A little blues from Mr. T.
Stanley Turrentine playing ‘Sister Sanctified’
Pink Panther Tenor Sax by Plas Johnson
Plas Johnson played tenor saxophone for the Pink Panther theme.
He has recorded a few CDs under his own name including The Blues, Hot Tracks, After You’ve Gone, and Positively.
I saw Plas Johnson in Carmel when I was 12, he signed and gave me a copy of his album “Positively”
Top Ten Saxophone Articles at Sax Station
So I was checking my stats, and here are some of my most popular articles. Let me know what you think of them!
Practicing Saxophone
Hillbilly Flamenco
Story of Captain T
Circle of Fifths (Fourths)
Sax Man (Jack Black) with Lyrics
John Coltrane Afro Blue- on Soprano
Joshua Redman Jazz Crimes
Saxophone Mouthpieces
Saxophone Sound
Saxophone Books
Pareto Principle for Practicing Saxophone
The Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) says that 20% of your efforts will produce 80% of the results. And many many things follow similar patterns.
It seems to be coming up in a lot of books I have read lately.
For saxophone, it might be the long tones you play for five minutes in your practice that account for most of the improvement in your sound.
Or it could be the two minutes you spend practicing the single difficult measure in a song that makes you sound a lot better overall.
Another way to get much more improvment is to simply pracice LESS. Maybe practice 20% of the material that you used to practice. And that smaller amount of material will become much better, strengthen your fundamentals, and therefore turn you into a better player faster.
Practicing Scales on Saxophone: How to Not Waste Your Time
Scales are important, they are one of the most important things to practice on any instrument, but they are not magic. If you aren’t carefully listening for the right things, just playing through them won’t give you any special abilities.
There are two reasons to play scales, and each requires a different sort of practice. Fortunately, if you are clever, you can combine them.
The first reason is technique.
When you are playing a piece it is too easy to hide inconsistencies behind the natural expression of the music. Scales leave you no room to hide. They are like a control group for experimentation with your technique. Any error is made obvious.
Practicing scales without rhythm will make bad habits stronger. Always play with good rhythm. If you cannot play fast with good rhythm, then slow down!
Slowing down is a very useful technique in practicing the saxophone.
The other reason to practice scales is improvisation.
You need to learn all these different sets of notes so you can follow chord changes. This is trickier to practice; if you are playing a solo you don’t want to just be running up and down scales, but you need to know them intimately.
Sonny Stitt and Charlie Parker
People said that Sonny Stitt sounded like Charlie Parker (on alto).
I wouldn’t say that’s a bad thing.
But you want your own sound, so he started playing tenor more and people said that he didn’t sound just like Parker anymore.
Charlie Parker was a pioneer in bebop, but Sonny Stitt took the style and cleaned it up.
I like listening to Stitt more than Charlie Parker myself, it’s more polished and I like his sound better.
Not to take away from Charlie Parker’s glory of course.
Funk Tuba Jon Sass
Heard about this guy from Evan Tate.
http://www.jonsass.com/
If you dig into the site a little bit you’ll find a few mp3s you can download from his CD so you can check out his style.
“Sassified” – selection of MP3 Tracks
Learning From Bad Musicians
You can learn something from all musicians.
Even if it’s what NOT to do.
But you almost always can find at least one good thing about any saxophone player or musician in general.
If you tell that person the good thing, it will encourage them too.
AND you can take that element and try and do it yourself.
It could be their stage presence, their style of clothes, interaction with the audience, one particular phrase that they used effectively, anything.
This was inspired by an article on Greg Vail’s site
Ear Training for Sax
Good Afternoon Neal,
What exercises/steps did you do to improve your ear training?
(-Delroy)
Hey Delroy,
As I have played with my R&B/Soul band that turned into a blues band, I haven’t read any music, just have been listening. The chord progressions aren’t too complicated, but that has still helped my ear.
Using Aebersold CDs would simulate that.
I also started transcribing- some Stanley Turrentine. And just working on recognizing chords, notes, etc with my teacher can help..
Another place which I have neglected a little and will go to again is http://musictheory.net That site lets you practice listening to intervals, chords, etc and quizzes you on it. I highly recommend it. And it doesn’t cost anything.
I have a book about ear training which I haven’t gotten too far into and I’m having my teacher look to see if he has something on it.
The most important thing for ear training (or anything else) is making constant small steps forward.
-Neal
My Top 7 Saxophone Practice Methods
- Using a Metronome (often on 2 & 4 for swing)
- Using a Tuner (for about four minutes during one half a long tones exercise)
- Long Tones Exercise (by George Young)
- Jackie McLean Scale Book
- Classical Method Book (usually Rubank)
- Jazz Phrases Book (David Baker right now)
- Transcription Book (currently Stanley Turrentine)
I use these things everyday, usually in this order.
For the last three, I listed the three I’m currently working on.
Those are a matter of personal preference and I have a number of those things.
Without music, life would be a mistake. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Without music, life would be a mistake.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
From a generally negative German philosopher, I love that he came out with this.
Probably most people would agree with the statement, even if they don’t play, they listen.
And you play saxophone, so you actually create music.
