Tone is obviously one of the essential parts you must get right when playing the saxophone. While most people know overtones are a great way to improve the overall tone of your sax, they don’t necessarily know how to use them part of their exercises.

Technique Called Voicing

When you are playing the sax, you are essentially creating vibrations in the air to produce the sound. You might know that the air inside your saxophone is vibrating and generating the stunning – hopefully! – noise, but did you know air inside your body is also vibrating?

Air inside the saxophone and your body are vibrating simultaneously. By influencing the air inside you with your mouth and throat muscles, you can influence the sound. This is called voicing and the below exercises help you utilise this in your playing.

Scale Forms

You can start by practicing overtones in scale form. You’ll simply be playing the different overtones, but moving from one overtone to the next without a break.

This exercise is especially helpful to noticing the minor differences in sound and finding just the correct point of the note. It’s also going to improve your embouchure technique.

Play Overtones for 30 Seconds

If you are already somewhat used to playing overtones, you should try this exercise. It’s all about being able to hold the correct note for 30 seconds.

Simply play each overtone for 30 seconds, maintaining a clear and crisp sound. Start from the lower overtones and work your way up as high as you feel comfortable.

As soon as you start feeling tired, remember to have a break. If you work your muscles too much, you’ll start making more mistakes and you can easily pick up a wrong playing technique along the way.

Lip Vibrato

When playing the overtones, pay special attention to your lip and the way it can influence the sound. When you are holding a long overtone, use your lip vibrato to hear the difference in sound.

If it makes the note sound distorted, then your technique needs working on. Get back to the lower overtones and work your vibrato to a fluid and easy sound. After a while, try the higher overtones again the see if your technique has improved.

Play Without the Sax

Furthermore, you should also exercise without the saxophone. Just pick your mouthpiece and do the following practices. A word of warning though, the sound won’t be very pleasant, so you’d be better off doing this exercise when you don’t have a house full of guests!

Take the mouthpiece and try to hold a single note. Try not to move the lower jar and experiment with different tongue positions to find the right tone. Once you are good with single notes, you can move on the scales and arpeggios as well.

The above exercises will help you notice differences in tone easier and they’ll add a lot more depth to your sound. Use them as part of your regular sax lessons to take your sound to the next level!

Want to learn to play the saxophone but feel like there’s no time? It’s easy to think playing an instrument will require hours of hard work and in today’s busy society, time is hard to come buy.

So, if you don’t have a lot of time to spare, consider going with the below30-minute session! Yes, that’s right – you’ll only need 30 minutes a day and you’ll start seeing improvements.

The Structure

This quick practice is all about the structure. It is divided into four sections, each focusing on different but equally important aspects of mastering the saxophone.

Here’s what each section entails:

• Section 1: Total length 8 minutes

You’ll be practicing the technique and getting your fingers used to the instrument. It’s a good idea to have a metronome at hand for the exercises in this session.

During the eight minutes, you’ll want to start by learning scales, starting with major scales and later on moving to minors. You should also spend some time each session playing arpeggios. Again, you want to start with majors first. Finally, include a bit of chromatic scale to your eight-minute stint.

• Section 2: Total length 10 minutes

Method books might sound like the most boring waste of time, but it is important you learn about the theory as well. You’ll want to spend just 10 minutes of your time learning about notes, dynamics and rhythms.

• Section 3: Total length 6 minutes

The third aspect of the exercise is all about your listening skills. The ability to hear differences in the music will enhance your playing immensely.

Pick a song you’d want to play and try to learn to play it with your sax without looking at the notes. Pick something easy first, listen carefully – just a section at a time – and try to repeat the sounds!

• Section 4: Total length 6 minutes

Finally, you’ll get to spend six minutes on playing whatever you want. Take the sheet in front of you and just play. Use a backing track to improvise and just enjoy playing!

Use your mobile phone to time each section. Even if you feel like continuing with one section, make sure you move on to the next part. This ensures you get enough practice on each skill and don’t get bored later along the line.

Prepare Well

The key to making the above sessions work is all about preparation. You need to make sure you have all the notes, books, equipment and things ready for your practice. Perhaps you could have a separate notebook and box for all saxophone related stuff!

After you are done with a 30-minute lesson, use five minutes to just organising all the things for the next session. This way you can get to practice as soon as you have the time the next day.

If you have more time available, you can always spend it on looking over the things that seem the most difficult to grasp! The important thing is to ensure your practice has a structure and that you enjoy playing the sax above all!

Beginner saxophonists tend to put a lot of their effort in playing scales, learning the right tone and tune adjustments, as well as running patterns. But knowing how to play rhythm is also important and it will in most cases improve your overall playing.

Below are five simple exercises that’ll help you play in odd-meters and work on rhythm. These sax rhythm exercises will boost your improvisation skills and add more depth to your style.

1. Utilising the Metronome

Every beginner sax players needs to get a good metronome! It’ll bring more structure to your lessons and it is a great aide, especially in this first exercise.

Set your metronome to around 50 to 60 bmp. Play along to the metronome so that you’ll first play once per beat. Continue by playing twice per beat, three times per beat, four times per beat and so on. Work your way up to playing eight times per beat.

If you can do this without a problem, make it a bit more difficult by randomizing your playing between subdivisions. For example, go from six subdivisions per beat to three subdivisions per beat.

2. Use a 4/4 Beat and Displace It

Use a backing track with a 4/4 beat. Turn the backing track on and play on the first and the third beat, but start the first with an offbeat.

Alternatively, you could use an odd-meter tune. Instead of starting with an offbeat, play with a downbeat on the first.

3.Clap Rhythms

You should start practicing without your sax as well. Pick a bepop head with rhythmic complexity. For instance, you could sing Moose and the Mooch. Sing the song in your head and pick a repeating rhythm you will clap to.

This could be the offbeats. Try to keep clapping just the offbeats as long as possible – you’ll probably soon notice you are clapping on the beat!

4. 3 Against 5

Another good clapping exercise allowing you to practice without the sax is the three against five. You just need to clap every three beats with one hand and hit every five eight notes with the other.

You can change this by doing it four against five to mix it up a bit. This is quite tricky, but mastering it will make learning modern jazz tricks a lot easier!

5. Converting triplets into the eight note

For the final exercise, you might prefer to do it with other players. But it is somewhat possible even if you are practising on your own.

You’ll be turning a 6/8 rhythm into a 4/4 rhythm. In essence, it means the old triplets of the 6/8 become the 16ths of the new 4/4. This will help you make the melody of the song a lot different and adds more power to your playing.

The above exercises will make you more rhythm aware and it can take your own playing to the next level. Make sure you include these exercises to your daily lesson and see how you can put them to use with the other things you learn during your sax lessons!

Playing the saxophone isn’t only about the right finger positions and the ability to create a smooth sound. A large part of your ability to play will depend on your so-called musical ear. You need to be able to listen to the subtle differences in intervals, scale degrees and chords, as this will boost your own ability to play them right.

Learn the Scale Degrees

Before ear training can kick off, it is essential you learn about the scale degrees. If you don’t yet know about them, here’s a quick guide to scale degrees:

• Scale degrees are essentially the labels applied to any note, highlighting the position the specific note has in a scale.
• First note in the scale is called the first scale degree, the second the second scale degree and so on.
• In a song, the notes in tonal piece of music come with a scale degree. This allows you to know the scale degree of each note simply by figuring out the key.
• Another term to understand is tonic, which is the first scale degree of a diatonic scale and the tonal centre.

Find the Scale Degrees

The first ear training exercise involves these scale degrees. Take a piece of music and figure out the corresponding scale degree of each note in the song. You can do this first by looking at the music sheet, but eventually you want to start hearing the scale degrees when you listen to music.

Identify the Tonic

Another version is to listen to a song and to identify which of the note in the song is the tonic. When you are listening to a sax song, figure out the tonic and sing it out loud.

Why is the ability to identify the tonic important? Because it allows you to recognise all the other notes and chords in the song. Being able to figure out the tonic will make it a lot easier to play music by ear and you’ll pick out subtle mistakes you make much better.

Before you become confident in figuring out the tonic, it’s a good idea to use your saxophone as a helpful tool. When you think you got the right tonic, play it with the sax to see whether you were right.

Mix it Up

Once you get good at figuring out the tonic, you want to kick the difficulty up a notch. Instead of focusing on the tonic, i.e. the first scale degree, try to find out the second scale degree and so on.

You can take advantage of the backing tracks and saxophone lessons from our website for these above exercises. Furthermore, it is a good idea to start with songs that have a stable tonic. These include:

• Old McDonald
• Somewhere Over the Rainbow
• Oleo
• The Star Wars Theme

So pick your favourite sax songs, turn on the stereo and start listening to some sax magic to improve your playing skills!