Playing a Baritone Saxophone

Video Transcript

Hi. For Expert Village, I'm EJ John Erickson and we're continuing our talk about the baritone saxophone. So to this point, you've studied up, you're playing your embouchures great. You've gotten all your scales down and you?re ready to start gigging. So, one of the things now is that we have to get it off the stand in this case, this is a pretty typical saxophone neck strap. It's great for a tenor, alto, others, but it's really not good for Bari if you have any kind of neck or back problems. So, you can use these, but what we found in our wonderful Bari was this wonderful, jumbly mess of harness neck strap. And, so let's kind of unpeel it here and get ourselves to take a look at what we've got. So, just like a regular neck strap, you've got a nice hook that comes down the front, these will come over the shoulder, and this looks like it'll come around the back. So we're going to put this on just like a regular neck strap. So, technically, we could kind of use it like a regular neck strap, except we reach around back and there's two little hooks on the side. One here and one here and these look really great when you're not wearing a shirt at all. Just kidding! So now it comes off the stand. We'll find our little neck strap hook here and we'll strap it in and, wouldn't you know it, we're ready to go for our shoulder strap. So, this can be adjusted just like our normal one. Pull this little hinge up to make it so that it's more comfortable. Really, you'll want it to rest right in your mouth, which it looks like we're doing. So, now you're ready for your first gig. But let's give you a couple of notes, a couple of techniques that you're probably going to have to play on the Bari sax. One of the things I'm going to mention to you, which we didn't really touch on, is after you practice and then you've practiced some more, and you practice the fourth element of learning how to play the Bari is listen. And get out there and listen to as many saxophone, listen to Tower of Power, listen to Blood, Sweat and Tears, listen to Jerry Mulligan, you've just to go out and find these players and listen to the work that they've done. That's the best way to figure out how to copy and do what they do. So, here's a couple of little techniques that I've heard over the years that you'll be doing as well. One is just the slur stop and actually heard it explained. But I'm going to go ahead and play it and then I'll tell you how it was explained to me from Doc Kupka from Tower of Power. So, he plays a little like this sometimes, not, I can't play anything like him, but I'll try. So, let's try it. So, that was using our appended time scale, but the slur to or tight stop and you almost don't even hear the second note. When I was talking to a friend about it, they were saying that his technique is to use a very light reed and you think he's barking, like blowing incredibly loud the way he gets that huge sound. It's actually quite the opposite. He's playing really, really light on a very thin reed, playing really tight, and they just mike him really loud and that's how he gets that big power punch so tight. So secret, it's counterintuitive what you think you'd play, but that's it. So, dah hop, and stop. You almost don't even play that second note. Anyway, dah dop, so get out there, bark away, have some fun.

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