How to Hold a Tenor Saxophone

Video Transcript

This is Dave Birkin and on behalf of expertvillage.com I am going to move on to how you hold the instrument. Now the way it is designed, it is designed to be held by both your left and right hand. If you look over here, there are places for you to put your thumbs. You got this black thing over here with the thumb and this is the octave key. And here you just have this hook, that you just hook your right thumb onto, that solidifies that. Now if you look at the left hand, this is, here is the B key, that is the one that you press the finger with. This thing here is actually what they call the axillary high F key, what it does is it opens up this key here, and you only use that occasionally you see it is that high F key, which is, you know, the highest button there. This is the second button here and that’s where you put your first finger most of all the time. Second finger, we skip over to this curl thing here, you see this little dude-it out here is the bis key, and that is only used for certain fingerings of B flat, it’s just a, usually, you just have your finger here, sometimes it’s only accessed with the first finger, so you don’t put your second finger there. So you got first your finger here, second finger here and third finger on this G key here. And the pinky actually controls these four keys here. That is the extension of the saxophone. You see but what you…. basically you got your first three fingers here, the right hand fingers here, and it is just one, two, three keys there. And there is a couple of little possibilities for your pinky here, E flat key and C key right there. So what they do is, I mean, they, you know, they close the holes and the make the air column you know longer or shorter and that is how we change the pitch. If you close all the holes off that is the lowest possible note that you could play and then on saxophones is low B flat.

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