Tone Development

[Michael Bishop]

Hey Johnny,

I’ve really gotten a lot of benefit from the eeh-ahh exercise, it helps a lot 🙂 It’s pretty amazing how effective these simple exercises are. Resuming my lessons locally, he emphasizes we work on our tone every single day, regardless of how long we’ve been playing. He was telling me how he’s seen players who learned another instrument prior to the Sax and they have a lot of music theory knowledge (which it’s important), but on the Saxophone their tone needed some work, so the music theory knowledge doesn’t do much good! The point he was making with me is our tone is the #1 thing I must concern myself with and work on it every time I practice. Long tones aren’t the most exciting thing in the world to work on, but man do they help! 🙂

[Mel]

Amen to Long Tones Michael!

[john]

right, and the eeh ahh exrecise, used during the long tones helps to focus in on our own “sweet spot”
it helps us to eventually “know” where we should be with the embouchure to get our best possible sound

[Mel]

Thanks Johnny! I just watched that lesson again and will be trying it.

[Michael Bishop]

@ Mel It’s impossible for us to not practice those things too many times. It’s something we have to work on every single day. When I push air from my diaphragm area into the Saxophone, I can sometimes feel the muscles in my back region working too. I have to remind myself to keep my shoulders down and keep the neck muscles relaxed, don’t lean my head forward, etc.. If we have a problem with our shoulders kind of shrugging up when playing, that usually means we have shallow air support. Keep the entire upper area/oral cavity relax. Recently with long tones, I’ve had a few times when I felt like passing out a little bit LOL

[Mel]

All good points Michael! It’s so easy to tip your head down and forward and choke off some air supply.

[Wesley Gemeinhardt]

Currently my sound is pretty dark and warm sounding when I play classical. I’ve been experimenting with my sound to get a more jazz/rock and roll style yet I keep getting a thin sound. Is there anything I can do to fix this and get a jazzier sound. Here’s a few examples of the sound I am trying to achieve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVl-ZFaY8To https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC0pTInd-CI

[Author]

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