Practicing the Tenor Saxophone

Video Transcript

Hi! This is Dave Birkin and on behalf of Expertvillage.com, I am going to talk a little bit about developing a practice routine as a saxophone player. Now you have to think about the components of your playing that you want to work on. I mean so you going to have long tones and tone studies that is always important. You can do it, there are many ways that you can do it, I mean you can do it in a very dry way, like a scientific way, like taking a note and deciding that there are eight dynamic levels that you can play that note at and play them for each a beat, and I did that at one point, but the point that I meant now, I think the best thing to do is just take a nice ballad and try to play that, you know, the best you can, you know, listening to each note while you play it and how you attack the note and how to fade the note out and things like that, that is kind of what I do now for tone studies. But at one point, I would just take one note and play it at eight different dynamic levels. This is actually one of the toughest exercises to do and I do not do it anymore really, but it is a…. if you notice, it is never going to be perfect and ?? (0140) was not as good as Michael ?? (0140), you know, it is what it is, and it takes a lot of control, you see what I did with head like I was counting a tempo like one, two, three, four, like that and for the first eight beats, I was getting incrementally louder with each beat and then for the next eight beats incrementally softer with each beat. But I find that you know, once in a while I’ll do it, but nowadays, just play like a nice ballad.

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