Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Way back when, Carl Orff had a bunch of instruments built in the pentatonic so children could play them without getting all self-conscious about hitting the right notes. These days we have the ukulele. On the one hand Yamaha seems to be aiming in this direction with the Venova, with a sort of "take it to the beach, play a couple riffs, get it banged up, who cares as long as you are enjoying yourself." And, yeah; a sturdy ABS instrument (like the many, many recorders Yamaha supplied to so many generations of music students) that costs under a hundred bucks is quite certainly something you can feel free to toss in the backpack or the beach bag. Except. Their videos are all of very good players showing off. (And I have this strong feeling that outside of the strange exception ukulele fans have carved out for themselves, we are in a much more judgmental, it-doesn't-sound-as-good-as-the-album, auto-tuned world and few people are going to embarrass themselves in public. Especially on something so terribly capable of making horrible noises as a member of the saxophone family). And then there's the other half of this thing; yes, the idea of a recorder-holed single-reed instrument isn't original. It has been done. What the Venova has, though, is Yamaha acoustic engineers being really clever. The weird shape is all about making it possible to play those scale tones in C without having to have fingers like ET. And to sound at least a little like a sax while doing it. So who is this instrument actually for? I really have no idea. For the dilettante who isn't willing to plop down the bucks for a student-grade sax? Maybe. I've been playing recorder (badly) for years, and trumpet (also badly) for about six months, and I picked up the basics on this thing in a couple of weeks. Which on the one hand is short given I had no prior single-reed experience, but on the other hand is a long time to be squeaking and struggling if you just picked it up on a lark. It works for me. Sure, I want an alto sax now (now that I know I can sort of work a single reed). But for now I can make some useful sounds on it. But that might be just me...I also own a rubber-string bass ukulele and a solid-body electric chin cello. Oh, yeah. And toss the reed. The plastic reed is too firm for a beginning player and sounds awful. I opened a box of Rico 2.5's and haven't looked back since.