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.

long tone exercises, saxophone lessons, woodshedding, tone, air flow, tone production