Talking about the "breath" when blowing the saxophone

Everyone knows that blowing saxophone is inseparable. The control of the breath directly determines the level of your saxophone, which is called the "tone". Here are a few things to say:

 

1. Breathing the bass or treble area

 

Many beginners, including those who have been practicing for a while, often have low-pitched sounds, and high-pitched sounds are prone to underfilled sounds (sometimes similar to "screams"). This is the typical control problem.

 

Since everyone didn't have a teacher at the beginning, they all felt like they were blowing. Therefore, when blowing the saxophone's high and low sounds, the mouth-type control method of "whistling" is adopted, that is, "the higher the sound, the tighter the mouth, the more the gas is promoted." In fact, the level of our saxophone's sound has been determined by the button, and all we have to do is to "send a breath" to the saxophone, causing the reed to vibrate. The more this air is sent, the more complete the reed vibration will be, and the more the sound will be.

 

In order to achieve this, in the high-pitched sound, you must relax your lips to control the strength of the mouthpiece, open our throat and push the breath as much as possible. When the bass is blown, the mouth is also relaxed. It is also opening our throat, letting the breath slowly and to the saxophone, and letting the reed vibrate in the low frequency area. At this time, if your mouth is too tight, or the breath is too tight, it will affect the reed's vibration in the low frequency area, but will change its vibration frequency so that the bass can't be blown out.

 

Gas "promoting": refers to the fast breath

 

Gas "slow": refers to the slow gas supply

 

Whether it is "promoting" or "slowing", you must ensure that you have enough breath when you play the saxophone. Therefore, when we are blowing high notes, the breath is “promoting and footing”. When blowing the low-pitched area, the breath is “slow and full”. When our beginners can't control these two mouth styles and breaths, they will make the high notes not blow out, and the sounds that are not coming out will be “dry, hairy,” and the bass will be easily blown.

 

2. Stability of breath

 

Breath stability training is an extremely important subject. This determines whether you can rely on your own control of the mouth and breath to blow a more stable saxophone sound. This kind of training is a process that must be experienced in learning saxophone. Because only such a large number of exercises can make your breath have sufficient stability, otherwise the sound that is blown out will be "floating."

 

The stability training of breath is determined by several factors:

 

a) uniform breath (invariant breath strength)

 

b) lip type fixing

 

c) hearing sensitivity

 

These three items are indispensable. Especially for listening, the sound we blow out depends entirely on our ears to make judgments and feedback back to the brain to direct our breath control "fine tuning." This exercise can be achieved not only by blowing long sounds, but also by blowing any Etude. It depends on the accumulation of time and experience. With the increase in the time of blowing, the control in this area will get better and better.