Breathing Techniques for Baritone Saxophones

Video Transcript

For Expert Village, I'm EJ John Erickson with Vital Flame Productions and thank you for joining us on our sessions focusing on the baritone saxophone. Okay, in this session we're going to start making noise. Finally, lots of noise. So, I mean the first thing you should do without even knowing any technique or anything else, is just put the thing in your mouth and try making noise. Put your teeth on the top of the mouthpiece and just try and make duck noises if you can. I mean you just want to start doing that anyway. Now, let's talk about maybe a little bit of technique to do that correctly. So everything that you generate is with your breath. So, one thing you want to do when you're breathing, breathing is important, obviously you want a big breath for a saxophone, especially a Bari even more, is when you breathe in, if you raised your shoulders, you're breathing incorrectly. You want to breathe through your diaphragm. So down up, think, like that. So big breathe in. And then, what you're going to do for your support is you want to kind of tighten up your tummy. So, if I hit on my tummy, I should be nice and smooth and my speaking, while I'm talking that's because I'm forcing the muscle of my diaphragm out so that it's nice and tight and firm and supported. If I'm not doing that then and it's not supported, you'll start hearing that kind of sound. So, nice, supported, firm breath. Now, we're bringing the mouthpiece up to our mouth, our embouchure. What do you do? The word is embouchure. So O. So, you want to think O. O and its corners tight. And it's this corner of your mouth and this corner of your mouth are tight into the middle as much as possible. You don't leave your lips up here, you still bring them in nice and tight, but you're making an O, so you'd talk like this. One of the things for lifting weights you can do to develop those corner muscles, which will take time, is you can use a pencil. And you and do that while you're driving in the car to build your muscles up. So when you're ready to put your on the mouthpiece, you actually want your teeth to rest on the top of the mouthpiece and you bring this in a lot. A lot of people when they first start to play, they want to kind of get on the end here. Don't. Shove that mouthpiece in. Get the O and you can do that all day long and wife and kids and friends will love you. If you want to have fun putting your finger in the end and changing the pitch, you can do that too. But you want a nice, strong, solid sound. That will not change when we put it on the Bari. Let's do that.

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