Hi All,
I hope you are all well and that your Saxophone has been singing regularly over the past month! I don’t know about you, but I’ve recently taken up the guitar as my hobby instrument and I find I spend more time thinking about what to practise rather than practising. Believe me, too many people spend time thinking about what to practise rather than actually playing, anyway, more on this later!
New Content
I’ve been hard at work, but I’m not looking for sympathy as I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. To give you a heads up of what I’ve added to the site last month:
- Technique: The Note Bend/Lip Slur/Scoop
- Song: Just The Way You Are - Sax Solo
- Scale: A Major to a 12th
- Improvisation warmup: Mixing Major and Chromatic Scales
- Rhythm: The Semiquaver (16th Notes)
- Rhythm: Swing Quavers
- Technique: Why your Saxophone is out of tune
- Song: When I Was Your Man - Bruno Mars (two parts)
- Song: Old Time Rock and Roll Solo
- Rhythm: Compound Time Signatures
- Rhythm: Dotted Quavers
- Theory: Finding the related Minor
- Song: How to play The Power of Love
Routine is key, planning can be a waste
Now don’t get me wrong, it’s really important for both your development as a player and for your enjoyment that you are practising the right things each time you pick up the saxophone in order to make progress and ultimately enjoy your time playing. As soon as you feel like you’ve hit a wall, practising becomes a chore, you research your next step and then, unfortunately, don’t pick the sax up for a while because your fun hobby has turned into a vocation…
Now, a shameless plug, but this is exactly why SaxCasts is so useful as a learning aid. I am adding two new videos to the Fundamentals and Song lessons (with backing tracks and sheet music) to make sure that each week you can practise at least 3 new things to keep your routine fresh and fun. My course will systematically enable you to pick up your saxophone every day and spend time enjoying your hobby rather than waste time thinking about what to play. If you get stuck, you can post a message below the video and let the answer come to you.
A typical daily practise routine might look something like this:
- Long Tones + Vibrato (Live Saxophone Vibrato Training for Stage 5
- Get your fingers and head around two new scales - e.g. A min + E min
- Revisit some other scales - majors, minors, chromatic
- Learn/Revisit a Rhythm eg Stage 5 Dotted and Swung Quavers
- Play some tunes with the backing tracks and sheet music from the site (e.g. Wonderful World?)
There you have a list of daily practise that will last for one week and really improve your knowledge of rhythm, tone, sight reading and reading skills. No research necessary just plug and play!
Requests
We are open to requests! If there is a specific song or technique that you'd like us to cover on SaxCasts then mail us and we'll add it to the list!
Special Offer
To get you out of that practise rut, the next 20 people to signup to SaxCasts will get 50% off their subscription for 3 months after their 7 day trial. But hurry as there are only 20 places up for grabs. Enter code: 3MONTHFLASH at checkout.
Thats all for this month, thanks for reading and I really hope you enjoy all the content on SaxCasts, happy Saxing!
Dan
SaxCasts.com Founder
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