Today I learned, courtesy of my coworker M, that reducing the venting of all the stack keys on a saxophone can help mitigate inconsistencies in the instrument's intonation. He was working on an old Martin alto and found that by closing the stack keys down lower than normal, he corrected a lot of the pitch issues in the middle register. The keys were so low that I would have never thought to experiment with an opening that small because it's so far outside the norm. But that saxophone reminded me yet again that I need to always be open to long-shot techniques when the tried-and-true aren't working.
I also learned that if you're going to plug a piece of tubing with silly putty to check for leaks, you shouldn't draw a strong vacuum on that piece of tubing because you'll suck a huge gob of silly putty up into the tube like a bubble in reverse. As a result of that little lesson, though, I learned that PB Blaster is really effective at un-sticking silly putty from brass tubing.
Seems like the first lesson was a bit more...nuanced.
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