If you start thinking about it like this, your progress is going to skyrocket. Playing the sax is like lifting weights or like laying bricks. Yes, the musicality would suggest more nuance, but once you learn how to blow air into your sax properly and adapt your embouchure, it’s pretty much set in stone. The only thing left to work on is your finger coordination and tongue coordination.
So how should your practice sessions look like? So that you can get back to letting loose and playing what you love without thinking, performing, playing with others, or to do the other things you want to do in life besides…practicing.
Notes and articulation. Hyper focus on getting the right notes and getting the right articulation. Playing only the right notes will mould your finger coordination to be perfect, playing only the right articulation will mould your tongue coordination to be perfect.
Imagine playing a whole piece or song in front of you, now imagine closely your finger movements throughout the whole thing. It forms a sort of pattern, doesn’t it? Resembling something like morse code, left index finger, + left middle finger, left thumb + left index. What you get in the end is a chain of coordinated finger movements. The same applies to your tongue.
So with this chain, how can we make progress in our practice sessions and get back to what we prefer doing (playing enjoyably, working on something else, socialising, etc.).
All you need to do is fix the broken links in the chain. Most of it should be fine if you ‘know’ how to play a piece, but there’s always these broken links in our finger chains/patterns and tongue chains that we seem to ignore.
You must look in the eyes of the dragon and slay it. Stop avoiding these broken links, think of them as only broken links, don’t think about the whole piece and how it’s not perfect.
All you’re doing is lifting weights, laying bricks, and fixing some broken chain links.
Once you’ve fixed 3-4 broken chain links in an entire piece, you’ll see that playing from top to bottom the piece just went from a 70% to a 90%, no exaggeration. And the practice took 20 mins tops.
This is efficient practice. This how you shorten your practice sessions, with intense focus on the broken links. This is how you progress significantly every week on your journey.
This has always been the truth and forever will be. There are no other fancy methods or workarounds this. See what playing the saxophone really is:
– Blowing air
– Adjusting embouchure
Once you know, you know.
- Fingers (always room for improvement)
- Tongue
What you actually need to practice when learning a new piece.
Work on what really matters.
