Two things ...

[losaavedra]

OK ... I've been on alto (from not even having anything else reed orientated!) for just over a year. Two things are really bugging me, and I think I need both to be resolved in order to progress:

1) How to bend the darn notes.

2) How to get a grip on reading the dots!

The first is bugging me because, as a sometime blues player, I can bend notes all day on a guitar, and even more so on a harp (harmonica) kinda easily. I've even taught my kids (and the odd son-in-law) how to do it over the years ... but can I do it on a sax (uhm) NO!!! And yeah, I've read the stuff about 'dropping your jaw?, and that its 'all to do with embrochure', etc., ... but it still ain't working. I've tried all sorts of stuff in these attempts, all to no avail. On a blues harp the bends (at least the ones I do) are all 'suck'. It doesn't get me anywhere suckin' on a reed! Some of you will say its all to do with practice, practice, practice ... but that's not a lot of help when still nothing happens!

The second thing, inability to read the dots, has always been with me. My hang-up dates back to me being around seven years old and having piano lessons from me Mum (God bless her, etc., as she's long gone) every day at 4 o'clock ... OK ... I know that's over half a century ago already! But the problem, I now find, was that she went in for the 'if its on the lines' then its the 'Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit' thing, as opposed to if its in the spaces then its 'F-A-C-E'. For the bass clef we had a similar 'Good Boys Deserve Fruit Always' and 'All Cows Eat Grass'. Now, you may all think this is terribly amusing but, here am I, a 65-year-old bloke, who can't get that stuff out of my head. What I want to be able to do is see a dot and instantly play it, notwithstanding all that fruit (or the cows!) getting in the way between sight of a 'note' and then the sound coming out.

Now I know there are a whole load of 'ear' players on this forum. I personally am still playing EVERYTHING by ear (guitar, keyboards, and now sax) after all these years. Yes, I get a load of enjoyment out of doing just that ... BUT, when I hear a really good bit of jazz, and subsequently find I have the dots for it to hand, it really frustrates me that I can't even attempt to play it without a couple of hours spent messing about using pencilled annotations to translate it into fruit and cows first. What I really want is the ability to just 'see it' and instantly 'play it' without all these intermediate steps having to occur first. Its particularly frustrating to me that the sax is a (more or less) 'one-note-at-a-time' instrument ... so it OUGHT to be easy to just read the score and instantly play what's represented there.

 

[jadoube]

Mike,

I feel your pain. Ain't got no solutions though - 53 and don't have all those years on other instruments so its coming cold for me.

Be thankful you didn't have to put up with my last two training bands.

This evening, stand in conductor. So what do they all do - practice their bit while she's talking. Practice their bit while she's counting us in, damn it practice their bit while others are playing. Can't hear a thing.

No trumpet so "let the tenor play that part" - and blow me just as I'm being counted in to play it cold a couple start talking - to me!!!

Amazing disrespectful to the conductor helping out, and to others in the band. I just cannot comprehend it. Can't even blame the youth of today cos it wasn' just the young uns doing it.

Last friday's band, little kid playing the lead. Always does, the conductor teaches it to him at lessons then brings the piece in for the rest of us to sight read backing for him. Lad couldn't do his part so - that piece gets pulled from the stand. Grrrr. I wouldn't mind his looking after the youngster exclusively so much except I'm the worse player.

And for this I miss two nights practice on the stuff my teacher gives me to work on for next week. 😡



Sorry. Thanks for letting me get that out of my system.

 

[young_col]

Mike
I'm of an age almost half way between you and John and I've been playing alto almost a year. Also I have played some instruments - recorder, trumpet, clarinet - when younger, but never quite mastered reading the dots.

I've determined that while learning the instrument I will also learn to read properly and get a bit of theory learnt as well. I just wish someone had explained the cycle of fifths relationship to me 30 or more years ago and it would all have been so much easier now! I guess it is just determination and practice, although I do find the AB Guide to Music Theory (Part 1 at least) very useful - by Eric Taylor, ABRSM publishing, ISBN1-85472-446-0 (tho' mine's a bit old, inherited from musical son).

As to bending notes, bending up a tone or semi-tone I find OK, more so in the upper range. At my stage of progress I find I can do it with played in reeds, fairly soft. Difficult to analyse, but I think what I do is to give the air column a bit of a push and just tighten my lip slightly.

Don't know if that helps.
John - was down your way yesterday, having lunch with some friends. Queen's College Arms, Pambers End, Tadley. Good beer (Badgers) but wouldn't rush back for the food!
Colin

 

[andrew_sanders]

Hi Mike
I know this will sound really boring but one of the best ways to learn is to get a copy of Scales and arpeggios for the sax and go through them very slowly. Don't cut corners look at the note and play it and eventually it goes in. The copy I've used was second hand from Oxfam for a quid. First scale F major get that sorted, then move on to G major. Learn the arpeggios up and down and before long you can look at the note and know the fingering even before you pick up the instrument.
Boring but solid.
Andy

 

[spike]

I'll just refer to bending the notes Mike,
try to concentrate on what you do with your mouth when you suck and bend on yer blues harp, do long bending notes on the harp and really concentrate on what's happening, now try to do the same thing on yer blues harp but blow and bend, it's like you've got the note in your mouth and you simply chew on it and manipulate it. You're already half way there with your harp playing, the penny will drop. Using the jaw will only give you enough bend for a little vibrato. Once you can do it you'll also be able manipulate your sound and save money on mouthpieces.
Got any snow in Spain?

 

[losaavedra]

Thanks for these replies guys ...
John, getting stuff off your chest always helps in the end ... my thing has been smoldering away for six months or so!
Colin, bending up totally defeats me at present ... I can do a wobbly bend down (but only a little way) but then it all goes haywire! I've got AB Bk 1, bedtime reading (over and over again) many nights. I'll do some more of that though.
Andrew, the problem I have with scales is that I can manage a scale in just about any key (some easier than others) via a sort of 'intuition' that comes with ear playing. And I can do that on sax, guitar or keyboard unfortunately. I sometimes wish I'd never been an 'ear' player because it makes it too easy for me to ignore the dots (or for the meaning of the dots themselves never to lastingly sink in). I suspect all ear players have the same problem.
Spike, recently I've tried relaxing more when trying bends. The temptation is to say to oneself 'I gotta bend that note' ... but for me it never happens then ... I just blow harder and harder in the hope that it will (but it never does!). My more recent (one-day-old) approach is to take it more gently ... maybe that'll work ... I'm encouraged to think it might! Hey ... snow in Spain ... haven't seen any in our part in the 12 years we've been here although its rumored to occur further north. I'm in UK in March for a couple of weeks (daughter having a baby) so kinda hoping it will have warmed up by then. Excuse for me to bring my sax over and jam with my son in Hackney!

Generally, I really appreciate these responses, I should've come here earlier on this!

 

[peedee]

Mike, I envy your ability to play by ear, I wish I could. I hear, or know a good tune that I would like to be able to play, and try to play it, but it all comes out wrong! So I have to look for the music to get it right. And even when I can play it ok from the music, if I put away the music, I still can't play it!!
I don't think I'm particularly clever, but I found learning to read from a basic self tutor book quite easy. You know the middle line is the note B, you look up the fingering for B on the fingering chart, look at the note and play it. Next you see that the next note up, in the space between the middle line and the one above it is C, so you look up the fingering...... and so on. Soon you should play the key of C. Then go on to learning the names and values of the notes, half notes, quarter notes, four beat notes etc, and play accordingly. I agree with Andy, a good way is to do the scales, starting with C (no sharps or flats), and progress to one with only one sharp or flat, then to ones with two sharps or flats and so on.
As for learning the deeper theory of music, ie fifths, fourths, dorians etc, I think it's purely optional. You can play a good improvisation, a good tune without having to know the in's and out's, I leave that to the academics, those who are young enough to study music for a career, to obtain grades etc.
As for bending, maybe you need a different mouthpiece, one with a wider gap between the reed and face. Can you vibrato? That's all it is basically, in slow motion. And it is just tightening and relaxing the bottom lip. I found it easier to do vibrato first, rapid movement of the lip, and then slow it down. Admittedly, it's easier on the lower notes than the higher ones for me, and the bending range is a bit limited, but comes with practice.
This is my personal experience of it anyway, hope it helps :erm:

 

[young_col]

Just a poste script before bed, Mike! Yes I keep the AB Guide by my bedside as well and just dip into it - was looking at cadences last night. And like Andy I have the ABRSM scales and arps book - that's what I have determined myself to get through; I have set myself to learn one or two (esp minors) scales at a time off the page and then do them from memory. I go through all the learnt ones from memory all as part of warm up. Dominant 7s and diminisheds haven't kept up with the scales though!
Colin

 

[Bobby G]

Mike, I think the note bending thing, in a physics sense anyway, is possibly to do with being a combination of a slight lessening of pressure on the reed and a slight enlarging of the mouth cavity, hence the slight drop of the jaw. All of this will encourage the note to go flat to a greater or lesser degree depending on the amount of lip pressure and jaw-drop. However, I'm not a physics expert so this is only my theory.

To actually achieve this, it might be easier to finger a note somewhere around the middle of the horn, say a G, then intentionally play it flat and bring it up to true pitch rather than trying to bend down from the true pitch. The more you do it, the easier it will become to control in both directions (I know, just a variation on practise, practise, practise!), eventually on some notes it becomes quite easy to get a bend of about three semitones. Just start with as slack an embouchure as you can manage to actually get a note out then try and bring it up to pitch - the actual movement needed isn't actually that great.

I wonder (again, just a theory) if it would help to purposely put the mouthpiece on too far so the horn is playing sharp, then trying to play in tune. If nothing else, it might help you to recognise what you need to do to flatten a note, which can then be applied to bending notes. Just an idea, not one I tried as I never really had that much trouble with the note-bending.

There's an interesting article called the 'thousand-note-scale' (there is a link somewhere here) which while it doesn't go into the techniques needed does have some great stuff about bending up to, rather than down from, a pitch, especially on the blue notes.

Incidentally, as you may be aware, my musical route is not so dissimilar to yours - formal piano lessons as a kid, picked up the guitar and bass at age 14 (totally self-taught and played by ear), then the saxophone about 35 years later (again self-taught and played by ear); however, some of the early training must have had an effect because I have retained or picked up a certain amount of theoretical knowledge around scales, cycle of fifths, chord structures etc. on the other hand, my attempts to play blues harp were doomed from the start, I never really got the hang of it.

Good luck with it anyway - at least if you have a feel for the blues, which sounds likely given your guitar and harp playing, you probably have a good idea of what it is you are trying to achieve. All the best.

 

[stephanie]

losaavedra wrote:
The second thing, inability to read the dots, has always been with me. My hang-up dates back to me being around seven years old and having piano lessons from me Mum (God bless her, etc., as she's long gone) every day at 4 o'clock ... OK ... I know that's over half a century ago already! But the problem, I now find, was that she went in for the 'if its on the lines' then its the 'Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit' thing, as opposed to if its in the spaces then its 'F-A-C-E'. For the bass clef we had a similar 'Good Boys Deserve Fruit Always' and 'All Cows Eat Grass'. Now, you may all think this is terribly amusing but, here am I, a 65-year-old bloke, who can't get that stuff out of my head. What I want to be able to do is see a dot and instantly play it, notwithstanding all that fruit (or the cows!) getting in the way between sight of a 'note' and then the sound coming out.

Oh I remember the lad and his flippin' apples... I was taught the same way. I've been trying to think about how I stopped thinking about apples and transferred it to the dots. Especially as I've been trying to get my head around transposing on sight, and that sort of means you have to relearn what you are reading. I think, ultimately it comes down to practise and starting by writing the notes under neath until you find you don't need them. A bit like learning a foreign language?

I do know that I look for the C and think up or down 1, or 2, or however many from that (this is the C in the middle of the treble clef BTW, not middle C - is it C5 they call it these days?).

This may be of no help whatsoever. But I hope it is.

Oh, on the bending, I can only get 1.5 semitones, but I was taught to play a note then, yes, relax the jaw by moving it as though you were saying 'WOAR' (except you need to think woooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar). It did work for me.

 

[thomsax]

Note bending: Longtone- and overtone-exercises helped me. I also did some adjustments on the ligature. Try to loose the screw(s). I got a new ligature, Rovner Massload, and most of the reed is free. The notebending is easy with that ligature.

Thomas

 

[Linky Lee]

with bending up, it's much harder than bending down, it is also not possible to bend up as far as you can down.

When people bend up on a saxophone what they are usually doing is fingering the note you want to bend up to, and starting the note with the jaw dropped, throat opened, loose embouchure etc. (the opposite of guitar, where you fret the note you want to bend) Then bringing it up to pitch. - This is very hard to master as you have to gain very good control over bending down first before you can get the control needed to start a note flat and bend up to it.

 

[Mikec]

On the sight-reading thing, Mike, you're aiming rather high on wanting to "see a note and instantly play it". That takes years of "seeing the notes and roughly playing something like it then having several more goes" and playing it, for many of us, I would say.
As for bending, I can bend about a fourth, now, and I've done that by keeping a spare mouthpiece and reed in my pocket and practicing on that in odd moments (when no-one's near!). It's like all the others have said, really, you just "think" bend. You definitely don't blow harder, though.

 

[losaavedra]

Thanks for all these replies. Done some hard thinking today on all this and just about to settle down to an hour-or-so to figure it out with 'sax in hand'! I'll first try and acknowledge what's been said most recently ...

Pete: I think the ability to play by ear is a two edged sword. Within a month of having my alto I could honk out (good choice of word!) most of several standards (21 to be exact, I just looked at the list) without the first idea what key I was playing them in ... it just depended on the note I started on! I remember moving on to Paul Desmond's 'Emily' (a tune I really like) and that's when the trouble started ... because I couldn't remember enough of it to do an 'ear' play after listening to the mp3. So I found the sheet and the fog of pencilled annotations followed ... but I still haven't got it and the frustrations have continued from there on. Anyway was talking to my wife today and she dug out her old school recorder book. Its for children ... but that's what I'm going to go through now. Everything's in the key of C and all the tunes are very simple ... but that's where I need to start I think. On the 'bending' subject I've got two mps, one the anonymous stock thing that came with the sax and a Yam 6C. I'll take your advice and try to nail down the vibrato better ... the bends I'm getting at present (sometimes) are all accidents and unintended ... once I've got the hang of controlling them I can start putting them in the right places!!!

Colin: I wanted to ask, and this is as good a place as any ... should I be worrying about transposing? It was another area I got hung up on when first getting the sax. The conclusion I came to (maybe wrongly) was that because every other instrument I play (or would try to play along with) is scored in concert pitch I dropped the 'transposed' note names completely from my fingering chart. Thus, on my alto, the 'two fingers on left hand' held down on the two top buttons produces a concert C as far as I'm concerned and it sounds the same as middle C on a keyboard. Working on the basis that I'm never likely to try to join a concert or marching band with other horn players I couldn't see the point of complicating things by referring to Concert C as being an A. Am I missing something that will cause me problems later?

Bob: Good stuff! I'll try all your advice tonight and see what I can make happen. Will also look up the article you mention. Pity you had no luck with blues harp although I might say that, within my box of ten-holers, a fair number are impossible to get a bent note out of (presumably for some manufacturing reason).

Stephanie: Yes, an evening with the recorder book (all in C!) should get some of it into my brain! C5 is an octave up from middle C (C4) as you say. 1.5 semi-tones sound pretty good to me (starting from nowt!). I'll try the WOAR too.

Thomas: I'll try anchoring the reed in different places on the stock to see what happens.

Linky: All advice will be tried, will continue to attempt getting the note down (and staying there!) initially.

Mike: Appreciate I might be trying to run before I can walk regarding the 'see-it ... play-it' notion. Its just that the rigmarole I'm going through at the moment, with the fruit and cows, is so counter productive I lose interest after the first few notes and go back to 'tootling' something else entirely! I'll try the spare mouthpiece method, the dogs'll love that!

OK ... now to try all this out, more later no doubt!

Thanks again ...

 

[Rogerb]

Mike

Maybe I should come over one day and we can 'compare notes'?....ha!

I have a pretty good ear but everything else is still rather rough !

I am in UK until 26th...perhaps sometime thereafter, if you'd like?

(I may even have a new sax to show-off when I return 😉 )

 

[losaavedra]

Excellent idea Roger ... see PM ... everything I do is pretty rough!

 

[young_col]

Mike
re transposing, I am not the most learned person on this to advise you. But yes, you're right the C to A difference is because the alto is transposed up a major 6th on concert C. If you play for your own personal amusement then it will work (I think?), but if you do read anything for alto you'll have to transpose all the key signatures and every note. If you ever took up tenor you'd have to do everything differently again as that is transposed by a major 9th. As they stand, as a family of transposing instruments, the keying is virtually the same across all of them.
Get a C Melody then you'll be OK!
Colin

Any one else help or add to this?
Colin