Received a question about saxophone technique.
Hi Neal
I hope this e-mail finds you doing well.
I have a question for you if you have time?
I’m working on slurring, when I go from D to C even though I have released the octave key sometimes I still get the high C? If I tongue the note it doesn’t happen. It seems the sound wave if not broken holds the octave key down??
Could my horn be haunted? Ha Ha!
Is that normal, is it me or the horn? It is not happening all the time. Maybe water in the octave pip?
Take care thanks for your time.
Tim
My response:
Hey Tim,
That’s actually a very good question that you’re asking.
It’s probably not a haunted saxophone or water in the pipe.
You can actually play up an octave from the low notes very easily without using the octave key. You can even play up two octaves or more. We can this playing the harmonic series, also known as ‘overblowing’ sometimes.
When you tongue in between notes, you create a space that allows you to ‘reset’ everything. So pretty much anything will come out cleaner as opposed to slurring it.
You’ll learn a lot by slurring through the music about your technique though.
Going from C to D involves a lot of fingers. Not just one, like going from G to A or something like that.
Are all your fingers moving perfectly in sync?
Probably not.
Slow things down and try and figure out what you’re doing and you’ll be on your way to fixing the problem.
Let me know how it goes.
-Neal