Sailor 1911S Music demonstrator

A few years back Music nibs were all the rage, with everyone reviewing the different music nib varieties that were available. Most that I saw were either made by the big 3 Japanese pen companies (being Pilot, Sailor and Platinum) or vintage pens (I saw a particularly beautiful vintage Waterman flexible music nib!).

I was attracted to this style of nib because the reviews mentioned that the writing experience was much smoother than either a cursive italic or stubs. I had experienced some issue with my handwriting style (which is normally cursive) with the cursive italic and the TWSBI stubs running dry on horizontal strokes, so I was curious to see whether the music nib style would work better for me.

I chose the Sailor Music nib mainly because I liked the look of the pen itself – this demonstrator gold trimmed pen. I also managed to get it in Japan for a good price.

This particular music nib is different to the others on the markets which typically have 3 tines, and is more similar to a stubbish normal nib. This style also has benefits including not having to align 3 times instead of two and if you are a beginner like I was when I bought this, it was easier to manage if the pen was running scratchy or had baby’s bottom.

This nib itself had no issues and worked smoothly straight out of the box. It definitely works better for my writing style than a cursive italic or a stub nib and doesn’t dry out on horizontal strokes. The nib is extremely wet, but I expect that most music nibs are, from what I’ve seen and this wettest would help with the horizontal strokes situation I’ve explained before. The only downside to this is that the sailor converters are very small, ~0.5 mL, which compared to the international Standard size converter (like a Schmidt) is about 1.4mL. As such, for me this pen is more of a fun pen, rather than a daily writer or an everyday carry. That’s ok in my book, I don’t use stubbish style nibs very often and when I do, the wettest and wideness of the nib isn’t overly practical for my needs.