How to Play Faster and Make Fewer Mistakes - Saxophone Fingering Tutorial

[Music] every sax player wants to play faster in today's video I'm going to show you a couple things you could start doing today that will help you play faster cleaner and with more solid rhythm my name is Jay Metcalf and on this channel I make videos to help you become a better saxophone player now this week we just hit 10,000 subscribers which is amazing and if you're not yet one of those people I'd love for you to join the list by clicking the subscribe button below later on I'm going to tell you about a worksheet you can download that has the lick that I played in the introduction as well as some other exercises to practice all of this stuff that I'm going to go over in today's lesson so stay tuned for that if you have your saxophone handy pick it up now and keep it in your hands while you watch this video so you can try out some of the things I'm gonna go over so my question for you today is how is your finger position on the saxophone when you play do your fingers rest on the keys most of the time or are they more flailing about a few inches away from the keys and the horn most of the time when you play if you're not sure record yourself playing something or just play something in front of the mirror and watch your hands most developing saxophone players have a lot of room for improvement when it comes to their hand position and finger position and even advanced players can gain a lot from working on what we're going to talk about today now you might ask what's the big deal what's who cares if my fingers around like this or they're close to the keys all the time what difference does it make well imagine you're playing a sport badging you're playing golf or basketball or tennis or whatever and whenever you swing the golf club or sweet a tennis racquet or shoot a free throw you were making lots of unnecessary movement with your body that has nothing to do with getting the ball in the hole or giving the ball over the net any extra movement or any unnecessary thing you're doing when you're playing sports is gonna really hinder your ability to perform well it's the same thing we're playing the saxophone don't make things more difficult for yourself you gotta move your hands in an efficient way and eliminate all excess movement let's sort out your finger position right now correcting poor finger position is one of the easiest things we can do that's gonna have a huge impact on our overall playing you don't have to be a professional saxophone player to play with good finger technique this is for everybody at every level if you're a beginner let's get things started on the right foot by getting some good habits from the very beginning if you've been playing for a while and you're you're not playing was really solid finger technique now is a great time to start improving that you're gonna notice being improvement in your overall playing once you do this so the first thing we're gonna do is define what the correct finger and hand position is on a saxophone your fingertips should be resting comfortably on the key pearls and your little fingers should be resting on the G sharp key and the E flat key your left thumb should be on the thumb wrist with just the tip positioned over the edge to action the octave key your right thumb should be under the thumb hook at a position that allows your fingers to rest rounded and comfortably on the key pearls notice the relaxed curve of my fingers you don't want to have straight fingers like this you want the motion of your finger on the key to be straight down and not at an angle when you play the palm Keys your fingers should not come off the saxophone like this so now try holding the saxophone with this ideal hand position that I just described remember to keep your hands wrists shoulders neck very relaxed it's extremely important to release any tension you might have in your body stand up straight with good posture we need to get this position right without playing a single note before we can move on and memorize what it feels like to hold the saxophone with perfect hand position good posture and while being totally next make this your default position now you might say that's all well and good but the problem happens when I start moving my fingers and that's where my fingers start coming off the keys that's why I step to is we're gonna play one note at a time while maintaining this perfect default position now if you've watched some of my other videos you may already be practicing long tones over the entire range of your instrument to work on sound and embouchure and intonation and all those things whatever add finger position to the list of things you focus on while you're practicing your long tones when you play the notes that have a lot of fingers down like D let's say be careful that you're not squeezing the keys down with a grip of death this is a very this is another really common mistake that people make in the other direction it's not as visible but it has the same result which makes our techniques sloppy and it messes up our rhythm and it's generally not good so if you're already practicing your long tones over the full range of the instrument as you should be adding this focus on the fingering position is not going to add any time to your practice session your goal here is to train yourself to always play every note with this ideal relaxed hand position step 3 is where we take whatever it is we're working on it could be scales arpeggios anything doesn't matter and we apply this focus on perfect hand position let's take our concert b-flat major pentatonic scale as an example I want you to play it up and down very slowly and focus on maintaining that perfect default hand position for every note [Applause] [Music] now the key to this is going slow we play fast the same way we play slowly just not nearly as good so if your hand position and technique is lousy at a slow tempo when you speed things up it's gonna be even more lousy now before you tell me I can't practice slow I don't have time for that I need to get better fast can't you tell me the quick and easy version of all this this is the quick ami boil the quickest and easiest way to develop fast technique to play cleanly and to get solid rhythm do you think I've got loads of extra time to practice I don't I wouldn't be telling you this if it wasn't the truth take it from somebody who has had a lot of trouble with this and only realised very late in the game how important it is to practice with meticulous attention to details believe me it takes far longer to correct bad habits down the road that have developed over time meant to just avoid them in the first place by going slow and practicing with very good technique you want to get into the habit of playing things slower and by slower I mean at a tempo where you can play things with no mistakes and it's slow enough that you have the time to think about other things than just getting the right notes let's call this the Goldilocks tempo you need to understand that by the time you're ready to play things fast the notes need to be automatic you can't be thinking about what notes to play your mind needs to be free to think about lots of other things if your brain processing power is all used up thinking about what notes to play then there's nothing left over for just making music in other words it's all the other things that you're doing that allow you to play fast musically it's having a strong armature having good finger technique you having good posture being relaxed solid sense of time good breathing all of those things is what makes the sound that's coming out musical you kits not just I'm able to wiggle my fingers really fast now in order to execute all of those other things we need to have practiced slowly to give our brain the time to process all this information and make it happen automatically so I want you to try to enforce the 8020 rule when you're practicing technical difficult things 80% of the time you want to be practicing stuff at a super comfortable tempo where you can get everything right and you're not going to be getting mistakes so you can concentrate on all the different aspects of playing and then for no more than 20% of the time will you practice that same thing up to the goal tempo [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] this means that for 80% of the time we don't have to worry so much about what notes were playing we can really think about everything else that we need to be thinking about in order to sound good you can actively be improving all the other aspects of your playing while enforcing good habits that are gonna carry over when we speed things up if you're already able to play something that's your goal tempo cleanly with no mistakes and you don't need to spend a lot of time practicing it but we end up wasting a lot of time practicing things we already know how to play it's not really practicing it's satisfying to hear yourself play something that that sounds good and you should do that you should indulge in that and allow yourself to sound good from time to time but if you spend all of your practice time just sounding good at playing the same things you already know how to play you're not gonna progress very much now I know a lot of people have doubts about the logic of all this people say how can playing slow help me play faster or they say listen all those musicians that can play really fast they must be practicing really fast all the time or else how could they do it I bet you my brand-new saxophone here that if you practice things the way I'm explaining to you now over time you're gonna see a significant improvement in how you play in your accuracy in your rhythm and how fast you can play things those of you who have had success with this please comment below to help convince the others that this method really works I've made a worksheet that anyone can download for free it covers the lick I played in the intro as well as some other exercises that are going to help isolate some problem areas for fingerings on the saxophone so you can improve those things and it also has some step-by-step instructions on how you should be practicing something to get it up to speed click the link in the description below or the one on screen here to get access to the PDF worksheet then and then work through the different exercises put on the metronome at your goal goldilocks tempo whatever that is and practice this stuff in front of a mirror so you can control and you can see how well you're doing with your fingers apply this method practicing anything technical that you're working on and let me know in the comments below it helps you play cleaner faster and with better rhythm if you found this video helpful please click the like button check out some of my other videos over here that you might find useful and check the description below for more links [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Better Sax

Views: 172,880

Rating: 4.9497724 out of 5

Keywords: bettersax, better sax, saxophone lesson, fingering, how to play saxohone fast, saxophone technique, saxophone fingering tutorial, alto sax, tenor sax, saxophone hand position, saxophone finger positiong, saxophone fingering, learn to play saxophone, sax lesson, sax tutorial, 80 20 rule, how to practice slowly, jay metcalf, jay metcalf saxophone, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, saxophone, saxophone technique exercises, how to play saxophone, learn saxophone

Id: vqskTWQxG04

Length: 12min 29sec (749 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 27 2018