Welcome back to Get Your Sax Together, I'm pro saxophonist Jamie Anderson. In this
week's show we're going to cover vibrato, and in order to cover that we're also
going to cover the most important aspect of sound and tuning on sax, which is
having flexibility in your throat and mouth.
In this free lesson for beginners
or intermediate players, or players of any standard on sax, I'm going to teach
you one of the most important technical aspects of playing the instrument which
is having the flexibility in your throat to stay in tune and produce a great
vibrato. Before we do that, you can help me out by subscribing to the channel,
click the bell icon to be notified when I upload new videos, you can go check out
my Instagram, please leave me a comment, and if you go into the description below
you can find the link to get a free pdf with all the main teaching points from
this lesson. So let's learn how to do vibrato and why it's really important to
have that flexibility in our throat.
What we're going to cover today is the secret
sauce of getting a great sax sound and being a great saxophonist. Now what we
need to do is, we need to have this open yawning throat and we need to have the
flexibility with our jaw and throat, and mouth shape, and lip set up, so that we
can bend the notes, get in tune and produce a fantastic vibrato, and use
these things to color our playing, but with control. What we see too often with
beginner players especially is this wild scoopy bending sound which doesn't sound
very good at all! lol So this week I'm going to teach you how to get a great vibrato,
but first of all we need to take our mouthpiece, and we're just going to blow
the mouthpiece and then using your jaw, and dropping, almost like a yawning, like
you're swallowing or something like that. You can experiment with your own
technique to get it working. We're gonna try bending the note just using the
mouthpiece and using our jaw and our throat to change the pitch. Now, first of
all, let's just start small...
What we're going to progress onto, once you can get that changing pitch, we're
gonna try and get a bigger range, like a siren. So let's try practicing a siren,
again, using the jaw placement, opening your throat and trying to change that
pitch as much as you can...
And this is going to take time to get here, but, the
holy grail of this exercise is being able to play "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" just
using your mouthpiece, so I'm gonna have a go...
So far so good, that is a really
good drill to practice, now what we're gonna do is we're going to put the
mouthpiece back on the full horn and we're gonna take some notes in the upper
register, we're gonna try an A and a B, in the octave, second octave, and we're gonna
try the same thing. Now because you've got a much longer tube you won't be able
to change the pitch more than probably a semitone, or maybe a tone at the most, so
we're gonna practice just playing a long note, and bending the pitch, not with our lip,
but with our jaw and throat, and using the same technique that we did with our
mouthpiece to change the pitch, with control, and then we're going to move on
to applying this to vibrato, but this is the second stage, putting your mouthpiece
on your sax, and then we're going to play a second octave A and B and try and
change the pitch...
To get a great vibrato, now what we do is we use this bending, and we're going to
get a metronome, and we're going to bend it slowly at first and then increase the
speed of the metronome until you can get those bends much faster and when it
strings together faster that is how you get your vibrato in a controlled way. So
let's try bending the pitch, slowly at first, but rhythmically, and then speeding
it up to get our vibrato. I'm not going to keep changing my metronome so what
I'm going to do is I'm just going to start playing it slow and then increase
the speed of the vibrato...
The other vital use of being flexible in your throat and your jaw is to stay in
tune on sax because that is how we stay in tune - the position of the mouthpiece
on the neck will give you a ballpark, then we have to tune each individual
note with our throat and jaw to keep it in tune. Now if you get yourself a tuner
and play up and down a slow scale you can get every note in tune because
different notes on the saxophone have different tunings - not every note is in
tune. So we're going to use the same technique, and you can practice over time
and see which notes on your horn are sharper or flatter and use your throat
to get in tune. That is a really vital technique to make your playing really
come forward in terms of tuning and control.
Final use of this flexibility with our jaw and throat is to use it creatively
and expressively. What we don't want is these "bwow" big bends that we see with
beginner players, we want real control. So here's... I'm just gonna play and use a few
examples of how you can use your throat to bend notes, color notes, and use them
creatively...
What you can now do is find examples of your favorite saxophonists, now linked up
there will be a card to my transcription series and that way you can learn how to
transcribe, and you can try and copy exactly what your favorite players do
with their throat and with their tuning and bending and try and copy it exactly
to really learn and then you can progress and make it your own and have
some fun.
hope you enjoyed this week's video - this
is a super important topic, this IS going to transform your playing if you work on
this thing with getting your throat flexible to get a great vibrato and get
great tuning going. If you enjoyed the video please do subscribe to the channel,
click the bell to be notified when I upload new videos, go check out my
Instagram feed, leave me a comment, give it a thumbs up if you liked it, and of
course don't forget go into the description, click the link and there's a
free PDF that you can download with the main points from this week's lesson. I'll
see you next week for more great saxy stuff on the channel, keep practicing and
I'll see you next week. See you later!