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.

Antigua winds a520-lq alto