It actually does require a certain amount of strength to focus the air and control the reed. I'm finally getting clean notes at the bottom of the scale but working it makes my mouth sore. It's right back to the first days of trumpet; you've got to build up those muscles.
The Venova; Yamaha's "Casual Musical Instrument." It's a saxophone that fingers like a recorder. Yeah...a plastic version of a woodwind instrument usually made out of brass.
As with the brass family, I've discovered with a degree of chagrin just how much the embouchure affects the pitch. You look at a trumpet, and you think with those buttons it should just go from one pitch to another. Nay. You can lip up or down nearly to the next note, and worse, you can force it to play outside of the usual harmonic series.
Woodwinds are worse. I'm tempted to blame Equal Temperament, but I think it is inherent in the mathematics of sound production. Yamaha openly admits that several of the notes are compromises; they will play sharp or flat and there's no alternate fingering that fixes it. You can try to half-hole them, or you can lip them (which changes the tone).
Apparently on a real saxophone there are extra keys for just these sorts of problems, plus yet another set of keys to make certain transitions easier (for trills, say).
But I have to say, even within the chromatic scale there are problems. The top of the first octave plays terribly flat if I don't blow it up, notes past about the fifth of the second octave are difficult to reach, and the lowest two notes of the chromatic scale (the ones with the keys on them) squawk badly and have trouble settling in.
Some of that is just the sax. Apparently the lowest notes are always a pain this way, and opening up the top octave is the same as with the brass family; strengthen your embouchure and eventually you get there. But some of that has to be this peculiar little instrument itself. It is an interesting acoustic experiment, folding the length of a soprano sax to where you can mostly stop holes instead of manipulating an assemblage of rods and valves. So it is cheap and travels well. And it sounds...okay.
So will I, in time. I'm just about where I can get through a tune without squawking.
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