Singing anyone?

[Marc]

Hi, mates…

Some time ago, amongst several books and websites I started reading about learning how to play this beautiful instrument, I found an author who encourages beginners to sing as a side practice. Not only it improves your tone and your ear, it even helps a lot in controling your breath, since woodwind breathing is almost identical to that for singing.

My teacher strongly recommends me to “sing” the notes while reading solfége even if pitch is not perfect. That kinda made me decide to take singing classes at a music school near my place… moreover, they’re for free.

Anyone does or did some singing besides blowing his horn?

[Anonymous]

I started learning the Sax in Dec 2013, and Johnny’s “Daily practice routine” worked wonders for my tone,
in a matter of weeks.

But in the last month i’ve started playing the virtual sax, and that is exactly what your teacher is talking about,
you play with a pencil instead of the sax, using the same finger positions on the sax, and you sing or hum the exact notes
for each finger position. This has completely changed my perception of the sound on my sax, and its the best thing out for pitch
association when playing the sax, i use do,re,me fa as in “the sound of music” as the humming/pitch of notes.

Until you’ve tried this approach, you have absolutely no idea of the advances you make in terms of sax playing tone.
After a few weeks, you can pick up any sheet music & hum the correct notes without even knowing the melody of the song.
In fact its so good, that you can practice the whole piece in your head humming, in tone & time, that when you actually
start playing the piece in a lot of cases, you can play the sheet music of in one take, instead of wasting time learning
things bar by bar & and end up playing disjointed.

But the main benefit it totally transforms the way you hear sounds on your sax, and it changes your playing completely,
i honestly believe, when you do this, you actually find your proper voicing on the sax.

[Marc]

Thanks, James… I’ve started “humming” in the best pith I can, every solfége I practice… my teacher encourages me to do so, and now that I read your comment, I have no less but to agree it’s a real advantage for “embedding” the tone.

Besides, I’m strongly considering the idea of enrolling in a choir to take at least one weekly class on singing.

[Anonymous]

Hi Marc,

It’s a lot better if you can sing the pitches, using 2 or 3 letter words,
like Do, Te, He, hah, heh or ‘sound of music – do re me etc.’
Most people who can’t sing the pitch resort to humming the pitch, but i think
humming is mainly better for growling.

If you don’t sing, then when you play the sax, you’ll just end up tightening
or loosening the lips just to make the pitch flatter or sharper on the mouthpiece,
and that will be your limited range on the sax. You won’t get that lovely voicing
that a lot of experienced players get.

To take the sax to the next level, if you sing specific words along to the pitch,
and then put the sax mouthpiece in your lips, then you open up a new pallete of
sounds on what ever pitch you play – in other words, when you play a mid c, instead
of just sharpening it & flattening it, you can make that c sound change into lots of
different c sounds, like people with different dialects saying the same c but they
all sound different, but still in tune – this is where you experiment & find the
best voicing for the sax you think sounds the best when you play specific melodies.

An interesting thing my teacher showed me – was
1) sing a certain pitch aloud,
2) then sing the exact pitch without making a sound, so you keep the same mouth positions,
breathing etc
3) then repeat number 2) with the moutpiece/sax – what you are doing is getting the reed to
vibrate at the exact frequency for the sound in number 1)

The next step is you can say or sing specific words as in steps 1,2 & 3 – you will
change the sax sound eg Te , Ta will sound slightly different whatever pitch you play,
so singing does the same thing – this allows you to make that sax pitch for a specific note
sound a lot different in many ways, without flattening or sharpening the note.

An example (not a good one) is recorded below what happens when i sing the 2 words Doo Wah
and play a pitch, if i was to hum instead – i would find it harder to get the same effect

If i’m playing overtones, i find if i sing different words, i get different overtones a
lot easier. eg I use words like “you”, “who”, “way” and this makes the overtone more stable
and easier to hit.

[Anonymous]

Marc its funny how you raised the “Singing anyone?” topic weeks ago.

i turned up for a sax lesson recently, and the pro had me singing!

But he’s got me singing numbers instead!
So i’ve now got to learn the exact sound for each number.
eg
1 – c, 2 – d, 3 – e, 4 – f, 5 – g, 6 – a, 7 – b, 8 – C.

you pick number 1 as the starting note of the scale, that is within your natural singing range.

So if he calls out a random number between 1 and 8, i have to make the correct singing sound. or he might say sing 1 2 3 1 8-below 1.

i didn’t quite pick up where he was going with this singing, but seems quite serious in gettng me to do in my daily exercises. Something to do with improvising & soloing – i’ll have to find out more in my next lesson.

[Marc]

Yes, Jim… any wind instrument is nothing else than the extension of the player’s singing apparatus, i.e. diaphragm, lungs, trachea and mouth.
So the only element we could be not taking much care of is our vocal chords, as far as our source of vibration is the reed. But all the others should be trained like a singer does.

[Anonymous]

I’ll find out more next time, i think its pre improvising/soloing training more to get me to hear a sound play a sound in relation to other sounds – so if i listen to a melody, be able to say what numbers the notes are.

[Author]

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