There’s a group on Facebook called ‘Beginning Saxophone Players‘ that you can join if you answer three questions. I’m giving feedback to people. There is a song to work on each week. This week is ‘My Way’.

I left this as a comment on Christopher’s video.

He spent some time learning this song. And he has a good start on learning the tune.

However, I wasn’t sure why he was doing several things wrong when he played.

It turns out he was basically learning from sheet music and a playalong on youtube.

Here is what I said:

So the good news is that you can probably fix a lot of how you played it fairly easily.

The bad news is that you learned from sheet music that is pretty wrong in multiple places.

You probably want relearn it not using that sheet music.

I made a point about the notes, not so much because of the notes themselves, but because of what they allow you to do.

If you play it in the same key as me, you can play along with me. And in this case, you can play along with Frank Sinatra which is probably the definitive version of this song.

You could listen to the song a lot and then play it starting on C.

Probably avoid that video though. You basically practiced and learned a flawed version of the song both in terms of the notes and the rhythm.

Beginning Saxophone Players