Saxophone Lessons
Continued

To continue our Saxophone lessons and our mission to learn how to play the saxophone we will look at the remaining main notes and the keying for these. By the way, Whether you want learn how to play saxophone Tenor or Alto the following will apply as the keying is the same.

So you now know B, A, G, F, E, D. Lets move onto C.

C follows in the same vein and to go lower we now need to incorporate the little finger of the right hand.

Place your left hand on the sax and cover B, A, G, then place your right hand on the sax and cover F, E, D. You would now normally be playing D.

I would suggest you will find it easier to start higher up the scale perhaps playing a G and work your way down to the C. With saxophone lessons it's all about experimentation.

You may also find it useful to push you bottom jaw forward as you blow. This has the effect of moving your lip pressure slightly down the reed and increasing the size of the inside of your mouth giving you more resonance and aiding the production of the note.

Try this note a few times. You may find it more difficult on an Alto than a Tenor but with practice you will get it.

Now lets move on to the last of the bottom main notes B. To play this note we are going to use all the keys incorporated in C with the addition of the little finger of the left hand. The little finger is used to depress the inside middle spatula key.

You will probably notice you will need to provide more support from your diaphragm as you go down. It may be that you will run out of breath quickly and maybe even feel a little dizzy. Don't worry. You will need to build up your breath support which you can only do with practice.

Try going up and down the scale slurring and tonguing. If you slur down to bottom B it will give you an idea of the amount of air you will need to sustain the note. Once you've done it slurring try it tonguing. You will find this more difficult but with time you will know how much support you need to give to the note.

Happy with what you've learned so far? Are the saxophone lessons going well? Good. Now lets learn one final note. This is the last of the main notes we need to learn. The note is middle C and it's right back at the top of the scale after the first note we learned which was middle B.

The middle finger is placed on the third key down. Imagine you are playing anA but remove your index finger. Got it? Did you find you blew too hard and supplied too much air?

This will be a side effect of playing the lower end of the scale. So now you know all the notes it would again be a good time to practice.

However if you want to you can go right up and down the scale of notes you've learned by incorporating the octave key(The one you press with your left thumb). The next note we would then play would not surprisingly be middle D.

To play middle D you simply play bottom D with the octave key pressed and then go up the scale you've already learned keeping the octeve key pressed and removing one finger at a time.

Here's the tough bit though. You have to go from playing a middle C to a middle D. Try practising going from C to D and back again.

This is one you will need to practice and practice so I suggest you get on with it.

If you want to learn the full range of notes go to Fingering Charts where you will find the full list of notes available to play. You will have to learn how to read a fingering chart but that shouldn't be too much of a problem if you look for middle B and take it from there. I've provided a guide on the first page. That's it for these saxophone lessons. I will post more when time allows.
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