Sax Practice Notes

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

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

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

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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