A few of my students have
this one it's very geared towards jazz/blues and has blues tunes and exercises very early on.
I found the opening sentence of a review of this book (on Amazon) quite amusing...
This book sort of does what it says but omits to tell you how much time and effort are required - i would guess about five years of regular practice to reach the end if you know nothing about music and have never played a sax before.
Errr...yeeees.
I am a complete beginner in sax, but not in teaching or learning generally, and I was interested to see the many various and diverse styles of teach-yourself-sax books currently available. Some start with simple tunes, right away - and some go nowhere near scales at all, while other have a good mix of both.
I bought myself "
The Complete Saxophone Player" (full 4 volume edition, originally compiled by Raphael Ravenscroft and, sadly sans
Baker Street) which is mainly tune based, and which introduces notes gradually. My teacher thinks that some of the tunes in the earlier sections are very well selected and work pertectly for teaching certain basic techniques and introducing the second octave, for example.
Following a suggestion in a another thread in this forum, I bought "
Playing The Saxophone" by Rob Buckland. The style of the text is quite serious and academic, and strangely appeals to me for that reason. I bought the download version and have put it on my iPad and have been working through the detailed chapters on posture, embouchure and breathing, so far.
There are lots of very scary technical exercises, and chapters with titles like "
Phonetic Superimposition", "
Microtonal Fingering Adjustments" and "
Jazz Articulation and Inflections", which are both exciting sounding and the main reason I tend to read Stephen King, instead when I get a free moment.
But the two books mentioned are, for me, a good balance between the easy start and the long term serious study that I think I need.
Stephen
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