It’s All About The Process (Of Practicing)

Whatever stage you are at with your saxophone playing, it is often frustrating trying to get to the next level – especially when practicing. 

Everyone goes through periods of feeling stuck.

Whether you’ve just picked up the saxophone recently or have been playing for a while, there are some solutions that I’d like to share with you that work for every saxophone player.

I’m going to give you a general overview of what you should be doing daily. This is basically what every serious saxophone player does more or less. The details can vary greatly from one player to the next. Whether it’s based on skill level or musical goals, but the overall process is the same for all of us.

The Big Picture

You need to know how to practice the saxophone (or golf, or kung fu, or painting) to get significantly better.

Tricks and secrets are useless if you aren’t practicing on a regular basis in a mindful, consistent and guided manner.

This approach to teaching may not get me as many views on YouTube as if I made videos about how to play some slick lick or another. But I’d rather share what I think is the truly more useful (if less popular and less immediately gratifying) information first.

How I Discovered The Process

I first learned how to practice when doing my bachelor’s degree in classical saxophone performance. I had been shown some very basic warm-up exercises before by some private teachers. But until that point, I had only worked on learning one piece of music at a time, and I just practiced that piece of music from beginning to end over and over, until it sounded somewhat acceptable to play in front of an audience.

This is an example of mindless, inconsistent and unguided practicing.

As you can imagine, the results from practicing in this way are slow to come, unreliable, and generally not very good.

At university, I was quickly informed that from now on I was expected to do a whole slew of warm-up exercises. All to improve my sound, build my embouchure strength, clean up my technique and finger movement, correct my lousy timing. Plus I had to fix several bad habits I had developed from my unguided practicing.

I did these exercises dutifully. Over time, I learned to “practice” in a way that actually helped me improve with each and every practice session.

I have since gone through periods where I had not practiced in this manner for long stretches of time, and my playing stagnated and ceased to improve. Some old bad habits crept back into my playing at different points in my career as a result of this neglect.

These days I’ve managed to keep a semi consistent practice schedule which means putting in at least an hour and a half most days and the days I don’t is usually because I’m busy with performances and rehearsals so I make sure to at least put the horn in my mouth every day.

I have also doubled down on practicing certain fundamentals that I have mostly ignored since my college days, and as a result have seen some very pleasing progress in these areas.

What I’m trying to say here is that practicing the right way works for everyone at every stage in their development.

What to Practice, Exactly…

We cover these three areas in this Sound section using the entire range of the saxophone:

• Long Tones (sound)
• Overtones (harmonics)
• Articulation (tonguing)

The Technique section is devoted to improving your hand position, efficiency of finger movement and grasp of crucial must know
scales. Over time, these exercises will help you play faster and with solid rhythm.

Exercises covered in the Technique section:

• Chromatic Trills
• 5-Note Chromatic Scale
• Major Scale to 9th (all Modes & Keys)
• 5-Note Major Scale (all Modes & Keys)
• Pentatonic Scale (all Modes & Keys)

Once again we cover the entire range of the instrument.

Several Lessons Worth of Material

In private lessons, I give all of my students these exercises over the course of several weeks. It is a lot of information to cover and demonstrating each exercise takes time. I also play the exercises together with my students. That way, they get the feel for them and hear how they are supposed to sound.

Share Your Thoughts – Please Comment Below

Thanks for reading this article. We’d love to hear from you if this information was helpful for your motivation and practice habits. Please leave a comment below and tell us about your experiences.

Interested in more practice tips? Check out “Are You Practicing the Right Stuff?”