Your Tone Holes and You

A level tone hole makes it much easier to seat a pad, but very few saxophones (none that I've seen) have truly level tone holes when they leave the factory. This is, I believe, due to the nature of the manufacturing process and the fact that metal has memory.

When tone holes are created on most modern saxophones, they are extruded, or "drawn" (stretched) from the brass of the body, and then cut to "level" at the factory. Some saxes have extruded tone holes with a rolled edge (Conn) and a couple have soldered-on tone holes (King, Martin). For the purposes of this article, I'll be talking only about the extruded tone holes found on Conns, Selmers, Yamahas, Yanigisawas, and other "drawn" tone hole saxophones (most saxes).

Though the tone holes may be perfectly level immediately after they are cut, the memory in the metal tends to eventually pull or warp the brass of the tone holes towards its original position as part of a round cone. This is a very slight change, but enough to leave valleys and hills on the tone-hole chimney. These valleys and hills can be easily observed by putting a flat metal disc (as seen in picture) on top of the tone hole and shining a leak light from the inside. Every single saxophone on which I've worked has these peaks and dips, to one extent or another.

The part of the leveling process I take issue with is the tendency of many repair technicians to level the tone holes with a rotary file or a flat tone-hole file. The problem with this technique is that the higher "hills" get ground down to the lowest level of the valleys, which can be very low, indeed. If the tone holes were of equal length all the way around, as they might be if the sax body was a square tube, this might not be much of a problem.

But the "North/South sides of the tone hole chimneys (when the sax is standing up) are much shorter than the "East/West" sides of the tone hole, and it is this ""North/South" side that stands to lose the most if it also happens to have a little "hill" on it, which is very common.

I've seen tone holes that had been ground down so far on the North/South side that the pad hit the body of the tube when the key was closed! The reason techs use files is simple: it's quicker and easier to create a very flat surface on which to seat a pad. '

But quality sax repair is not about quick and easy. Remember, any metal, once removed can not be put back. This is why I use what I call the "dent-repair" technique of tone-hole leveling.

Why start by removing metal with a file when there's a better, although slower, way? I'm not suggesting that the file (or rotary discs) should never be used, only that they should be used as the last resort, not the first.

It's not even necessary to level all the tone holes Certain tone-holes will accept a pad easily with little or no leveling at all (side Bb and C, LH palm keys, Low Eb, etc...) This is because these keys are held closed by spring tension, and act independently of other keys. The Low C is the only open key that is not linked to other keys and it should always be leveled. But for the other independent-key tone holes, no leveling is usually necessary unless the tone-holes are very distorted,