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It's been pretty quiet on the bass sax front over here, so I thought I'd share how I learned this new skill to open up more bass sax playing opportunities for myself. Please feel free to share your own experiences and advice here as well.
I've been playing bass sax for a few years now, mostly in a small trad jazz band where I improvise the bass lines 100% from the written chord symbols, mostly two-beat lines (root and fifth) plus some Rollini-style embellishments. But a local 10 piece trad jazz band needed someone to replace their tuba player and asked if I could do it on bass sax. I really couldn't. But I really wanted to. So I said yes and went about figuring out how to pull it off. Since this band used entirely written charts with no chord symbols, I had no choice but to learn to read the tuba/bass violin parts and play them on bass sax. Luckily I had 6 months before our first gig. Turns out I needed every bit of that to climb the mountain ahead of me.
First I had to decide how I was going to approach this problem. I could learn to read the bass clef parts as-is, then transpose each note up a step on the fly. Or I could read the bass parts as-is and just learn a new set of fingerings, i.e., read and F, finger a G and think of the new note as an F. Or I could treat it like learning an entirely new clef, Alto clef, so the note I read matched the fingerings I already knew. Since I already had a little bass clef reading skill from playing piano and tuba years back, I opted for the first approach - read as-is and transpose up a step.
My bass clef reading skills weren't all that great to begin with. So I spent the first month with flash cards until I could read the bass clef notes instantly and reliably. Next, I had to tackle the transposition. I did this with the sax, fingering the note that was one step higher than I was reading. This process took me a solid two months to get reasonably fast and mistake-free. I spent the subsequent three months reading every tuba/trombone part I could find. Unfortunately the band leader would only share a few actual bass parts with me ahead of time. The rest I'd be sight reading at the gig.
One wrinkle I only learned once I started reading lots of different parts is that tuba and bass violin parts aren't the same. Bass violin parts are written an octave higher than they sound. So I had to read up high, and play down an octave. Tuba parts are written as they sound. So they're written lower on the staff and don't have to be taken up an octave. My main difficulty was not being great at reading the higher ledger lines. Otherwise, it wasn't too terrible going from one type of part to another.
Finally, D-day came, and the first gig was upon me. Most of the tunes had fairly simple written two-beat bass lines. A few had quarter note walking lines, but at pretty brisk tempos. I'd say I did ok, at least well enough to get asked back for the next gig. At least now I have all the parts which I can practice on my own. It's still a work in progress as my old brain doesn't retain as much or work as fast as it used to.
I've been playing bass sax for a few years now, mostly in a small trad jazz band where I improvise the bass lines 100% from the written chord symbols, mostly two-beat lines (root and fifth) plus some Rollini-style embellishments. But a local 10 piece trad jazz band needed someone to replace their tuba player and asked if I could do it on bass sax. I really couldn't. But I really wanted to. So I said yes and went about figuring out how to pull it off. Since this band used entirely written charts with no chord symbols, I had no choice but to learn to read the tuba/bass violin parts and play them on bass sax. Luckily I had 6 months before our first gig. Turns out I needed every bit of that to climb the mountain ahead of me.
First I had to decide how I was going to approach this problem. I could learn to read the bass clef parts as-is, then transpose each note up a step on the fly. Or I could read the bass parts as-is and just learn a new set of fingerings, i.e., read and F, finger a G and think of the new note as an F. Or I could treat it like learning an entirely new clef, Alto clef, so the note I read matched the fingerings I already knew. Since I already had a little bass clef reading skill from playing piano and tuba years back, I opted for the first approach - read as-is and transpose up a step.
My bass clef reading skills weren't all that great to begin with. So I spent the first month with flash cards until I could read the bass clef notes instantly and reliably. Next, I had to tackle the transposition. I did this with the sax, fingering the note that was one step higher than I was reading. This process took me a solid two months to get reasonably fast and mistake-free. I spent the subsequent three months reading every tuba/trombone part I could find. Unfortunately the band leader would only share a few actual bass parts with me ahead of time. The rest I'd be sight reading at the gig.
One wrinkle I only learned once I started reading lots of different parts is that tuba and bass violin parts aren't the same. Bass violin parts are written an octave higher than they sound. So I had to read up high, and play down an octave. Tuba parts are written as they sound. So they're written lower on the staff and don't have to be taken up an octave. My main difficulty was not being great at reading the higher ledger lines. Otherwise, it wasn't too terrible going from one type of part to another.
Finally, D-day came, and the first gig was upon me. Most of the tunes had fairly simple written two-beat bass lines. A few had quarter note walking lines, but at pretty brisk tempos. I'd say I did ok, at least well enough to get asked back for the next gig. At least now I have all the parts which I can practice on my own. It's still a work in progress as my old brain doesn't retain as much or work as fast as it used to.
