. Reeds are traditionally made of cane and produce sound when air is blown across or through them. The type of instruments that use a single reed are clarinets and saxophone. The timbre of a single and double reed instrument is related to the harmonic series caused by the shape of the corpus. E.g. the clarinet is only including the odd harmonics due to air column modes canceling out the even harmonics. This may be compared to the timbre of a square wave.
The reeds of alto (left) and tenor saxophones. They are of comparable dimensions to alto and bass clarinet reeds, respectively.
Drawings of idioglot reeds: tubular single reeds in which the reed is still part of the reed stem. Reeds can be split from middle upward (kataglott, the reed hangs down) and from top downward (anaglott, the reed stands up). These particular reeds are drawn from those used in an from an arghul. Also used in bagpipes, and reedpipes or clarinet family: bülban, diplica, dili tuiduk, dozaleh, early chalumeaus, cifte, launeddas, mijwiz, pilili, reclam de xeremies,
The ligature, mouthpiece, and reed of a clarinet. These three components are present in many modern European Classical single-reed instruments and tend to be aesthetically and mechanically similar.
Chalumeau
