Hi, I'm pro saxophonist Jamie Anderson and you're watching Get your sax together.
From beginners to experts, I sax up your Sunday every week with
technique stuff, player profiles, tips on playing great solos and of course, my
famous breakdowns of the world's best loved sax lines. There's a lot of info out
there on articulation but in today's free online sax lesson, which is part one
on this topic, I'm gonna cut through all the noise and teach you three basics of
sax tonguing, which will instantly get you sounding better on virtually
everything you play. Often when I take on new pupils even some who have been
learning with a teacher for some time, I'm shocked at their lack of tonguing.
It's probably one of the most neglected aspects of woodwind playing I can think
of. I know this from direct personal experience. When I started playing
clarinet at school in Scotland, I guess I must have been about 9 or so at the
time, my teacher who used to nod off in lessons ,by the way, failed to mention
anything about tonguing. For two years my mum made me practice every day bless her,
so I still passed grades one, two and three, maybe even four, I can't remember, but every
Examiner's sheet kept saying "consistent lack of articulation." My mum, who played
viola in the local amateur Orchestra, was curious about this articulation thing
in all the examiners reports, so one day she spoke to a pro clarinetist who was
working with the orchestra and she fixed up a lesson for me. Well, all I can tell
you is that I never saw that school clarinet teacher again, and it turned out
I'd passed three or four grades without tonguing a single note. My teacher, my new
teacher, couldn't believe it. lol It goes to show that it's never too late to learn the
basics of articulation, which is exactly what I'm going to show you today. You're
gonna learn the smallest amount of information that's going to give you the
biggest return on your playing. Before we start, make sure you go down into the
description for this video and click the link to download your free pdf cheat
sheet for this lesson so you can follow along. As I'm sure you already know,
the vibrating reed is the device that produces the sound on a saxophone. Put
simply, tonguing is when we touch the reed with our tongue, stopping or
severely dampening the reeds ability to vibrate and make noise. We can use this
technique to start and stop our sax sound with
control. To contrast this with another reed instrument where tonguing is
impossible think of bagpipes for a moment. That might be a painful thought
but stay with it. Bagpipes make a continuous unbroken
stream of sound and the only way to distinguish a repeated note in a melody
is with grace notes. Check out some bagpipe music if you want to see some
serious grace note action. However, on sax we have the ability to momentarily stop
the sound and shorten any note. Going back to bagpipes again you might be
familiar with that painful startup sound as the bag fills with air, and on a
much smaller scale that's exactly what I was doing on clarinet with my first
teacher every time I started a note. Each note began with a mini whoosh of air
that reed gradually got going. This is what happens without tonguing, each note
is fuzzy and undefined. By the same token, short notes without tonguing taper off
at the end and don't sound very short or crisp. However, we can give each note on
sax a clean attack and cut off using our tongue. So to summarize the basics then,
we can do two things by touching the reed with our tongue: we can start a note
cleanly without a surge and we can stop a note instantly without a fade. Just
before we dive into all of this, if you struggle with stuff like embouchure,
improvising or technique or if you board with scales and don't know how to
structure a practice session, check out my Saxophone Success
Masterclass. It's a full solid hour of teaching that isn't an YouTube to help
transform your playing, no matter what standard you are, and best of all, it's
totally free! Just click the link in the description or go to www.getyoursaxtogether.com/masterclass.
Okay, on with a lesson now, and a couple of important caveats on
tonguing. Firstly, articulation is as personal and complex as each
individual's fingerprint or speech, so the rabbit-hole goes way deep on this
topic, far too deep to cover in one or even ten videos. If you go to YouTube and
look for x-ray videos of, em, the tongue while someone's playing sax or clarinet
you'll see the crazy and complex stuff that's happening in there. Also, one of
the main reasons that people struggle with tonguing is that you can't see my
tongue as I'm playing I can't see my tongue as I'm playing and YOU can't see YOUR
tongue while your playing. We're triple blind. I have to tell you proprioceptively
what I'm feeling in my mouth and you have to interpret that and use trial and
error to get it working. Plus, everyone has a unique physiology and your tongue
is different from mine. It can also be kind of gross looking at close-ups of
people pointing, em, pointing to their tongues and lessons! However short of
teaching and a double x-ray studio that's what we're stuck with I'm afraid,
so we're just going to have to do our best. If there's something about
articulation that YOU really struggle with, I'd love to hear your feedback, so
leave me a comment down below. Let's talk about the actual physical process
of tonguing then. At the most basic level, you're going to use the area just back
from the tip of the tongue, about a centimeter or two or a quarter of an
inch half an inch or so back and gently press it against the tip of the reed. You
should focus your touch on the thin front tip of the reed, not the flat part.
Once in contact with the tip of the reed, the tongue then releases back and
slightly down, letting the reed vibrate like this... you should experiment with
tongue position how much surface area you use and how lightly you touch the
reed to vary the attack of your articulation.
There's a lot of talk in the sax tuition space about syllables like
saying "tah-dah" or "the" but what everyone seems to ignore is that
you can't say any of those sounds when you've got a lump of plastic or metal in
your mouth! For that reason, I always get a bit confused with the whole syllables
thing. I think to begin with your best bet is to experiment and find something
that's easy and effective. Don't worry if it's a bit 'spitty'
and noisy to start with. Once you've got the basic feel for touching the reed
with your tongue, this method can be used in three main ways.
The first way to use that tongue movement we just learned is to start a note from scratch. This
technique should be used EVERY TIME we start a note with a new breath, unless
it's a very very quiet phrase that creeps in gradually from nothing. To do
this we already have the tongue on the reed just before we blow, and at the
instant we blow the air into our horn, we pull our tongue off the reed like this.
Initially it can be useful to practice basic articulation with just your neck
and mouthpiece to minimise distractions. So technique one sounds like this...
That gives us the familiar "ch" or "thu" transient at the start of the note and makes sure
we get a nice clean crisp start to each note. The second way we use tonguing is
to articulate a note within a breath. Whilst blowing a continuous stream of
air, we can briefly touch the reed with our tongue and then quickly take it off.
This light touch of our tongue on the reed momentarily interrupts the sound,
indicating a new note. I call this legato tonguing and it can be either used to
repeat your note, or we can coordinate our fingers to move
at the same time as our tongue, cleanly articulating a different note. Unless the
notes in a phrase are intentionally slurred, this technique should be used
for every note you play. It's the default. The main goal here is to try and minimize
the time your tongue your tongue is in contact with the reed so you don't get a
gap in the sound. Again, experiment with the position and surface area of your
tongue and how much pressure you use. You should aim for the minimum effective
tongue movement to articulate efficiently. Here's what legato tonguing
sounds like...
The third and final use of the tongue is to stop a note dead. The most common use
of this is to play short note. As soon as we pull our tongue back from the reed to
start a note we immediately put it back as fast as we can and keep it there. This
is called staccato tonguing. Try to imagine a kitchen tap with a handle, or a
faucet I guess our American friends would say. Pulling your tongue off the
reed is the equivalent of opening the water flow with a handle, then you
immediately shut off the water flow with the handle, which is like putting your
tongue back on the reed. This gives a sudden powerful gush of water that
immediately stops. The most important part of this metaphor is that the strong
mains water pressure is constantly present behind the tap, and our breath
pressure is constantly present - it's your tongue that stops and starts the sound,
not your breath. You should be blowing throughout. In fact once you cut off that
sound with your tongue you should feel the back pressure of the breath in your
mouth. This should give you a really nice crisp, short note. As usual, experiment
with the different tongue positions and patterns to get a nice short note.
Okay
so far so good let's have a quick recap of those points now.
Our tongue can be
used to instantly dampen the vibrations of the reed and stop the sound. This lets
us start and stop notes cleanly. These transients also give the saxophone it's
distinctive sound. The three basic ways we can use tonguing are, number one -
starting a note with a new breath, number two - articulating new notes within a
phrase, which is called legato tonguing, and number three - stopping the sound dead
to produce short notes, called staccato tonguing. This video is only covering the
very basics and I'm sure everyone wants the sexy stuff like jazz articulation,
Derek Brown style double tonguing and slap tonguing, doodle tonguing and
whatever other weird and wonderful techniques you've heard about, but, if you
just get super clear on these fundamentals it will instantly solve 99%
of your articulation problems and, if correctly, will get you instantly sounding
better. I should also say at this point, your tongue is a muscle, and should be
treated and trained like any other muscle. There's a load of exercises to
train that muscle and I haven't forgot about that,
but I don't feel tonguing drills are necessary at this stage. You can
drastically improve your playing articulation by simply mastering the
basic three moves and applying them. I mean how often do you actually need to
tongue sixteenth notes 120 bpm? When I make the other videos on
articulation we'll go a bit deeper and learn some drills at that point. Now
let's look at a very simple example to demonstrate the three techniques we've
learned, but to do that we need to learn the basics of how to notate tonguing.
Before we see articulation in practice, let's cover the basics of notation. I
know many of you don't read music, but even if you don't it could still be
useful to learn this stuff as you surely come across music at some point, not
least the PDFs you get from me! If you go down into the description and click the
link you can get the free PDF cheat sheet for this lesson which has these
markings explained as well as the examples we're going to play. Also the
vast majority of you guys play pop, soul, funk, jazz, blues and other secular music
forms, but if you play classical music the rules can be kind of different and
they're much more subject to context and interpretation. What I'm describing here
is the convention for most non classical music. First of all if nothing is marked,
just tongue the note and play it full length. Easy. Specific symbols for
articulation are added directly above the note head or sometimes directly
below the note head if the stem of that note goes up. Personally, I always put
articulation above the note head regardless. I just prefer that. For longs
and shorts, think morse code. Dashes are long, dots are short. A dash, called a tenuto,
means play the note long - for it's full value. Yeah I know that's the same as
having nothing above the note, but often it's better to be specific, as an
unmarked note could be subject to artistic interpretation. A dot above the
note means play it short. This is called staccato. Don't confuse these staccato
dots above the note with actual dotted notes. Now here's the cool thing about
short notes with a dot in commercial music. I know I'm generalising here, but
basically short is short. There's really only one short.
Whether it's crotchet (quarter note) with a dot above it or a semi quaver
(sixteenth note) with the dot above it, it's still the same just play it short!
Finally if there's a curved line over the notes, called a slur, it means tongue
the first note but then join up all the other notes underneath the slur smoothly
without tonguing them. The exception to this is if there's repeated notes under
a slur, which should be legato tongued as lightly as possible.
That's it, that's 99% of what you need to know. Let's look at Old MacDonald Had A
Farm, that soul funk classic, to practice our basic tonguing patterns. Even
intermediate players might be surprised at how little attention they were
actually paying to this stuff. "T" means normal tongue, "ST" means a short,
staccato tongue, "LT" means a legato tongue and "X" means don't tongue at all. I'm
not saying that I'd play this song like this by the way, it's just to demonstrate
the three techniques. This is what it sounds like...
Moving on to a more realistic example that you might actually want to play,
let's look at Pick Up The Pieces by the Average White Band. I think the original
phrasing is slightly more choppy than this, but for the purposes of practice
let's just use the markings here. You can see the first two notes are slurred, so
your only tongue the first note, then there's a long-short on the next two
notes, so tongue the first one and staccato tongue the second one. When you
play a short note, make it short as you can. The second phrase has the same
phrasing, then, there's no phrasing marked, so we'll just tongue those three notes.
The tied note over the bar line is tongued of course, and then it's
short-long-short, so staccato tongue, tongue, staccato tongue. This is repeated to finish
off the phrase. Here's what it sounds like, in slow motion, and then in real
time.
Once you've got these basics together, the best way of learning good
phrasing is to study your favorite players and transcribe them. The card
above links to my series on transcription if you want to do this. It
really is the number one way that you can transform your playing. Virtually all
your favorite licks just use the basic three patterns we've learned today. It's all
about how you apply them. Just to show you how important phrasing is, I'll now
play Pick Up The Pieces with little or no attention to phrasing, then with
intentional and correct phrasing. You should be able to hear a distinct uptake
in funk immediately. Here we go...
So that's it for this Sunday, what you've learned could and should instantly
transform how good you sound. There'll be more parts on articulation in the future,
but this lesson will always be the most important. If you want to learn some
in-depth sax stuff go to www.getyoursaxtogether.com/masterclass
and get your free
one hour lesson with me, and as always you can support me by giving this video
a thumbs up, leave a comment, subscribe to the channel, click the bell icon to be
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don't forget to use the link in the description to pick up your free PDF
cheat sheet for this lesson. I'll see you for more awesome sex malarkey
next week. Laters!!
- at how little attention they've been paying -
ffffruit bats
Each note
began with a mini whoosh of air as the grab - reach
Keep rolling! Keep rolling!