Been working on saxophone technique a bit over the last couple of months.  It all starts with the fingers.

How you press and lift your fingers affects your sound a great deal more than you might think.

Slamming them down triggers reactions in the rest of your body which changes your sound.

Even moving your body as you practice affects your sound.  It’s a variable that you want to eliminate as you practice.  You have more control if you don’t move anything except your fingers.

During performance, go wild!  Don’t want to be a statue on stage.  But you’re not performing when you’re practicing, you’re improving how you play.

Received this email from James,

Hello Neal,
My biggest frustration is keeping my fingers on the keys, especially my right hand.  I have been taking the advice from your website to practice the movements slower and I have had some success, but when I do not focus on keeping my fingers where they belong, they float high above the keys.  What other training measures can I implement to get my fingers to stay where they belong?
Sincerely,
James

My response:

Hey James,
I can see that, I’ve had more trouble keeping my right hand on the keys, something about the feel of the left hand makes it a little easier to keep the curve there it seems.

To be honest, it’s not a small feat to get your fingers to stay on the keys.

Javier offered this suggestion,

“….practice in front of a mirror and watch his fingers move, learn to feel how the fingers feel close to the keys and do it slowly over and over again to teach the fingers muscles how it’s supposed to feel. Then close his eyes and keep practicing and open them to keep checking and learn to feel the corrected distance from the keys… and stay relaxed in both hands which is imperative as you speed it up”

So a mirror and really slowing things down can help.  Your muscles have memory and you have trained them in a different way for a long time.

The change won’t take place instantly.

If you want to take some personal lessons with me I can help you more directly.  But I can’t really just tell you how to make it work right without seeing what you’re doing and giving you feedback over an extended period of time since you’ll need to work on it for a while.

Let me know if you’re interested.

-Neal