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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