LISTEN, AND MEMORIZE

Think about it for a moment – how did you learn to speak?

By listening first, then, by repeating what you heard as best you could, and finally, by memorizing.

Nobody handed you a book or a page with words printed on it and said here – now go learn how to talk.

That’s not how it works.

You mimicked everything you heard as a baby and as a toddler. Your adults also helped by saying words and encouraging you to repeat them. They were happy when you got it right, right?

Well, maybe you don’t remember how it went for you, but when my daughter said her first word (31 years ago!) her mom got on the phone to everybody in the family with the big news. We laughed, we celebrated, and we got her to say it again, and again....

By the time you got to kindergarten, you were well on your way to being fluent.

Unfortunately, this is rarely the way we teach anyone to play music. Instead, we give students an instrument and a book and a fingering chart.

Yes – those tools are totally necessary. But what we leave out is listening, then mimicking, and remembering.

Granted, the job of any fifth-grade level band teacher is complex. And there is probably no way a teacher can get an entire class of beginners on various instruments in shape for spring concert by having them sit around and listen/mimic/memorize.

We shouldn’t toss out the other sensory input in exchange for classroom management. But we do, and it is often years (if ever) before a student begins that far deeper and more rewarding work of listening and finding the same notes on one’s instrument, repeating them, and then memorizing.

So how do you do this?  Simple. Start with a song you really like. Doesn’t matter what kind of music. All that matters is that you really like it. Get a copy of it via download or CD or whatever so that you can listen to it several times. Then, find the notes on your horn and learn the melody.

Little steps. Go slow at first. You’ll get it eventually. Memorize the tune, and incorporate it into your daily practice. Then, learn another. And another, and another.  My promise to you is this: the more you do it, the easier it comes.

 Jazz improvising, tools to improvise, music memory, composition, sax lessons

My Sax Equipment and Setup

The choice of saxophone/mouthpiece is highly personal. In effect, the saxophone (or any instrument for that matter) becomes a working partner in the creation of music. The equipment needs to synch with the player and allow her or him to express ideas without impediment. 

I tend toward gear that many consider to be less than ideal, which probably dates back to my formative years as a musician. In the fifth grade, at the age of 10, I got a Conn student alto, clunky as all heck, and stiff, but which I would play in many student rock bands before throngs of adoring 11 year old classmates. 

Later, in high school, the band teacher put me on their bari sax. It was an ancient piece of metal that leaked and was in bad repair.  It stunk. But, that's the horn I was given to play in an award-winning jazz band that made waves and would produce Grammy Award winners and famous bands like Fattburger. It was that, or nothing -- then, I was not a soloist. And so I made that stinking bari work, and likely with the same reed all year! Possibly this is why I tend to favor the uphill battle in my choice of instruments as you will see in today's blog post. 

There are many many fine brands of saxophones being made today; consider them all before you decide on purchasing a horn and a mouthpiece. Better yet, try every combination possible. Many music stores, Sam Ash for example, will let you do this to your heart's content. 

Today, my main tenor sax (I own two of them) is a Buescher True Tone that was made somewhere between 1923 and 1927, judging by the serial number. Satin silver finish (now vastly blemished) with the remnants of a gold wash bell. (The one pictured is not mine, but is nearly identical.)

My mouthpiece is a wide-open Otto Link Super Tone Master 10* that I found in a box full of used mouthpieces in a seedy old used instrument shop one day. I replaced the standard Link ligature with one made by Rovner. I added a couple of cardboard shims to the inside of the ligature.

I use Fibracell 2.5 or Legere synthetic reeds. With the STM, they are quite bright. Baffling with the modified Rovner helps tone that down a little. The benefit of this setup is the ease of playing in the altissimo range. I can also push this setup as hard as I want to get a full overblown Texas tenor sound, and I can lay back and get something closer to an acoustic jazz sound or a thick pop R&B sound.

  

I also fashioned a little homemade wedge and positioned it inside the STM, right at the point where the roll-over baffle falls off. I made it out of that sticky clay you can use to post things like photos on walls.

I got the idea for the wedge from listening to a fine sax player named Ernie Watts. I experimented with various shapes for years before settling on a design that resembles a step-baffle.  The little wedge speeds up the air flow and adds a little bite to my overall sound.

The True Tone blows freely and remains in tune through the octaves. It has a darker sound, possibly due to the age and manufacture of the horn. The older metal resonates and buzzes at a different frequency than my other tenor. I can feel it. 

For years, I played on a tenor sax made by the Olds Company in Fullerton, California. It has low serial numbers that make it very old in the company history. No one really knows how old, because Olds's records no longer go back that far. Olds was known for selling student-grade instruments, especially brass. 

I had the tenor re-padded, but even then, it still blew sharp or flat on so many different notes that it was work to keep it in tune on a gig. That said, I still love that horn to this day, mainly for the strong, focused, buzzy sound that it makes. It is not unlike that of an old Selmer cigar-cutter. In fact, many times on gigs, people have confused the Olds for one. 

But now, the True Tone is becoming my horn for all occasions because being of better design, it opens my playing up to more possibilities. So many sax players complain about the Buescher’s ancient ergonomics (key-work,) but that doesn't bother me in the least.  This is among the kinds of horns that our forebears in music (like Ben Webster or Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young) may have played in their time.

The True Tone has wide-open key work, and with the STM 10* piece, it makes a huge shock wave of tenor sax sound. Everything is in this horn, every tonal/sonic possibility. 

The added cachet is that I restored the True Tone myself. It came to me from a storage unit that I’m sure had flooded. The horn reeked of mildew and crabs. On a whim, I bought a set of very small screwdrivers, and I took it apart and discarded the old rotted pads. I soaked the works in buckets of machine oil for weeks and gently scrubbed away the crud buildup. Buescher’s snap-on pads made the job of replacing them much easier than seating modern pads with shellac would have been.

A bona fide repair tech adjusted the key heights. This is one of those jobs best left to a true pro. In fact, restoring a sax is not something you can do by watching You Tube videos.  It is an exacting job, one that requires skill and training and experience.

Still, I’m glad I did the cleaning and the restoration and the re-assembly myself. Why? Because if for nothing more, I understand this particular horn in a way that I can’t adequately describe. Having the parts spread out on my dining table for six months, and now playing it at gigs, well, that’s a bit of history I have had with no other saxophone I’ve ever owned. 

tenor sax, Buescher True Tone, Olds tenor sax, sax restoration, saxophone equipment, Otto Link  

Make Your Practice Sound as Good as Your Performance

I’ve noticed a trend among my students. It’s unanimous. They all do it.

What I’m talking about today is the habit of separating practice tone and development from performance tone and development.

In other words, my students all practice sounding one way, but when they perform, it sounds another way entirely, sometimes like two different musicians. 

Which didn’t occur to me until I started going to my student’s various recitals, where I heard tone and vibrato and phrasing that never happened in the practice studio. 

Why not practice everything as if one were performing?  In other words, play even the lowliest of scales with as beautiful a tone as possible all the time.

Break up stock patterns by playing scales and triads in three, or five, not just four/four up and down. Play them backwards. Make melodies from the triads.

Keep the air flow and the tone going at all times, even when cranking out those endless finger-busting classical arpeggios. 

Work on melodies in the same way. Not just, “well, I gotta get this done so I can get back to my computer games,” but, practice them as if in front of an (imaginary) audience.

How to get better faster:  from this day forward, make everything you play, every note that comes out of your horn in practice as pretty and musical and expressive as your skills will allow as if performing in front of thousands of adoring fans at the Hollywood Bowl.

Dig?  

saxophone lessons, best practice habits, performance, how to practice, instrumental, solo, air support 

THE ONE THING

No, I didn’t come up with the phrase ‘the One Thing.’  That came from that old Billy Crystal movie, the one with Jack Palance, where the guests at a dude ranch spend most of the movie pondering what, exactly, the one thing really is.

In this case, the one thing is that single phrase or turnaround or scale or passage that, once perfected opens up the doors to smooth sailing on everything else.

For me, it was mastering the F# M scale through the octaves in both directions with triads and inversions and arpeggios. For some reason, after I learned that one, everything thereafter in terms of playing scales seemed easier.

Another recent example: a student of mine was facing end-of-school-year juries. There was a simple eighth-note phrase in a particular song she was scheduled to perform that included a note she was weak at playing – - low C#. 

What I noticed was that her performance stalled both before and after the phrase with that C#. In other words, she choked in anticipation of its arrival in the chart, and, she flubbed almost everything after.

The solution? We isolated the phrase, and she practiced it over and over, starting very slowly and gradually building speed until she arrived at a place where she could NOT make a mistake.

And after that, after mastering that ‘one thing,’ the rest of the song came together.

As students, we all tend to get caught up in the big picture and we fail to see that there is usually one thing we can work on that will have the greatest impact on the entire spectrum of our playing.

So, what is the One Thing for you? 

saxophone lessons, private instruction, soloing, effective practice, instrumental