Скачать или смотреть Quit Using Your Tuner (Do This Instead) | Sax Lessons for Adult Learners | Dave Good Sax

Yes, you read right: saxophone students, stop using your tuner (except in the special instances I indicate in today’s video and unless your particular tuner generates tones.) So, why no tuner? Because tuning as such generally involves watching a digital display turn from red to green or a digital meatball freezing in place or a meter or a gauge stop wiggling or whatever as you come into tune on your horn.

What’s the trouble with that, you ask?

In every situation listed above, you are tuning your sax with your eyes, not your ears. And this can lead to serious intonation problems when you begin to play with other musicians in a live setting.

Today’s session is all about how to fix saxophone intonation. How many times have you tuned up to your device only to wonder later why is your saxophone still sharp or flat? That's because a tuner gives us a false sense of security.

Tuning is relative, of course, and if you are content playing sax all by your lonesome, tuning is much less of an issue, right? But the minute you show up to your neighborhood Saturday jazz jam and they call Blue Bossa and you and the trumpet player take the lead, that’s when you come into the full realization of just how fickle tuning can be.

Best practice? Tune with your ears. On longtone exercises, I like to use drone tracks to play to. I’ll link to the cello drones I use in the description below. A keyboard can be useful too.

And to develop your ability to make split-second intonation adjustments on the fly, use play-along recordings. Barring those, you can always play along to the TV or the radio, or to various web sources like YouTube and Spotify.

Saxophone intonation is less about embouchure (unless you gnaw on your mouthpiece) and almost all about air support. It’s the quantity and the quality of your air that creates good intonation. So remember – fill up, and push air into your horn using your abs.

If you got some benefit from today's session, I hope you will hit that LIKE button and SUBSCRIBE, and share with anyone on the horn in your network who'd dig what we're doing here. This is your channel, and I'm grateful to be a part of it.

More questions? We can dive a little deeper in a one-on-one session. Find my contact info in the description below.

For information about online lessons with Dave, go here: https://saxlessonssandiego.com/contact/

My bio is here: https://saxlessonssandiego.com/bio/

Check out Gregg Fishman’s play-alongs here: https://gregfishmanjazzstudios.com/

And those cello drones I mentioned are here:    • Cello Drone C