Category: BACK TO THE SAX

Mouthpiece Deprivation, and the Saxo-fooooon, and Making Good Art

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UPDATE (6 July 2013): Woohoo! My Barone mouthpiece arrived in time to be carried back to me by my friends! Here’s the snap my friend sent me: I’m excited to get it on the horn and start getting a feel for it! Original Post: So, a week or so ago I screwed up my tenor sax mouthpiece. I was having some problems, and there was a persistent, weird problem I was seeing–my reeds weren’t really sealing, and I was seeing a weird moisture buildup on the table of the mouthpiece, where no moisture should have been going. It was happening …

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On My Practicing: An Update

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Original Post (updated at end of post): I have stopped posting here regularly about what’s going on with my return to playing the saxophone (because my practice log notebook, though no longer daily, is publicly available to anyone interested), but I’m in a contemplative mood about it all now, so I figured I’d post. In exciting news, the overtone exercises I’ve been doing at the advice of Phil Barone had been paying off. I really am a lot happier with my tone than I have ever been, and I’m getting a richer sound. Not only that, but I’m getting pretty …

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Out from the Sinews

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In a book I read long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the Christopher Dewdney wrote in his book of poetry The Radiant Inventory about neurology, using the most brilliantly poetical and beautiful language. He wrote about all kinds of things, of course: books of poetry are like that. But among the things he discussed in the book was the neurobiology of break-ups, and why they are so difficult. I can’t quote the book, or even paraphrase it in any way I’d regard as trustworthy–my copy is somewhere in that other galaxy where I read it, in a box, floating …

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Practice Notes Shared at Evernote

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One of the things that has been surprising about moving to a new computer is being able to access social network/media services so much better than I could in the past. While my first instinct is to blog everything as a way of putting information into accessible storage, it’s not really the most efficient way to do everything. So I’ve been exploring, and one of the services I’ve found to serve a purpose I needed is Evernote. While I don’t think posting about my music practice here is a terrible idea–and I will be posting sometimes as part of my …

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Morosco Exercise, And Moving Forward

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So, a little digging reveals the Victor Morosco exercise that Phil Barone described to me has been posted online with more detailed explanation. (Presumably posted by another of Morosco’s students?) Or, at least, it’s an exercise that very, very closely resembles the one Phil reccomended to me, and which seems to teach the same essential things. Since I’ve only been doing the Morosco exercise a couple of days, I can see what I’ve been doing wrong in terms of the articulations, and it helps me understand parts of the exercise I didn’t get from Phil’s explanation. It’s also pretty in …

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Sax Practice Notes

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Well, I’m still doing those exercises Phil Barone gave me to do. I’m pretty happy with the result, and I’m finding that taking more mouthpiece is making a big difference, and that overtone exercises are also helping a lot. Maybe it’s just that I’m recovering my embouchure, I’m not sure–that must be part of it–but I have begun to develop a largeness of tone that I remember wanting and needing, but not knowing how to get, back when I was playing in Dabang Band. This, of course, also brings me to a couple of problems: First, I think I’ve truly …

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Overtones

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I’m on my seventh day back to the sax. (I had to miss one day a few days back, as I spent three hours searching Saigon for sax accessories, unsuccessfully, and the rest of the day was tied up with other things.) Not much to report as yet, though I’m still doing the exercises I got from Phil Barone; the overtones exercises he gave me are the ones with which I’m making the most obvious progress, to the point where now I can get more than one upper partial on certain notes, at will. I am very much wishing I …

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Phil Barone’s Tone Production Exercises

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Note: I wrote this about ten days ago. I thought I’d posted it, but I hadn’t. So I’m posting it now, backdated. It’s probably not of such pressing interest to most people reading this blog, so I don’t mind doing that even if it means some people will miss it. It’s basically all about my current practice regimen, my interaction with Phil Barone online, and my return to the saxophone.

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Back to Sax

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Those who visit my webpage (as opposed to reading it via RSS) will notice that over the last few months I changed my gravatar (to a friend’s caricature from 1995 of me with a saxophone, which you can see to the right), and then I changed the template and the layout of the pages in the top menu, and added a lot of headers, including a few with me playing saxophone, like these below: The template change had been necessary for a while, but the selection of images of me playing music in the headers has not been incidental. Ever …

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