Taking these steps will get you well on your way to sounding incredible when you play the saxophone:. Having the right saxophone and quality equipment can make a huge difference when you start learning how to play the saxophone.
Here are popular types of saxophones :. Wondering how much a saxophone costs? This can vary greatly! This is great news because no matter your budget, you can find one that works for you. You can find new and vintage options and prices can range from a couple of hundred dollars to several thousand.
Here are our best recommendations for standard equipment for beginners:. Note: For your neck-strap, just make sure that it is rigid and not stretchy. Working on the embouchure, scales, articulation, dynamic control, and vibrato will strengthen your abilities as a saxophonist.
The best thing you can do to learn these skills and continue to grow as a musician is to choose a good private instructor. TakeLessons has a great selection of experienced saxophone instructors for both online and in-person lessons. There are a variety of teachers so that you can choose one who can help you reach your specific goals. This type of instruction will help you build a solid foundation of tone, reading ability, and technique.
Mastering any instrument is a lot of work and takes practice to master , but remember to have fun! At the end of each practice session, try some improvisation or play your favorite song. Including this step into every practice routine will help you stay motivated.
This will help you avoid frustration and continue thinking positively about your progress. Want to find a teacher that can help you master the skill and love your new hobby? So in that regard, the saxophone is slightly easier. If you don't feel like playing today, then don't. But, if you suddenly want to play your saxophone right now and learn something new, simply log in and pick a lesson!
There is no right or wrong with learning how to play the saxophone. Saxophone is the easiest wind instrument. Too much sax may be bad for your health. The association between disease and wind instruments, such as the trombone, trumpet, French horn, tuba and saxophone, seems counterintuitive. Anecdotally, wind instrument musicians have reported a greater lung capacity and even improved asthma because of their musical hobbies. When playing a saxophone, whether in a small ensemble, full band, or even solo, tuning is very important.
Good tuning makes for a clear, beautiful sound, and it is essential for every player to know how to tune and adjust their instrument. The alto is easier to play than a tenor. The soprano sax plays notes one octave higher than the tenor but to play the notes with the proper pitch requires more skill. Most sax teachers recommend starting with the alto or tenor. The fingering for the sax family is the same with a few exceptions.
That's really something that makes the saxophone one the instruments same as the trumpet or violin , where it takes quite a bit of time and effort, in the beginning, to get somewhere. On a piano, you can play many keys at the same time, where you have a left hand and the right hand where you have a bass part and a melody part, you are doing two things at the same time, right from the get-go. A saxophone, in that regard, is a melody instrument. You're not that concerned with harmony at all, with things such as progressions and baselines.
The saxophone is really an instrument for the solos and the melody. That chops away a certain degree of difficulty right there, although, in order to play well you still have to understand harmony.
You just don't have to develop any skill of playing harmony as directly on the saxophone as on a piano or guitar. So in that regard, the saxophone is slightly easier. It really does take quite a bit of effort to do anything with the saxophone that an audience can even start to appreciate.
Whereas with a guitar or piano, you can learn some chords and within a day you are playing your song and it's really nice to listen to, or you can just play some chords and it's already nice music. But as with anything, there are people who play with guitar and the things they play are incredibly difficult to do, even with decent practice. I put quite a bit of study into the horn, that's true. In fact, the neighbors threatened to ask my mother to move once when I was living out West.
She said I was driving them crazy with the horn. I used to put in at least 11 to 15 hours a day. I did that for over a period of 3 or 4 years. As I said earlier, shoot for at least half an hour of practice a day and you should be able to get a consistently good tone after a year or two. In fact, I will do more than just tell whether it is possible to self learn a saxophone.
I will give you ten common things habits, if you like that hold back saxophone self-learners. Now, this might sound a little strange, but what I've noticed that there's one theme that's particularly common with beginners, especially those trying to self learn the saxophone at a young age. Almost everybody who learned to play an instrument when they were little, develops an unhealthy carefulness, a fear of the instrument almost.
They are kind of afraid to touch the instrument, to see them as just fun objects, probably because they've had the experience of parents tell, when they were little and impressionable, to be careful with the instrument.
It's very important as a self-learner that you see your instrument as something that's fun, something that you can play around with without fear of "spoiling". Most self-learners, I find, do not take the time to really understand their saxophones.
Most skip over the part where they need to understand how the instrument works. Understanding the basic mechanics of your saxophone is crucial.
Things such as how it produces sound and how it is designed are really important to know because once you understand how your saxophone works you eliminate a whole lot of problems, fear or too much carefulness. Many beginners, especially self-learners, send me messages related to not understand their saxophones—such as getting things such as weird sounds when they are playing, or that they think something is broken—all the time. Most of the time, all I really have to do to help them with this is to just tell them how the instrument works.
As soon as they understand how the instrument works, how it produces sound, it's very easy to locate and fix problems on your own. It's easier to know, for instance, if a spring is broken, or if maybe one of your tone holes is leaking. Most problems are very easy to at least find, then you can go to your repairer and say, "Look, this particular thing is broken, can you fix it?
Many little problems, such as a spring that's lost some tension, you can easily fix yourself. Playing an instrument where you keep hearing a weird sound and don't know what's going on eats at your subconscious like a motherfucker! Most self-learners seem to think that learning to play the saxophone, is somehow linked to how well or fast you learn to read sheet music.
That the two go hand-in-hand. You really have no reason to put off learning the saxophone until you learn to read sheet music. In fact, you can learn to play the sax surprisingly fast by ear, pretty much just goofing off and playing what you hear. Actually, you develop a pretty good understanding of your instrument and hand technique this way surprisingly fast.
Learning to read music and play off the sheet from scratch generally takes upwards of a year or at least two years of slow gradual progress.
Many self-learners, even students with tutors, combine the two, especially in classical style saxophone schools, and all they do is play off the sheets, play off the sheets. As a self-learner, you want to spend a lot of time away from reading anything—just playing. Pick up your sax and play whatever tune comes to your head, or play along to the radio and you'll make very fast progress that way.
Separate the two learning curves, because if you combine learning the sax and learning to read sheet music, your development will be much much longer.
Your ability to learn to read music will hold you back on the saxophone a lot. I find that most people, especially the more musical people, can learn to play little songs very easily. In fact, using just finger charts, you can learn to play little songs in minutes, literally.
It's really not that difficult. And you can learn hundreds of songs that way before ever reading a single note. Now I am not saying that you completely side-step reading, it's a great way to open yourself up to a lot of other music, and to play new songs with other people, but, early on your focus should be on learning the play the saxophone. Many self-learners are usually pretty scared to play with other people, and for good reason—they haven't really mastered the instrument.
So they wait for far too long. And it's natural to be nervous when playing with other people—you don't want to mess up other people's music. But still, it's very important to play with other people, because if you don't you confine yourself to this whole other path of evolution away from getting better faster.
Find a local free improvisation workshop or something similar and go there. Your little melodies are nice but you really need to master the instrument if you want to play professionally.
You need to play with other people because from that you learn a lot that will really help you bridge the gap between playing alone and playing with other people. Find something like a little band or anywhere you can play in little sessions with other people. Pretty soon you'll find yourself playing with a lot of people. I believe it was Sonny Rollins , one of the absolute masters of the tenor saxophone, that said that playing with other people for an hour is worth about four weeks of playing alone, and I really believe that's true.
Get out there as soon as you can even if you feel uncomfortable. I would say that if you've been playing for upwards of three weeks, that's good enough. Get out. If you are serious about practicing, find some local music events, venues or workshops, join, meet with local musicians, be open about the fact that you've just started and then go from there. This will enormously boost the speed of how much you can get better and you'll be glad for it.
As a beginner, we are all just too aware that for the first year or year and a half you're just not going to sound really really great. The saxophone isn't just one of those instruments like a piano where it doesn't matter who presses the key because it always sounds the same.
You really do have to put in the work and soldier through the learning curve just to get to a point where other people will start saying that you're starting to sound okay now, or that you sound really nice. Something that happens to a lot of self-learners is that instead of being honest and accepting that it will take some time, they think what they need is an expensive mouthpiece, or a more expensive saxophone, or this other type of reed, or ligature or whatever it happens to be.
You tend to go, especially if you have the money, into this obsession with tuning your setup. Early on, you do not need that amazing instrument, that, to be honest, you can't really work yet. All you need is a good solid student saxophone to play on for a year, or a year and a half, and really practice it to get to a point where you can really appreciate the differences.
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