Hello everybody,
It was great to hear you all play this week. Hope you have a great week of practicing ahead, and I look forward to seeing you all next Thursday!
Dylan
Continue practicing long tones in order to help with rounding out your tone. Support the sound from the diaphragm, make sure your shoulders are not rising when you inhale. Try to hold out the note for a longer duration of time, and really focus on making the crescendos and decrescendos as gradual and smooth as possible.
Practise the chromatic scale from the low Bb, up to high F (side keys or fork key figuring). Try going very slow and aim for consistency of sound throughout the various ranges, as well as accuracy. Practice the passages that you find most difficult (slow tempo, repetitive), and when you feel more confident with the harder parts try to put it all together and play the entire scale up and down with as minimal mistakes as you can.
Continue practicing the major scales (C, G, Bb, F
Keep practicing exercises #121-124 in the method book. Aim for optimal accuracy. Watch the problem sections. Look over the lower part in the G major exercise (low D-B), and the higher fingerings in the Bb and F exercises (D, E, F, and D, Eb, F side keys). Remember to take breaks if you are doing any repetitive practicing in the lower octaves, especially when practicing the low Bb, B, C, C# keys as you don’t want to stretch and stress out your fingers (you’ll grow into the sax eventually, at the moment these fingerings can be a stretch for the size of your current hand – so we want to avoid any potential stress in the hand).
Hope you have a great week of practicing! Good luck!
Sebastian
Hope you get a chance to repair the saxophone before next lesson, so that we can practice more scales and exercises that might involve the problem keys. In the meantime, continue starting your practice routine with long tones. Focus on the sound and pitch staying consistent. Make sure the tone doesn’t spread out (lose its core/body) as you get louder. Remember that it possible to start the note from a very quiet place, so make sure to focus on controlling all the dynamic extremes of the saxophone (most quiet to most loud). Play long tones from various notes (C, B, D, etc.) and try to learn each note’s tendencies.
Practice the chromatic scale, starting from the low Bb and going up to an E or F. Try to maintain a steady tone as you work your way up and down the range of the saxophone.
Make sure you are breathing and supporting the air from the diaphragm. Keep the sound warm as you play in the higher range (experiment lowering your tongue and playing around with the air, and try to match the pitch of a higher note to the same note in a lower octave).
Work on the band piece with a metronome to stabilize time and watch out for the changing rhythms (especially in passages where the melody might be the same). Look over the last two systems of the first page and first couple of the second page (watch out for the quarter triplet rhythm, as well as duration of notes – quarter notes vs half note vs whole note). Make sure the low quarter notes (B) in the beginning of the song are more controlled (try not to honk them out, but let the note ring/play out instead).
Best of luck with the practicing, and wishing your saxophone a speedy recovery!
See you all next week!