Ezio asked about Saxophone Embouchure –
I am 52 and I just started learning the sax tenor.
I had my first lesson last week.
My previous music experience amounts to 1 year of studying the piano 20 years ago.
As expected I am finding the embouchure very hard so much so that I am trying different ways like with the lower lip sticking out rather the folding over the teeth.
Do you know exercises to strengthen the muscles around the lips?
By the way my teacher is clarinet player who also owns an alto sax.
Is there a difference between the embouchure for the clarinet and the one for the sax?
Any suggestions are welcome.
Regards.
Ezio
Hello Ezio,
Good to hear from you. That’s great you started learning saxophone, you should have a lot of fun with it. I have played just a bit of piano myself, but mostly I do saxophone. How did your first lesson go?
For embouchure….. you might be okay sticking the bottom lip out a bit more, but don’t put your teeth on the reed at all. I started playing clarinet before saxophone myself- the difference is that you need to be a bit tighter on clarinet and it requires more control. Therefore it’s better to go from playing clarinet over to saxophone rather than the opposite. If you’re not planning on playing clarinet, I wouldn’t worry about that though.
You’ll develop the muscles naturally as you play, but one thing that really helps is long tones. What I do is take a breath, start on low E and play it as quietly as I can then move up to F. You use one breath for two notes and go up chromatically. I go up one octave and then come back down. Does that description make sense? I was thinking about making a video of myself doing it…. so I could do that this week sometime.
-Neal