Online Saxophone Lessons

Solving a Common Problem

BetterSax.com is all about solving this problem that many saxophone players have. Traditionally, if you want to learn the saxophone you have a choice between the Jazz method, and the Classical method. This course fills in the gap and teaches the information that has been the most useful in my saxophone playing career. It was never taught to me in music school. That’s right, with all honesty I can say that 90% of what I play professionally is stuff I learned outside of classical and jazz music school and method books. Not to say that everything I learned in school is not valuable information that contributes to my overall musicianship. However, it’s kind of like your high school trigonometry class. You’re not going to use it everyday. That’s why I’ve created the Online Saxophone Solution for saxophone players

I want to show saxophone players the everyday things they need to learn in order to play popular styles of music (rock, pop, soul, blues, jazz and more). Throughout the course I try and keep the music theory part to a minimum. I want to focus on the very practical nuts and bolts elements. The theory we do have to learn is explained in a way that everyone can understand.

So who is this for?

The main goal of this course is to help you play good melodies and improvisations on the saxophone in a wide variety of musical styles. If this interests you, then this course is definitely for you.

If you have a basic knowledge of how to play the saxophone, you can start using this online saxophone course now. You can get a head start on the things you should be learning from the beginning to become a better sax player.

Even if you’ve been playing for a few years, or played in the past and want to pick it back up, this course is perfect for you. Intermediate players can use this course to quickly advance their saxophone playing and get to the next levels.

Some of you may have put the instrument down in the past because you were bored. The materials you had available to learn from and  the music wasn’t really anything you wanted to know how to play. This course is probably exactly what you wish you had before, and it’s a great way to get back into playing.

For those of you who are more advanced players, there may be quite a lot to learn for you as well in this course. As I mentioned before, I became very good at playing classical and jazz styles. Yet, I still had difficulty playing some popular music styles. In my case, the vast majority of the well paid gigs and recordings I have done were not classical or jazz music, but popular styles like blues, pop, rock, and funk. I know this is a common situation for many advanced saxophone players.

One Scale to Rule Them All

Sorry about the Tolkien reference, but in this case it is appropriate. The pentatonic scale is THE scale you should know inside and out. It is the main source of melodic and improvised musical language in everything from folk music to modern jazz.

One thing that really gets in our way as saxophone players is that we start off by learning the major scale, and then base everything else off of that. Now, there is nothing wrong with knowing the major scale. We definitely need to know it inside and out as well. What gets in our way, are the 2 notes of the major scale, that have a more specialized musical function. To say it very simply, there are 5 notes in the major scale that are basically all the time notes, and 2 notes that are more sometimes notes. Those 5 all the time notes make up the pentatonic scale. We are going to show you why the pentatonic scale is the preferable choice for your musical base and how to use it.

Can’t Say Enough About Simplicity

Beginning saxophone improvisors suffer from technique on their instrument that is often far more advanced than their ability to improvise effectively. The results of this usually sound pretty bad partly because they have lots of major scale technique, when what they need is pentatonic scale technique.

The pentatonic scale is the go everywhere, do everything cousin of the major scale and he is going to be our go to scale from now on.

By the end of this online saxophone course you will have a solid base to start playing melodies and improvisations more effectively. There is of course, lots more to learn once we have established this base, and we will be following this course up with more online saxophone lessons on BetterSax.com

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