Hello, and welcome to How to play the sax. My name is Matthew, thank you very much for joining me. In this lesson. We're going to put our saxophone together. So in the previous lesson, we've talked about putting the mouthpiece here these onto the neck of your saxophone. Now we want to put it all together.

So just to recap, we have put our neck strap on first, we have put our mouthpiece and our read on. Next, we want to add, put it all together. Now, the saxophone is a very delicate instrument. You need to be really careful there. They are expensive. They are delicate, they break easily.

They've got a lot of moving parts and a lot of mechanisms on them. So please be careful with your saxophone. So like I say, pulling it out of the case, being very careful. It is usually excuse me, I'll just put that down there. It is usually A two handed operation. So when you pull it out of the case, if you can grab it by the bell, the big bit at the front, because that's mainly metal, you'll also need depending on the size of your hands, a little bit of help.

So being careful, Grab it, grab a lots got a big handful of it, rather than just one of the, that's a bit hard to see. But rather than these rods here, they've all got little springs, don't just grab one of these rods because the saxophone will break. So you want to be very careful and gentle, but still maintain a big grip. Two hands, okay, take it out of the case with two hands. So once you've got it out of the case, that's where the neck strap comes in. We can attach the saxophone to the next step.

And that way, you don't drop it. Good. Then here's one we prepared earlier. You need to your saxophone might have a little gizmo a little plastic thing The top so this little screw here, you loosen that screw. And that loosens the overall opening at the top. A loose opening in the top means that you can then get your neck with your mouthpiece and your read on it.

You can put it in very carefully. And you might need to twist it just a little bit sort of wiggling and move maneuver it in, don't just shove it, don't slam it, you need to be careful and precise. Put it on so that the that the neck is in the same parallel with the rest of the saxophone. So you can see here on my neck, it's got a little bit of a raise here most saxophone necks do have a little bit, a raised bit on the underneath that underneath raise bid needs to follow down to this little picture. And again, I apologize that's hard to see. But this little pin pokes up into the next into the register section.

So please be really careful, don't just shove it in. And once you have put it in place, and once you're happy with the right the right angle, tighten the screw. And what that's what that does is stops this from moving around too much you don't want it to move around. You want to be nice and stiff. So tighten the screw and we are almost there. Now we talked about in the other lesson having the neck strap the rod heights, we talked about pivoting.

So from here we may need to adjust the angle of the mouthpiece. So when you pivot, it comes in comes into your mouth, and you want the read and the mouthpiece to be horizontal in parallel with your lips. Don't want it to be ridiculously on an angle. So you have to sort of tilt your mouth. And here I'm exaggerating, obviously, but being very careful because you don't want to mock up the position of your read. You want the mouthpiece and the read to be parallel and horizontal and exactly the same angle as your lips.

And there you go, we have a saxophone. key takeaways from here. Be careful, be slow, be delivered. Don't drop it. Be very careful. They're expensive, and you don't want to break them.

Alright, I'll see you in the next lesson. Thank you.