There’s an effing manual or How to Play Wind Instruments

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I changed the title of this thread. Shooshie offing RULES!!!

[mhschmieder]

Shooshie's advice is very pertinent and timely, as I have been aggressively extending my woodwind range of late, and have come to the same conclusions he lists above -- most of which fly in the face of "common advice" (such as using a loose sax-like embouchure on Bass and Alto Clarinet).

I plan to get back to flute again soon (I'll have some catching up to get back where I was), and oboe (only brief exposure), and know Shooshie's advice will come in handy (or mouthy, as the case may be ).

If not for the change in the thread title, I wouldn't have clicked, as I have mostly ignored this thread until now. Only Yamaha includes manuals with their woodwinds, it seems. And it's mostly about proper care of the instrument.

[Shooshie]

[edited for typos & clarity]

I'm playing devil's advocate, here, but am also just being a little skeptical.

I wonder what the test of playing the note on the sax, and removing the mouthpiece from the horn while continuing the note, and vice versa would reveal about this technique.

I've never met a sax player who wasn't skeptical of this method at first.
I've never met a sax player who actually LEARNED this method — and not some limited derivative of it — who didn't gush about how effective it was for them.

What you need to know about sax — not Trumpet — is that almost anyone can produce a sound on it. With a little practice, anyone can play a scale on it. But the easy, natural way to make a sound is about as opposite as you can get from the path to virtuosity. Once you get on the right path, it too becomes easy. But it's kind of like speaking a foreign language. There are sounds that are genuinely hard for some people to make. Consider the letter R in French or German. I've even known people who couldn't roll their rr in Spanish. Umlaut vowels in German give people a lot of trouble. But most of all, speaking with a perfect Parisian accent, or even London accent, or Liverpool, or Bronx or Thomasville Georgia, or Houston Texas — the list goes on — can be very troublesome for people. Problematic.

If you trained with a vocal coach, they would teach you to shift the production of certain vowels and consonants to different parts of your mouth. In doing so, if you can actually do what they say, you would discover the secret to talking with any of those accents.

So, what we're doing on the mouthpiece is NOT forming a perfect sax embouchure. That can only be done on the sax. What we are doing is training you to put the constants and vowels in the right positions of your mouth to facilitate resonance from the bottom of your lungs to the bell of the instrument. The mouthpiece alone exaggerates the flaws dramatically. Controlling it requires isolating the problem and keeping things very stable. Once you are able to do that — once you have trained the muscles in your mouth to move naturally and instinctively in consort as pitch, timbre and range change — then you can apply those consonants and vowels to the production of sound on the instrument. THAT is when you start making real progress with every technique available to the saxophone.

Why do it this way? Because of two things that work together:
1) it's unnatural to make these positions, and since the saxophone will play fairly easily with other positions, it's unusual for someone naturally to learn the right way. This blocks their progress when they reach advanced techniques.
2) The mouthpiece alone is unforgiving and exaggerates poor technique. To make the mouthpiece play [especially] the lower notes in the scale, you simply MUST do these things. You can't fake it or work around it. Either you do it or it won't happen. This makes it ideal for figuring out what the teacher means by various analogies that don't really teach you to what extent you must stretch muscles to get the job done.

Remember: while playing this scale on the mouthpiece, you have to do dynamics without losing the pitch. In order for that to work, several things have to happen simultaneously, kind of like drawing circles with one hand and straight lines with another, in hemiola, while whistling Yankee Doodle. It's not easy to do. But with practice, focusing on the pitch teaches you to do them. Perfectly. To do that on the instrument itself could take many years. Doing it on the mouthpiece shortens that to days, weeks, or months. I had one student grasp the whole thing in 30 minutes. He literally was transformed into an advanced player in one lesson. He already had a lot of technique, but his lack of airstream control was blocking him from ever sounding like a pro. He walked out of that lesson sounding like a pro. Some people have years and years of bad habits to overcome, and it takes longer for them.

Always use pitch as your guide, dynamics as your obstacle to overcome, and the mouthpiece scale as your method.

When learning to double-tongue, do the same. When you can do it without dipping the pitch on every "K" articulation (T-K-T-K-T-K), then you've got it. Circular breathing, the same way. When you can do it without losing the pitch, you've got it. I prefer that people learn circular breathing on the instrument itself, though it is greatly enhanced once you've mastered the mouthpiece exercise.

So, you see, this is quite different from buzzing on a trumpet mouthpiece. Sax players have so many optional "wrong" paths that it's darn near impossible to present them with a foolproof path to the right way, especially once the wrong ways become engrained into their playing. But this is that path.

It's ok to be skeptical. As a non-saxophonist, you won't be able to try it out. But if you were a saxophonist, and if you tried it until you mastered it, you'd see your playing transformed. The only ones it does not transform are those lucky ones who were doing it the right way to begin with. But they are exceedingly rare. I was doing about half of it, but not ALL of it. When I learned ALL of it, I was able to do anything and everything, from a physical, technical level of capability. Then, practice became a matter of making music with those tools. And sight reading, and improvising, and so forth. But I no longer had to worry about being blocked by "difficult" passages.

"Difficulty" simply ceased to exist. It was just music practice from then on.

Shooshie

[Shooshie]

Since we're talking about it, and since some people are skeptical, I'd like for you to indulge me as I demonstrate a practical application of the skills learned in the mouthpiece exercise. Let's take a passage in the Giga of the Bach partita for solo violin in D Minor. Since the written music goes below the saxophone's range, it was necessary to raise it a third to F# minor. In measure 12, there is an arpeggio that rises to high D on the violin, which is high F# in our transcription. The figure is continuous 16th notes, in 12/8 time, where a dotted quarter goes at about 80, though I've heard it and played it 10 points faster or slower. That's pretty fast.

After reaching the high F#, it immediately drops a 7th to G#, then it jumps back to to F#-G#-F#, then drops an octave and a 4th to A, where the figure goes into a stretto a step below. This must be done as gracefully as an ice skater landing triple axels at speed, and seem effortless, not drawing any attention whatsoever to the technique. All those intervals are at the octave range: 7ths to 11ths. In some ranges this presents no problem, but here we're leaping into the altissimo register on every other note for a stretch. Fingering alone is a nightmare. I devised and attached a special key for all my saxophones just for this piece, which has come in handy for countless others. Once the fingering technique is acquired, jumping from range to range can be a real problem for some people. It was actually this piece which set me on the path of exploration which led me to the mouthpiece exercise.

Here we go, describing the process:

• 1) Play high F#.
  2) Once you have a full sound, in tune, on that pitch, take note of your phonetic positions, as learned with the MP exercise, as they apply to that note. Something like "G/K—ih—R/L" Doesn't matter how you notate it, just remember it.
  3) Play the middle G#. Note it's phonetic positions, too. "G/K—oo—R/L" roughly speaking.
  4) Play one after the other, alternating between notes, sustaining a moment on each pitch before continuing to the next. Note the change between notes. It's a tiny change.
  5) Practice for just a moment making that phonetic change. The moving part sort of goes: Huli Huli Huli Huli... (silent H, barely any L) See how little change there is? If you feel other parts of your tongue changing, go back to the mouthpiece exercise and do the same phonetics there. It will force you to keep the G/K and R/L constant, just moving the vowels. (ugh... a vowel movement)
  6) Now practice both slurring and tonguing that interval until you reach tempo. The pitch for all notes must be perfect with no dipping during articulation.

Once you do this, you can play that interval at any tempo, cleanly as a violin. After you've mastered the MP exercise, you don't usually even have to work these things out. You've already got that technique baked into your voicing.

Obviously, you don't want to have to dwell on this. That's why we learn the exercises and their application to the overtone series and to the horn itself, so that we don't have to think about it.

Just an example. Any string of awkward-in-series notes would make an equal example. The goal is to make any string of notes as easy to play on sax as it would be on piano. In other words, we're getting the airstream completely controlled so that it does not contribute to technical issues. The rest is fingering and expression.

Shooshie

[stubbsonic]

So, what we're doing on the mouthpiece is NOT forming a perfect sax embouchure. That can only be done on the sax.

...

The mouthpiece alone exaggerates the flaws dramatically. Controlling it requires isolating the problem and keeping things very stable. Once you are able to do that — once you have trained the muscles in your mouth to move naturally and instinctively in consort as pitch, timbre and range change...

There are obviously some similar reasons for WHY people do mouthpiece work. This weekend, I played with a very skilled trumpet player and was paying attention to his warm-up. He did several minutes of deft mouthpiece playing (with the end of the mouthpiece wide open-- i.e., unobstructed flow).

The movements I use in my embouchure to change pitches go beyond "getting it in the ballpark and letting the instrument do the rest". My lips are like my vocal cords, and I similarly have as natural a connection to producing pitches, but obviously much more is needed to make the horn sing. e.g. air flow, the vowel, the soft palette, tongue, etc.

Though all of these factors can (and perhaps should) be trained and exercised, they all can't be efficiently micro-managed by the conscious brain in the moment-to-moment, or in performance. It is important to listen deeply and allow the body to naturally make the adjustments that bring the right sound.

Thanks for that deeper dive into the techniques, Shooshie. It's fascinating.

[mikehalloran]

I think everyone might find this interesting:

The Saxophone’s Unlikely Journey Out of Meme Hell
https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/z ... -meme-hell

[Shooshie]

While I don't put much stock in articles like that one, the author does hit on some points that always rankled me. Mention that you play sax, and immediately one's mind pulls up their own image of what that means. It can be anything from 60s rockabilly "Boots Randolph" to quiet intellectual rage bottled up inside jazz great John Coltrane, to cotton-candy-kerfuffle pop star Kenny G., to Phil Woods to Charlie Parker to Stan Getz... in fact, every famous saxophonist has a unique style that you can identify in about 3 notes, and that's really as it should be. But there develop clans around some of those players that consider that style the ONLY authentic sax style, and they work to memorize that player's solos, learn that player's licks, and imitate that player's life. It culminates in bizarre behavior that disses everyone else to the point of character assassination. Compound this with the institutionalization of jazz in universities, which promote "methods" usually affiliated with local faculty members who have an inside track on one or more of those clans, and you can only get the secrets from him. (nearly always a him) That's not limited to sax, but it affects sax differently than the other instruments, because the saxophone doesn't have a traditional home. It's very identity as a musical instrument is tied together with the competition of these clans.

I prefer musicians who are amazingly skilled and can do anything. One of the greatest living saxophonists, and also one of the highest paid, is a guy everyone here has heard more times than you can count, but none of you know his name. Dan Higgins. I studied briefly with Dan, till I realized that his method was the same as mine: practice your ass off and learn everything you can about everything. He was a student at North Texas at the time, and I thought he rocked. After North Texas, he moved to Los Angeles and quickly became established in the studio scene. He has been #1 call there for several decades now, and you often see his name in movie credits. When Lisa Simpson breaks away from the band in the opening credits of the Simpsons, and play the short Bari Sax licks before stepping out the door, many of those are Higgins. I don't know if it's all of them or 50% or 10%, but I've been told it's more often than not. The sax solos in the Pixar movie "Up" were Higgins. I could name a hundred others, and you'd immediately know most of them. Maybe you remember Julian Po, an odd and obscure little movie, in which a sax played a pretty melody all through it. That was Dan. Doesn't matter if it sounds like Coltrane or Parker or Boots or Kenny, more often than not in the movies and TV shows it's Dan. Excellent player! He's by no means the only one of his kind, but he's a shining example of the super-competent commercial artist.

What's more, he's a likable guy with a big smile and few of those eccentricities that we associate with the clans. Most great musicians are. We go to music schools all full of hopes, but it's the rare musician who can keep those hopes and not get all spirit kicked out of him or her by the oppressive way instrumental music is taught in those places. It becomes so political. I had been at North Texas for several years when both of the sax teachers came to me and told me something kind of shocking. Another saxophonist, 4 years older than me, had been the guy who auditioned me for the bands. He immediately put me in a lower band. I thought there must have been a lot of great players there, but I'd eventually work my way up. And there WERE a lot of great players. But I was one of them. The teachers told me that this guy had systematically schmoozed the band director so that he was in charge of placing all the sax players, every year. The band director was a drummer and probably was happy to let someone else do it. When I would try out for orchestra parts, with the amazing conductor and violinist (formerly concertmaster with Philadelphia) Anshel Brusilov, I easily won them. He loved my playing. But the band? I could never get to the top of the section. My teachers had noticed that and were upset about it. They told the band director that he had been "snowed" by this guy. But nothing changed. That tends to happen in the education world. One student gets the top chair, and nobody can have it until he graduates. It is rarely about skill or musicianship, since so many people have what it takes. Some places have taken to rotating the top players so that everyone gets experience, learning the solo excerpts and so on. But most places aren't so enlightened. Band directors like consistency, for they are striving for recognition, themselves. There is no real professional world for bands. Only orchestra directors move on to coveted professional careers. The same thing happens in "Lab Bands," the little jazz bands on college campuses where a lot of this attitude stuff is born. North Texas had about 9 of them when I was there, each named by the time it rehearsed, the One O'Clock Lab Band being the most famous. (Higgins was 1st chair of this band, by the way, when it was Grammy Nominated)

When I finished my master's degree, I didn't know what I wanted to do with the saxophone. I had already recorded with RCA in the Dallas Symphony on several saxes. I had played in several other fine symphonies. I'd toured in recitals and played at sax symposiums by invitation. I was friends with most of the sax elites. I was well known around here for chamber music concerts. But the last thing on earth that I wanted to do at that point was teach in a college and become stalagmized in stone, seducing kids to give up productive careers to become stuck as sax teachers. There had to be a breaking out point to make a mark in the world, and I found mine: MIDI. I became a MIDI director and music director for touring shows. I didn't need to be the big fish in the tiny saxophone pond. It just wasn't something satisfying to me. I later published my techniques on the internet for free, and they took a life of their own. That was personally rewarding, to know that so many people would have the opportunity to learn the sax on the level of the finest orchestral instruments. And I hear a huge difference now, as compared to 30 years ago.

But there is no "one way" that saxophone is supposed to sound. It's a chameleon among instruments. When people find out you play sax, they say "Oh, I LOVE [insert their favorite player here]" You say "yeah, he/she is great, but I play a completely different style." They lose interest immediately and change the subject. Sax means one thing to them. To a lot of people it's a "sultry, romantic, seductive sound" associated with foreplay and sex. That's not hard to do, but it's not my style. I love classical music and should have played violin, but ended up on sax. I made my living arranging and directing pop and rock, also very satisfying. But the cold world of university clans was not the place for me. In my opinion, those places have worked to the detriment of music, pretty much everywhere. The promotion of the weird and arcane have developed a public perception of weirdness and inaccessibility, both in classical and jazz. Music finds its own place. Some of the best classical composers of our time were not a product of music schools, even if they used those schools to advance their careers. The music schools disapproved of Phillip Glass for many years until it became obvious that he was going to be great with or without their approval. Then they embraced him and tried to teach his style. When a style becomes institutionalized, it becomes a caricature. It's frozen and cannot evolve, because politically minded hacks are in charge of its reputation.

That's why I like people like Dan Higgins, who plays whatever he wants, however he wants to play it. It's all different, but all Dan Higgins. He was a stern taskmaster as a teacher. You've gotta be. Students don't need someone telling them they sound great. They need someone pointing out how they can improve. The basics are the same for everyone. But you've got to be free to let the instrument take you where you want to go, not to get locked up in some already fading style, forever. Become proficient. Be free. Stay out of traps!

Shooshie

[Shooshie]

PS: Sorry for the length of these posts. I don't mean to wear out my welcome here. In fact, I feel honored when someone reads even one of my posts from start to finish. It's just that I don't know how to tell these stories concisely, because they cover a lot of territory. Thanks for listening.

Shoosh

[stubbsonic]

I completely agree about sax clans, and your point about the sax not having a "traditional home" is an interesting one.

This idea about compartmentalization of style is also true in a broader sense about other instruments, and even more generally, about music genres and cliques. It may perhaps be a way that insecurities manifest themselves with performers, content creators, and teachers. Also, some teachers; due to their own training, or a feeling they need to "earn their check"; tend to over-reach their authority.

As a side note, I overheard the trumpet player I mentioned in my previous post say that he met with a prospective new teacher who said, "If you want to study with me, you'll have to change to X mouthpiece and go buy Y trumpet," to which this trumpet player replied (in essence), "Ok. I guess we're done here." Yea, seriously.

With the auditions & seating for those ensembles, it can be very tricky to second-guess the thought process behind placements. Each player's skill levels are broken up into tone, intonation, reading-accuracy, groove, soloing ability, etc. Then there's distributing core players to keep all ensembles sounding good and bringing inexperienced kids up. There's also interpersonal chemistry (i.e., who gets along with who, or more importantly, doesn't).

I'm mentioning this, not because I doubt your suspicions of unfairness-- but more to say that sometimes those auditions and placements are very difficult and complicated choices. I've been in many meetings where we had to make difficult decisions about placing students in roles & bands. We were always balancing many factors, and were always considering what was best for the students, regardless of the impact on the show-- usually what was good for the students was good for the show.

For some student who did not get the placement they expected, it can be helpful to find a respected person involved in selection to ask, "How can I improve my placement in the next audition?" That said, I'm sure there are some in those positions of authority who are careless and unfair about the process.