And welcome back. Now what I'd like to do in this lesson is have a quick chat about mouthpieces and mouths and the joining thereof. So what I mean by that is, it's not quite a simple case of putting the saxophone in your mouth and playing, it's obviously not quite like that. It's not like using a fork and putting your dinner in your mouth with your fork is a subtle couple of tricks to it. So first of all, the first thing is when you don't want to put your mouthpiece too far in your mouth. It's not as though you're kind of swallowing the whole thing.

But in the same breath, you don't want to be you don't want to be hesitant in only putting a little bit of the mouthpiece in your mouth. So what do I mean by that? There's a happy medium, basically. So excuse my ugly face, or bring it a little bit closer to the camera. And what we're doing is we are folding the mouth pace following your lip over your bottom teeth and your top teeth are actually resting on the top of the mouthpiece. So again, my ugly face up close we are falling bottom lip sort of over over our bottom teeth.

Top teeth are on the top of the mouthpiece like this. So we kind of again we're pivoting with the neck strap, we are folding it over exaggerating my teeth. And there we go once once again, folding in over teeth. nice tight mouth around the mouthpiece. You don't want too far. You don't want too little, just a little bit maybe about a centimeter maybe about half an inch or there abouts.

Folding the bottom with over your bottom teeth and your top teeth are on the mouthpiece. So that's the first thing while the mouthpiece is in your mouth, you need to have nice, nice tight cheeks, your mouth, nice, firm cheeks. Were not blowing. We're not going and blowing our cheeks out like balloon caving in a nice firm, nice firm base. Its ugly face without the SEC sign in it. And arguably, my face is uglier with a saxophone in it.

And it is without a saxophone in it, and it's pretty ugly anyway, but your face is beautiful. Your face is awesome. You are good looking, especially with a saxophone in it. Okay, so we're putting once again, putting the saxophone in our mouth. nice thin cheeks. Keep resting.

We're not biting, no biting teeth top To resting on the top of the mouthpiece and firm cheeks. Cool, good. The next thing we are talking about diaphragms your diaphragm is the big muscle that kind of goes sort of underneath your ribcage it follows your ribcage, your lungs in your chest, your diaphragm is the big muscle, your diaphragm pushes air out of your lungs. Okay, so the diaphragm your stomach muscle pushes the air out of your lungs, which in turn comes up your throat and out of your mouth into the mouthpiece in the saxophone. So you when you take a big breath, you fill in you fill your lungs, your chest expands. Then when you breathe out, you slowly but surely use your diaphragm muscle to push the air out of your lungs slowly inconsistently like this and slowly What that means is you're as you run out of air, your lungs empty their air, your stomach actually goes in.

Alright? That is tricky. The natural reaction is when you breathe out. You kind of relax and and you tell me expands. But no we're doing a conscious deliberate efforts using our upper stomach muscles push the air out of your lungs, which means that your stomach actually sucks itself in. All right.

I mean, again, I'm exaggerating. It's tiny, subtle. So there we go. So a practice for you what I would like you to do first of all, big breath and blow not hard but consistently. So like this. Keep pushing and keep going until you run out of it.

Let's see if we can count to five we're doing saxophone away from your mouth. See if we can breathe in and blow out for five counts already like this. It's difficult, not easy. Let's try that again. One more. Good.

Take a bit of a breath might get a little bit dizzy doing that. Next thing, we are using our tongues with our constant breath. Our tongue stops the air from going through the saxophone. Okay, we're still breathing, the air is still coming out, but our tongue Stop it. Alright, so like this tongue. We want the tip of our tongues by the tip, not, not there.

But right on the tip of your tongue. The tip of your tongue touches the tip of the mouthpiece and the tip of the raid at the same time and your tongue it just goes bop, bop, bop, bop. Okay. So it's not as though we're, again, we're not biting the mouthpiece. We're not shoving our tongues all over it. It's not some kind of disgusting ice cream licking kind of thing.

It's, uh, alright, let's try that with the count of five. Again without the saxophone. Big breath. And with the tongue on each count, ready, one. Good. Take another breath, big breath.

Let's try that again. Great. Now let's try to add that with the saxophone. So we put the saxophone in the mouth, no fingers, no fingers. Don't worry about thing is all we've got is our thumb under the under the little thumb wrist at the Bottom on the right hand side, or other thumb on the thumb wrist on the left hand side. No fingers touching any keys.

Big breath. Okay, ready? One, two. Here we go. How'd you go? How'd you go?

Let's do that again. So again, we're following the lips. bottom teeth. top teeth are on the mouthpiece. And we'll go big breath in, and we go 512345 with the tongue already. Great.

Let's try that. Let's try seven. Big breath. seven notes. Ready? No fingers.

Big breath. Seven tongues. Go. How'd you go? We're starting to get more air through our lungs and our into our saxophone. Let's see if we can do eight.

Ready? 123. Go. good, this is good. We will slowly over time your lungs will get stronger. slowly over time, you'll get used to blowing air and taking a quick breath and then blowing more air slowly, inconsistently.

Take a big breath in more air slowly and consistently, you'll get used to it. Let's see if we can try 10 we'll take a big breath. And we'll go 10 times like we did just just before, but 10 of them. Can we do 10? I can do 10 can you do 10? Of course you can do 10.

And if you can't, that's all right. Do as many as you can, and then we'll stop. And please rewind this little bit of the video and try again. But over time, maybe it might take a couple of days. Maybe it might take a couple of weeks. It'll be fine.

Ready? Let's do Tim ready. Big breath. Go. How'd you go? I got to 10 did you get to 10?

I'm guessing you did. Well done. Excellent. That is my quick chat about mouthpieces and mouths and tonguing and I'll see you in the next lesson. Well done. Excellent.