improving Intonation?

[jake]

Very interesting. Will have to try it out. After playing for nearly going on 3 years intonation is one of those annoying things. Like u said I warm up, get instrument in tune with a tuner, make sure mouthpiece is correct, even use the YouTube a440 tuner Johnny has video of and when I play find out it is still off.
The sax is def different than that of pianos and guitars. Just because it’s in tune doesn’t mean we will play in tune because of the other variables.
Thanks for this info. Doesn’t hurt to have more exercises in the arsenal.

[Anonymous]

The reason i say imagine/use Do, Re, Me, fa ,so, la, ti, do
instead of c,d,e,f,g,a,b,c is because you can practice it on any major scale
and start with Doh (you don’t wan’t to be starting on different letters – too confusing).

i then play simple songs like happy birthday & think in terms of ‘doh doh rey doh fah soh’
‘doh doh rey doh soh fah’ etc..

in relation to doh i then imagine:
the rey (asin happy birthday),
the mee (as in oh when the saints)
the fa (as in here comes the bride)
the so (as in twinkle twinkle little star)
the la (my bonny lies over the ocean)
you get the picture, that way i can imagine what each pitch is like
without having to refer to a keyboard/tuner if i forget.
All good inner ear pitch training.

if you can’t imagine a note in its correct pitch, i can’t see how you
honestly tell if you are playing it correctly pitch wise. Aural exercises
are a bit under-rated but they do help.

There are other aural exercises – which are useful – one of them is you listen
to a song, and try and remember where? the volume changes in the song and was it slowly or fast?,
where any change of playing occured? was it smooth or staccato? etc…

For me the hardest aural exercise is clapping in time to a song (loudly on the 1st beats in a bar),
which is great for focusing on rhythmn, and then saying what time it is in.

Like i say, if anyone else has any good ideas for learning the mind/inner ear to be in good
pitch – i would be interested to hear what works for them.

Piano players are lucky (assuming the piano has been tuned)
guitar players are less lucky, they still have to tune each string & when they
play a note on the fret, they can bend the note by pressing harder on the string,
so they can go out of tune as well, but not as bad as playing the sax (BEAST)

[Anonymous]

should have said ‘doh doh rey doh fah me’

[Author]

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