If you got those McIntyres from a guy in South Carolina, then they were from a large batch of old stock that, to my knowledge, was never sold. At some point after 1958 or whenever McIntyre went bust, somebody bought their entire inventory and dumped them in storage in a South Carolina storage facility. In 2020, a storage wars type of guy managed to buy the storage locker and stumbled upon the gold mind of McIntyres.

They don't have serials because, I suspect, they hadn't made it that far in production.

It's a pretty neat instrument, but hard to find and expensive in America.

I've never held one, but I would say that it more closely resembles a conical clarinet than a saxophone, specifically due to the Albert-esque key system, which is different enough from the standard saxophone key system.

I have played in a band at UCLA (on contra-alto), which specialized in the most obscure instruments possible; we never had a taragato in our group.

I would very much like to own one, but I don't play enough and am not that dedicated of a collector (anymore) to justify it.

In America, on the rare occassions it's played, it appears to be played more like a saxophone in terms of play style. It also has a more soprano-sax-ish tone to it, but a clarinet timbre, if that makes sense.

Here's a nice relaxing jazz session:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQpG4ynzbzA

I don't see why you wouldn't be able to transpose, in theory. In practice, you'd probably need to have some skills that I don't have to transpose on the fly.

I feel like if you want to make real money, the market is in the REPAIR of saxophones, not necessarily the RESELL.

Pros will pay thousands for a good sax tech. Vintage saxophones are also as a rule worth more than a comparable clarinet, but there are very few deals to be found with saxes, in my experience.

I’ve sold one. Very little interest.  No idea why.


My Etsy listings expire soon and I plan to move them to Reverb and maybe a few to Ebay.


I’ve been toying with the idea of posting a video of each instruments tuner analysis in the listing. But have reservations because beginners wouldn’t understand and experienced players could detect the tuning by ear.  Your thoughts on this idea?

I've done some youtube videos along with listings and most of them have comments ragging on my poor playing skills! Haha. It takes a few minutes and never hurts to demonstrate playing ability of something you're trying to sell.

The mechanism is for fork (1+3) Eb/Bb rather than a correction key for the long (1+1) Eb/Bb.  i.e. a fingering that is not available without it.

It may or may not improve the long Eb/Bb in the lower register which is the one that is always horribly sharp.  The upper register long Bb is normally perfectly acceptable tuning wise.

Oops, thanks for the correction!!

These are cool, but I don't think they're at all necessary. In the grand scheme of things, just another pad to need to seat and that can get out of adjustment.

Technically it helps keep the Eb/Bb in *slightly* better tune, but the meager gain isn't really all that noticeable. Cool to have, though.