How To Play The Saxophone. Tonguing is the next step in your journey to learn to play saxophone and becoming an accomplished player.
I have scored this as easy because the basics of it are. However, to become good requires lots of practice.
As with slurring it's not really an effect but more of a way of playing. Again it will be marked in musical notation so you do need to know about it.
Tonguing involves placing the tip of your tongue on the edge of the reed between notes to stop the reed making a sound and thus forcing a break between the notes. Most people advise that when using tonguing you should be placing your tongue in the same position as if you were going to say Tu or Lu.
There is no symbol for tonguing in musical notation. So the lack of anything will tell you that you need to be tonguing.
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In the above picture you will notice the only things on the bar are the notes.
This means the only thing you need to do is tongue each note in turn. This would give you G-A-B-B.
The difficulty with tonguing is making sure the note is the same throughout. Try tonguing B-B-B-B-B. I would like to think that all the notes you just played were exactly the same.
The reality is probably that some notes started at a higher or lower pitch and that the sound was not constant throughout.
You really do need to practice this. Given time you should be able to produce a consistent sound and be able to stop the reed with the lightest of touches.
