On saxophone and clarinet, is there a correct note that the reed and mouthpiece (alone) should sound?
One might answer: If you can play in tune, with a good sound and you are comfortable, who cares what note comes out when you blow the mouthpiece? Of course, not all of us do satisfy those conditions, and some teachers use the mouthpiece pitch exercise as a diagnostic. So, why might this exercise have a diagnostic value? There is an approximate answer to this question. In a simple but very useful model probably originating with Benade, the reed of the sax or clarinet is loaded by the acoustic impedance of the bore Zbore in series with that of the player’s vocal tract Ztract. To a rough approximation, the sax or clarinet plays at a peak in Zbore + Ztract. You may have learned that, in electricity, we often describe a real generator or battery as an ideal source together with a finite internal resistance or internal impedance. In much the same way, we can conceptually divide the reed into the reed generator (the idealised component that converts breath into sound) and the reed’s own passi
