Five Things You Can Do to Improve Your Saxophone Playing 10 Times Faster

1. Practice at the same time and place each day.  Short bursts of active concentration for five minutes at a time on something that you are having difficulty with are better than playing things you already know and are comfortable with for 30 minutes or an hour.

2. Practice playing long tones. First, blow air through the horn without making any sound other than wind gusting out of the other end. Put your stomach muscles into it – that’s where tone and control comes from. Then, fill up with as much air as possible and hold a single note as long as you can starting soft, then getting loud as you can, and bringing it back down to soft again.  Do all the notes in a scale this way.

3. Practice playing scales – but not just any scales. The ascending/descending structure teaches the range of your instrument and all the notes, but it can become a roadblock to creative soloing. Try this instead: learn your scales, and practice playing them in intervals, especially the 1-3-5 notes. Learn all major, minor, and dominants first.

4. Practice using a tuner and a metronome.  A tuner will help dial in intonation, and a metronome will help to learn to stay on tempo. 

5. Keep a practice log. Set goals for yourself, and measure your progress weekly. For example, if you start playing a new scale (or a difficult passage in a score) at 50 bpm, try increasing by 10 bpm per week.

Feedback: let me know how these ideas work for you -- 

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BRINGING IT ALL BACK TO NUMBER 1: YOUR TONE

Many of my sax (and flute and clarinet) students work their long tone exercises faithfully but get nowhere. Week after week they come back with little or no improvement to show for their efforts.

If indeed they are putting effort into it.

Yes, there are some among them who aren't practicing long tone exercises. I know that, because I hear the continuation of problems that daily long tones -- even if practiced for only five minutes -- will fix.

But then there are those among my students who really do their long tones and still make little improvement.

Yes. It is possible to practice long tones the wrong way. If you are one of the ones who is putting in the time and not hearing results, stay tuned for some more ideas below.

I keep harping on this subject because tone is number one. It's the first thing someone hears when you put air through your horn.

Repeat after me:  tone is king. 

And the way to having a great sound is by including long tone exercises in your daily warm-ups and your practice routines.

We've talked about a variety of long tone exercises. My favorite is to fill up with much air, then blow soft-loud-soft on each note in an ascending scale.

Another way is to do the opposite: fill up with air, but blow the softest clear tone you can manage while maintaining the integrity of the note. Maintain your embrochure from note to note. Don't loosen up. Breathe thru your nose.  And yes, this should cause your smile muscles to hurt, but that's the point: to build up your embrochure.


If you're doing all the above and still not getting where you want to be, here are some suggestions.

1. LISTEN to yourself. Don't zone out mentally while playing long tones. I know; it's more fun to do long tones while you play GameBoy or watch TV or look at the computer.

Don't.   Focus instead on the sound coming out of your horn and your relationship to it. Make adjustments with air flow and embrochure until you hear some improvement.

2. POSTURE   stand with your back to any flat wall in your house and rest the back of your head against the wall. Hold the sax up and then blow your long tones. Much of the time, poor horn posture limits the air flow or causes a player to bite down on the mouthpiece.

3. THE GREAT OUTDOORS   find a place outside where you can blow long tones without disrupting the neighbors. Stan Getz once told an interviewer that's how he got that powerful sound of his -- by practicing outside.  Without anything to bounce off of, your tone goes everywhere outside and sounds thinner and flatter.

Time with long tones will fix that, and just about everything else that ails your individual sound.

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ONE THING THAT WILL IMPROVE YOUR SAXOPHONE PLAYING

And -- everybody can do it.

It's a simple adjustment-- in fact, you will be amazed at just how simple it is. But then again, much change leading to improvement often comes from the simplest of life re-alignments.

Here it comes. Ready?

Practice every day at the same time and in the same place.

I learned this the hard way...by allowing outside influences to dictate my practice schedule. I ended up practicing whenever and wherever, which led to a general decline in my focus and skills.

Me? I hit it at 8 am every morning and I use the guest bathroom so I can isolate my sound, not wake up the neighbors, and use the mirror. My metronome is right there on the counter.

Many of you who have used the guest bathroom at my house have probably wondered, but that's my routine.

Is it always easy? No -- especially not after a late night gig.

But, it works.  Try it, and see for yourselves.




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I KNOW YOU PRACTICE. BUT -- ARE YOU PRACTICING THE RIGHT STUFF?

My Sunday sax student had an epiphany -- he told me that he practices at least an hour each day, but he admitted that he wasn't getting where he wanted to go fast enough.

"I'm practicing wrong, aren't I?" he asked.

Yes. He was repeating the same errors over and over in his practice, but not knowing it until he brought it in for lessons.

He was in the same place each week as a sax player, not getting worse, but not getting better.

It's so easy to fall into the habit of playing the same things over and over in practice, and for a variety of reasons. How to escape this trap?

I'll give you three ideas to try out BEFORE you start a practice session.

1. THINK about what it is that you want to work on in the practice session. What are you having difficulty with? How can you break that down into smaller steps that you can work on?

2. Warm up the hands. I've showed each of you how to do those palms-out arm stretches that work the muscles that we use to control the keywork.

3. Finally, get the instrument warmed up with some breathing and some long tones, from soft to loud.

Then, get started.

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