wow, you’ve worked thru charlie parker’s omnibook decades ago, and yet you cant growl? Wish i could help, i can only re-iterate what’s already been said pertaining how to growl. Just hum while you are playing….

🙂 keep smiling, try tasty peppermint flavoured oral cavity growling gum, at a drugstore near you

anyways there’s good tips here – thanking you, gents

my suggestion is go back to a normal mouthpiece and get it happening there first – and hum for the fifth of the note that you want to growl and are playing ie finger growl C but hum G (really hum it out / spit it out)

could be its like bending two suck on a harmonica, say, very hard at first, then one day it just happens and is there on tap evermore, hmm a good way to show beginners is to tilt the harmonica up (thus to bend the reed and attain the note), later dropping the tounge and different kinda throat pressure makes it simply happen

good luck in any event i’m just saying this coz i got my flutter tounge happenning on the normal mp ok but can’t do it on the metal mp at all yet

anyways i’m growling guys coz my tenor fell of it’s stand bigtime 2nite (from the table !!) and bent the front of the bow, caved right in, and my fave note F# is motorboating in a dissonant fashion which does not resonanate well with me or even flatly bode too well for it’s future playing pleasure
my other tenor fell out of it’s dud old clapped out case one nite from a greate height back of ute and itz turned into project that will prob realistically never be completed or a happenning thang so my penance for being stupid is henceforth to pick the alto that i earlier bought for my daughter (which she doesn’t want or use) and go down that trck – incidentally the sax stand is a cheap crap piece of junk that came with the sax nameless brand variety built way back beyond the black stump; its aluminiumm paper thin crap tube has the end pipe flattened and then welded to the curve bar under the bell and appears weld has given way over time it just flopped down

*so far be aware hey check your stand and the angle on the bow support

itz not all bad, the cows will come home to pasture,
well howz about speak up on this , try growling to this tenoriffically
ta tatata ta
E AEG E
rpt slowly

all the best, stay happy, and growl long
i betcha you’ll be harmonically stoked soon
to achieve one must heap up small things

Johnny, making a “hum” without sound (made up of my vocal cords) is difficult. Or do you mean to make hum with the sound?

to explain the singing technique better.
open your mouth and sing a constant Mid C pitch.
memorise the exact position of your mouth and tongue.
This time keeping the mouth and tongue in exactly the same position, dont sing but just blow air out of your mouth instead.
now pick up the sax and using the exact mouth and tongue position,
play Mid C on the sax.

You might find this technique helpful, to get higher overtones on the sax, leading on to mastering the altissimo notes, the reason being, you might now be playing mid c on the sax in a different way (mouth/tongue wise) to the way you normaly play mid c.

this is why when you hum or sing through the sax while playing, you can alter the shape and colour of the sound coming out of the sax, bending the sound up or down, to distorting the sound, darkening or brightening the sound. Dropping your jaw when playing, increases the size of space inside your mouth which helps bend notes up and down, or laugh on the sax.

Having well kept teeth, ie removing all the plaque and bits of food sticking to your teeth, helps create a much clearer perfect pitch, all the vibrations go from teeth to bone in your face. Increases the growling and buzz.

You can also hold back spit in your mouth to create different effects while playing. or play with air escaping from your lips while playing.

Once you start bending notes, you can get better control over the sweet spot of pitches, have more control over saddening a pitch or brightening it up.

If you dont try all these things, you’ll just end up with a boring monotonous lifeless pitch on the sax,

Sxpoet, thank you, it is very helpful.

Would you manage to record a tone and examples of how you can change its shape and color? This has been greatly appreciating me for a long time but I have never seen anything like this on the web ….