How Long Does It Take to Learn Saxophone?

Learning How to Play Saxophone

So you want to learn the saxophone, but you don’t want it to take years before you can play something that is fun and sounds good. You’re a grownup and you know that it takes a long time to get really good on any instrument, but if there was a way to accelerate the whole process, you’d prefer that right?

Here’s the thing, the saxophone is traditionally taught to kids in school and the goal is to get them to play their written parts accurately in the school band. So consequently pretty much every music teacher or method book is going to teach you as though you were a child in the school band.

This method is very long, most of the energy goes into just learning to read sheet music, and you’ll never learn how to play any of your favorite music. This way is great for school kids and band, but terrible and excruciatingly boring for adults.

Luckily there’s a better way, and I’m going to show it to you so you can get what amounts to an enormous head start compared to going the traditional learning route. In fact, everything I’m going to show you will accelerate your progress by several years compared to the traditional method book system.

This doesn’t mean never go to a saxophone teacher, you absolutely want someone to help you in sound development and lots of other technical things that are best done in person if possible, but if you’re a beginner and “Mary Had A Little Lamb” is not your vibe, I got you covered.

Play Sax by Ear Crash Course

First I’m going to lay out how I teach adult beginners so they get off to the best possible start, and at the end, I’m going to tell you how to get access to my entirely free “Play  Sax by Ear Crash Course“, which goes into greater detail.

Now if you are a complete beginner and you’ve never played a note or if you haven’t played the saxophone since middle school, I got you. Go ahead and watch the rest of this but I also have another free Beginner/Refresher course designed specifically for you where you get all the fingerings, how to make a good sound, and develop the best habits from day one. You can get both of these courses at the same place and the link is in the description or go to bettersax.com and click the button at the top.

The Pentatonic Scale

So, assuming you already know how to put your horn together and play most of the notes, let’s get started. I like to start people out learning the pentatonic scale. It has only five notes and is by far the most used sound in all popular music styles in the western world. I’m talking about Blues, Rock, Pop, Hiphop, Country, and Soul. This pentatonic scale sound is so common that once you learn it it will feel like you’ve known it your whole life, and that’s because you have.

Now with this pentatonic scale we can do two amazing things right away. The first is to play the melody to songs we know and love. There are countless melodies that are pentatonic scale based, meaning nearly every note is one of those five in the scale. Here are a few you know that come to mind: “Superstition”, “Waiting in Vain”, “My Girl”, “Hotel California”, “Georgia on my Mind”, “Your Song”, and “I Want You Back”.

Learning Melodies Without Sheet Music

Now you might ask, “Don’t I need to know how to read sheet music for this?”.  No, you don’t. Trust me. When you go through my free course on this you’ll understand how easy it is. Anybody can do this in a matter of minutes.

Once you learn some melodies this way, you’re already light years ahead of someone learning to read “Hot Cross Buns” in their beginner method book, and we haven’t even really started yet.

Improvising Using the Pentatonic Scale

The second thing you can do with this amazing pentatonic scale is improvise. Yes, you can start improvising immediately. No special license required, no music degree, and certainly not years of lessons before you can just start playing and experimenting with music. You can take the pentatonic scale and improvise melodies, and there are no wrong notes.

You can play using those five notes and mixing them up in different ways. After a while you can start letting your ears guide me to the next note you want to hear. It becomes intuitive, like so many other things we do in life. It’s entirely natural to do this and it’s how humans have been making music for tens of thousands of years, before sheet music ever existed.

It’s fun and once you start doing this, you won’t want to stop. In that Free Play Sax by Ear Crash Course, I explain everything you need to do step by step. It’s so easy people often tell me they can’t believe what they’re able to do in such a short time and you can certainly learn to do all this in the first day or two of having your saxophone. Or you can go down the tired old traditional path.

Play Along with Songs You Love

And last thing before I let you go get started on that course, once you know the pentatonic scale in a few different keys, you can start playing along with endless songs you know and love. I can just put my favorite songs on and play along. Now keep in mind, this is just the beginning, but it’s a much faster beginning that will lead to a lifetime of faster learning.

Once you’re ready to move on to the next steps, I’ve got you covered there as well with tons of videos on the BetterSax YouTube Channel, as well as a whole bunch of courses on how to solve all the typical problems you’re going to come across along the journey and how to reach all the different goals you’re going to set for yourself. So to answer the question “how long does it take to learn the saxophone?”, it really depends on who you learn from and the approach they give you. I wish I learned this approach a lot earlier but I’m very happy to share it with you now to save you enormous amount of time. Get the free courses I mentioned earlier linked above, or visit BetterSax.com to sign up. I’ll see you in there.