You can play a lot of notes during your solo on sax.

That can sound ‘impressive’.

But sometimes you can take away half those notes and sound just as good or better.

Some parts are just ‘filler’ or noise.

In science and engineering, we talk about signal vs. noise.  The meaningful part and the random noise that sometimes covers up the meaningful signal.

There’s also the matter of making the pieces you want people to hear stand out.  That means landing on certain notes of the harmony, hitting and accenting specific places, bringing the dynamics up or down, etc.

One exercise you can do is to write out an etude over chord changes using a solid line of eighth notes.  Then go through and eliminate some of them.

See how you can make it sound.

The solid eighth notes might be a starting point, but it’s not what you want to play onstage.

Using space is important, and it makes your saxophone solo more musical!