What if I were to tell you that by using your tongue properly (and yes, I realize that sounds kind of creepy), you can boost your tone quality up a good notch? You might think, “Well that doesn’t make sense! What about the embouchure, throat, air support, tonal concept, reed, mouthpiece? Aren’t those the things [read more…]
Many musicians end up choosing the wrong mouthpiece or a specific brand of mouthpiece because their teacher or band director tells them that is what they have to play. From my experience in listening to video lessons from saxophonists such as Bob Reynolds, Don Menza, Bob Sheppard, and Antonio Hart along with the lessons I’ve taken [read more…]
Let’s face it – saxophonists are known for playing out of tune. Well, not only for playing out of tune, but suffice it to say that the saxophone is anything but a perfectly tuned instrument. Simply pressing down the keys while blowing ain’t gonna cut it. And if you play alto or soprano – forget about it. You’ve really [read more…]
Ligatures- do they make a difference? I have heard and read many reviews about the saxophone ligature and whether or not it had an effect on one’s sound. From my personal experience, I think a ligature has two goals. The first goal is to simply hold the reed on the mouthpiece, and the second goal is [read more…]
Regularly-updated saxophone blogs are few and far between. But recently, I came across another site at the web address, Saxophonistisches.de that is hopefully part of a trend towards modern and vibrant saxophone-specific websites. A German site run by Bremen-based saxophonist and educator Tobias Haecker, this online saxo-hub is chock-full of saxophone news, product reviews, instructional content, and even [read more…]
This post is part of a special column titled “Ask a Saxophone Repairman” with answers supplied by our resident repair whiz, Matt Stohrer of Stohrer Music. Disclaimer: Saxophone repair is a complicated business, depending not only on the skill of the repairer but on the reality of the situation at hand. The advice given here is given without [read more…]
I love Cannonball Adderley and Sonny Rollins. But instead of writing yet another article for an audience of sax players about a sax player, I thought I’d hop on over to the side of the hippity-hop, since sometimes the best way to drive a point home is to look at the subject matter from the [read more…]
Normally I like to include your names and links to your sites when I use your questions in my articles, but in this particular case, anonymity was requested. You see, what we’re talking about could be a bit embarrassing to discuss, but since we deal with saliva and cane working together, it’s not at all [read more…]
Being that this website has been around for as long as it has (since 2010), link-based articles like these often become out outdated as some of the websites linked to disappear. Because of that, if you see that any of the links here go to defunct websites, please do let me know in the comments. [read more…]
You can play all of the Bird licks and Sonny Rollins solos you want – at the end of the day, without proper jazz articulation, it’s not going to sound like jazz, plain and simple. Of course, jazz articulation is a pretty massive topic in itself. In this video, I’m going to be focusing on [read more…]
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