If You Want to Become a Great Sax Player… Do This

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The Truth About Musical Ability

Most people don’t understand what separates strong musicians from those who can’t really play.

It’s very common for people to say he or she is so talented, I wish I had that kind of talent. As if great musicians were somehow gifted this magical ability to play well at birth.

While there are certainly people that have more natural ability than others, nobody’s born with the ability to play an instrument and improvise killer solos. That stuff has to be learned no matter how talented you are. As you start getting serious about playing music, you’ll inevitably realize that there is a lot you need to learn to get good.

Where to Start?

The sheer amount of information you need to know can feel overwhelming and a lot of people don’t even know where to begin to start chipping away at this mountain of stuff.

I play the saxophone so this is going to be from a saxophone player’s perspective and what I’m about to tell you is not exactly what I did, it’s actually stuff I’ve learned over decades of working on it. So hopefully this video will help you save a lot of time no matter where you’re at in your journey.

If you don’t know who I am, my name is Jay Metcalf. Tens of thousands of students are enrolled in BetterSax courses on how to play saxophone and on improvisation. I’m also the founder of the BetterSax line of saxophones and saxophone accessories that people are adopting all over the world.

How to Become a Great Saxophone Player

So here’s my process for becoming a strong musician, that will hopefully help you make the process more manageable, easier, and faster. Instead of asking yourself how do I become a great saxophone player, ask yourself what are the micro skills that all great saxophone players have.

You could focus your energy on each one of these skills one at a time, rather than looking at this monstrous task of doing it all at once. And all together that adds up to being a great saxophone player.

1. Sound

Your sound is the most important aspect of your saxophone playing, and with a beautiful sound you can go very far. But an unpleasant sound is a total deal breaker.

Developing a beautiful saxophone sound is pretty easy but first thing you need to know is what a beautiful sound sounds like, and the only way to do that is by listening to great saxophone players and emulating them as much as you possibly can.

There’s lots of ways to work on sound. Some people play long tones, some people work on ballads. Whatever you do, make sure you’re always thinking about your sound with every note.

Make it a habit to always play with your best sound and that’ll just become the way you always play. It’s very important to note that your sound on the saxophone is directly tied to how consistently you’re playing the thing. So if you’re not playing every day your sound is going to suffer.

Put simply, great saxophone players put a lot of attention into their sound and play the instrument every day in order to maintain that ability.

2. Rhythm

Great saxophone players have impeccable rhythm. Again, this micro skill on its own is not particularly difficult. It does take a significant amount of work and time though.

A strong sense of rhythm can be developed and just like learning to have a great sound, the best way to do this is to listen to great musicians and emulate the way they play. You gotta think rhythmically all the time.

The good news is we can learn something about rhythm from any musician regardless of what instrument they play. So we’re not stuck just copying our saxophone playing heroes. We can copy drummers, guitar players, piano players, anybody.

I find that developing a strong sense of rhythm works best when you put yourself in situations where you’re playing with other musicians who have better time feel than you do. So try to do that whenever you can. And if you can’t do that, play along with recordings.

3. Technique

Great saxophone players have a technical mastery of their instrument. Their fingers can move around the horn and execute anything that they need to play with a beautiful sound and solid rhythm.

Anyone can develop good technique. It just takes time practicing. But in order to maximize the time you spend practicing there are a few things you can do.

Practice On a Regular Basis & Diversify Your Practice Material

First, you have to vary the things you practice on a very regular basis. Don’t fall into the trap of practicing the same technical exercises for months or even years.

You’ll actually get better a lot faster by diversifying the stuff you work on. So if you already know your major scales start working on your harmonic minor and melodic minor and then diminished. If you can play those scales in patterns, start mixing up those patterns on a daily basis.

Our goal is to be able to play any combination of fingerings we may come across. But if we limit ourselves to only practicing basic scales and arpeggios, we’re not going to be prepared for most of the stuff we need to be ready for.

Play Slowly But Accurately

Another shortcut for developing technique is playing slowly and shooting for 100% accuracy. Slow and accurate is infinitely more efficient than fast with mistakes.

Developing clean and accurate technique is not that hard on its own. Anybody can develop this micro skill, you just have to work at it consistently and have patience.

4. Harmony

Great saxophone players have a thorough understanding of harmony. This is important for any genre of music but especially jazz, or anything where you’re going to be improvising.

Harmony refers to chord progressions and the music theory we use to communicate that information. Now, while it can get somewhat complex, 99.9% of songs are composed using a relatively small set of harmonic building blocks.

With knowledge of only a dozen or so harmonic patterns, you’ve got everything you need for thousands of songs in every genre of music.

On its own, becoming proficient in harmony is easy and anyone can learn this micro skill. Spending 5 minutes a day at the piano playing chord progressions would be enough over time.

5. Vocabulary

Music is a language and when we’re playing music, we’re communicating with our listeners. And just like with a spoken language, the more vocabulary we know, the better, more effectively we can express our ideas.

Expanding your musical vocabulary is the same process as in literature, but instead of reading loads of books, we need to listen to volumes of music. And instead of underlining passages of text, we’re going to be transcribing musical ideas and committing those to memory. Rather than quoting our favorite authors and philosophers, we’re going to be quoting our favorite musicians and composers. Anybody can learn to do this.

6. Repertoire

Great musicians know songs. Lots of them. And they’re always learning new ones. Songs are the currency of music in every genre. The average person knows the melodies to hundreds of songs even if they’re not a practicing musician.

To become a great saxophone player you got to learn a lot of songs. And not by reading them off the page. You got to commit these songs to memory and that you know the melody, you know the chord progression, and you’re familiar with several recorded versions.

It also means practicing these songs on a regular basis and developing your own personal way of playing them. Again anyone can acquire this skill by doing the work.

When you see somebody who knows hundreds of tunes, it’s not because they have an exceptional memory. It just means they put in the work.

Identify Your Weaknesses

There are more micro skills we could add to this list, but I think you get the idea. With these six you’ve already got tons to work on and I’m sure you’d agree that anybody who mastered these skills would already be a great musician by any measure.

Now I want you to think about this list and which skills are your weaknesses and be honest with yourself. If you want to improve you got to attack your weaknesses. If we just work on the stuff we’re already pretty good at, we’re not going to get much better.

If your rhythm’s not great, focus on that for an extended period. If you don’t know a lot of tunes, challenge yourself to learn 10 over the next month or so. If you don’t have a lot of vocabulary, spend some time working on that. As you progress, continue to evaluate your weaknesses and shift your practice focus onto those things.

The most important thing to point out is that the process never ends. There will never be a moment for anyone where they think that the job is done. Rather than than be discouraged by that fact, embrace it.

Realize that the process is the thing that matters. Not achieving any particular goal.

How the BetterSax Studio Can Help

In the BetterSax Studio we’re working on this stuff all the time, and many of our members have had transformative results. So if you’d like to study Jazz improvisation with me in an amazing community of your peers, check the link in the description or go visit bettersax.com.