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Sax In the 21st Century

© Chris Mindel

I found Jim Schmidt's new Chromatic Saxophone design off the International Saxophone Homepage. After Looking through Mr. Schmidt's site, I have only one thought: the future is here! This new design is most exciting, and now I'm going to let you in on the excitement.

Jim Schmidt has been inventing and designing most of his life, he says. It began with the "need for speed" as a motorcycle racer. Luckily for us, he turned the same attention to his other passion: music. He worked for ways to improve both of his instruments; his first hand-built flute was created over twenty-five years ago. And now we have his saxophone.

The Boehm fingering system that is currently used on the saxophone sacrifices intonation for ease of play. And yet, it creates some serious "ease of play" dilemmas. Mr. Schmidt noticed these problems, and wanted to correct both the ease of play and the intonation problems with one stone. He did.

Welcome the Chromatic Saxophone. Many of the interlinkages of the Boehm system (overlapping keys, many pads moving with one keystroke, redundant keys) cause fingers to move in the opposite direction of the notes. That is, as Mr. Schmidt points out, if you have the first four fingers of your left hand playing 'high G' and put your fifth finger (the pinkie) down, the pitch goes up to a 'high G-sharp.' This happens other places on the saxophone also. With the Chromatic Saxophone, each keys develops a "one-to-one correspondence between the fingers and the twelve pitches." When you add fingers, the pitch lowers, and when you lift fingers it raises. It's that simple.

But there are more bonuses and improvements made to this saxophone. Because there are very few interlinkages, the key springs are lighter. This increases the speed at which one can play, a reminder of Mr. Schmidt's racing days. Except for the top palm keys (which I'll discuss soon), the keys are all open, creating a more open sound. This also allows for more fingering combinations and tricks. That is, it allows more freedom in fingering, so you can adapt the sound more to your liking (also giving you more combinations for effects such as altissimo and multiphonics). Right hand keys can also remain down throughout much left hand movement without affecting sound quality (this facilitates hard runs and odd intervals). There is also less hardware soldered to the body (a result of the few interlinkages), giving the instrument more resonance.

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