Hi, and welcome to the music coach program. This is week one of alto saxophone lessons. Today we're going to get started on a great journey playing the original saxophone. The saxophone was invented in 1840, by Belgian instrument maker, Adolph sax. And the very first saxophone was in fact, an alto saxophone like the one we're going to play. Now after that, he continued to invent other saxophones, there ended up being 16 different types and total from very small all the way to huge large ones that are as tall as I am.

Today we use mainly for different saxophones, soprano, alto, tenor and baritone so the alto saxophone is the second smallest of the four that we use the most often. Now the saxophone wasn't originally intended to bridge the gap inside an orchestra between the woodwind instrument family, which are flutes, clarinets, oboes, and the brass instruments, which are trumpet and trombone, tuba. And the idea was to build a brass body, but use a wood Reed and mouthpiece very similar to a clarinet. Now like a lot of new technologies, and it might be funny to think of this as technology, but the saxophone for its time was a really high tech machine. It was not embraced right away by the classical music of the time. A lot of people thought it was strange and weird and didn't have a place.

It wasn't really until the early 1900s when jazz music began to happen in America, where the saxophone really found its home in music, because jazz music itself was being created out of basically nothing. The saxophone found at home because it was easy to put play fast moving lines Like on a clarinet, but it was louder than a clarinet. And there were different sizes you could play. So the saxophone went on to become part of the early part of rock and roll and r&b and many other forms since then, but it's being used as a soloist instrument is in jazz. So we're going to get you started on how to put this actually together. All saxophones including the also come in three main pieces, one is the body.

And one thing about the body for right now a couple of things to really notice is on your bottom hand, there is a hook for your thumb that helps you hold the weight of it. There's a ring in the center of the body, which is what your strap is going to clip on to. And there's a thumb rest on the top hand. Now saxophones can only be played one way you can't play them. If you're left handed, there isn't a left handed saxophone, there's only one way to play the saxophone. The right hand is always on the bottom.

The second main piece is the neck. The neck is very simple in its design, it only has one key, which is the octave key that opens and I'll explain how that works a little later and it's got cork on the on the on the end of the mouthpiece goes on. The third piece is the mouthpiece and this is the part that's going to go in your mouth that you're going to blow into. And the mouthpiece has a few different pieces that I'm going to show you how to put together. The first thing we're going to do to assemble the saxophone is to put the mouthpiece on the neck. The reason why we do this first is that you may need to grab around the mouthpiece like this and you don't want to have the reed which is very delicate on there.

So you grab the neck of the mouthpiece and twist gently. Now how far onto the cork you go depends on the saxophone. How far on the mouthpiece goes determines how sharp or flat the instrument is going to be. And because it's made of metal and it's heating up when you blow into it, you may need to adjust it over time depending on the temperature of the room you're in. It's a little bit more of an advanced thing, but we'll get into it but that's why the cork is longer than it needs to be so that we can move the mouthpiece in and out for now, put it on about that far. And you want to basically line up the flat part of the mouthpiece straight with the neck like this.

And now we're ready to put the reed and the ligature on. The Reed, which is the part that vibrates and helps us make our sound is made of wood and comes in usually a little plastic case like this. Now the strength of the read that you use will usually be on the smaller end of the scale at the beginning. So like a two and a half or a two is good for beginners. And as you get more advanced, you can use harder reads, they take more air but they produce more volume. So we want to grab the read out of the back like this and you'll notice right away The tip of the read is very, very thin, and it's very easy to crack and ship it.

So you want to treat the end of this thing like you're carrying a bunch of eggs. It's very, very sensitive. So we're now we're going to place that on the mouthpiece with the thin tip at the end. And next we're going to grab the ligature, which has a larger opening on one side and a smaller opening on the other. And we're going to take the large opening and slide it down like this. And we may have to loosen the screws of it, we want to make sure that the ligature slides all the way to the top.

Every mouthpiece is a little different, but we want to make sure it slides all the way past this sort of ramp here. Now, when the reed is like this, it's not going to play very easily. So we want to make sure we're going to loosen the screws, and now we're going to slide the reed down so that the tip of the read is close to the top. Tip of the mouthpiece. Then once it's in place, we're going to tighten the screws on the ligature. And that's going to hold the reed in place.

Right. Now we're ready to attach the neck to the body. Now on the top of the neck, there are two screws. One of them is for an old fashioned music stand called a liar. And we're not going to use this one at all, it's always on the left side, the screw we want is on the right side, we want to make sure it's loose. Just don't unscrewed all the way just a little bit so that it moves.

And then we're going to attach the neck and just screwed in very gently till it clicks to the bottom. And then you want to line up the neck with the thumb rests. And then we're going to tighten the screw. And again just has to be snug. You don't have to turn it really, really hard. Now we're ready to attach the neck strap.

You always want to make sure the hook is facing away from your body when you hook it in. And now we're going to adjust the neck strap so that the instrument comes up to your face. Right now my neck strap is too low. So I'm going to bring it up like this so that my head is straight, and that I'm able to make a sound. To make a sound on the saxophone, you need to rest your teeth on the mouthpiece, about an inch from the tip for three centimeters and you don't want to bite down you just want to rest your teeth there and then close your mouth around the mouthpiece to make a seal. And on the bottom of the mouthpiece, your lips should just be resting a little bit out like this, rather than in like this and when you blow You want to keep your cheeks in and direct the air all the way through the instrument.

So your armature, which is what's holding the mouthpiece should look like this. Now in this week's practice video, you're going to learn the first three notes of the E major scale, which is going to be the scale we're going to use in this program. So the first note we're going to play, we have to push down in the top hand, the B key, which is the second key from the top, the A key, which is the fourth key, we skip over the first one, and the third one, and then we're gonna play the G key, which is with your ring finger, then the bottom hand you're going to play the first key and the second key and this makes an E. Now that we know how to make e work Going to make our second note which is F sharp, the only thing you need to change to make F sharp is in your bottom hand, you're going to lift up your pointer finger.

So now we have his three fingers on the top and middle finger in the bottom. To make our last note for this week, we're going to play G sharp. And to do that, you're going to lift up your bottom middle finger and add the pinky key in the left hand. Now the trick is, is to do this at the same time, because if you move one and then the other, you'll hit a note in between like this, then the sound we're looking for is can take a little bit of practice to get used to moving them at the same time. Learning any musical instrument is going to be challenging because your fingers and thumbs are not all equally fast or equally. They're not all the same link.

They're not all the same strength either the learning of music instrument is about learning to even out the amount of pressure and speed that your fingers are using. Alright, great work on getting started and I'll see you in the practice video.