Beginner Which resources should I use to teach myself?

[lydian]

@mizmar,
In @Fatih ’s case, fundamentals need to be learned first - fingerings, embouchure, basic technique. Transcribing is further out in the future, I hope. While it might be fun to try to play some tunes by ear now, attempting Giant Steps before you get a significant number of fingerings under your belt would probably be counterproductive.

 

[Pete Effamy]

I find myself messing around instead of actually learning. It's practice but, still.

Beg to differ, but it isn’t practice. Can be a lot of fun, can also be quite educational at times, but we tend to revert to what we know and can already play, so it’s not really practice.

 

[mizmar]

@mizmar,
In @Fatih ’s case, fundamentals need to be learned first - fingerings, embouchure, basic technique. Transcribing is further out in the future, I hope. While it might be fun to try to play some tunes by ear now, attempting Giant Steps before you get a significant number of fingerings under your belt would probably be counterproductive.

Yeah. I realized I'd mixed up Faith and Freddie, so deleted my comment. My bad.

 

[Pete Effamy]

I should also add I'm more interested in learning genres like jazz, smooth jazz, and funk

It’s interesting about which elements define style: their importance etc

With Smooth Jazz, melodies are usually very simple, but they’re heavy on the quality of tone, inflections and vibrato - especially on alto.

Rarely do you hear players use vibrato in the early years (especially when they have teachers) - it gets missed, even though the sax essentially is a “vibrato instrument” (like the flute, violin etc) - it is usually played with vibrato on most, or many of the notes depending upon style and which sax - Bebop tenor for example can be quite straight.

So, if you can look into developing vibrato it will really help you sound better and more authentic.

 

[Pete Thomas]

I have moved some off topic posts about reading note names to its own thread:

Beginner - Learning to read standard notation vs using the note names - Cafesax

so I write out a song lyric and add the note above the syllable. We've another colleague, @eb424, who's fond of that approach. There are many threads, here, discussing questions arising you might find useful to read.

cafesaxophone.com

If you want notifications for posts in the new thread you may need to click on the Watch button at the top of the thread

 

[Selmer10G]

To the OP: you might look at John Laporta's "A guide to Jazz improvisation" as a supplementary resource (I have used it e.g. to build up confidence improvising in certain keys when trying to improve my soloing in e.g. a real book standard).
In particular, there are a lot of auditory based exercises where you listen to a short musical phrases on a backing track, and then copy them, then improvise "answers". with what you wrote about (not) reading notation, you may find this approach helpful. Good luck. Another resource that starts out with a similar approach is Buster Birch "Beginner jazz soloing" although I think more reading of notation will be needed, sooner, if you try to use that one.

 

[John Laughter]

so I'll make sure to get at least a couple of lessons in person in some big cities.

Very important Fatih. In addition to all of the excellent suggestions above, face to face lessons are the best way to go for so many reasons. Some posters will disagree and that's fine. Hopefully you will contact an excellent sax teacher in one of those cities. Good luck!