Hello, and welcome to How to play the sax. My name is Matthew, thank you very much for joining me. Okay, now one of the first things here in learning how to play the sax is putting it all together. And so what I wanted to quickly talk about to you with this lesson is putting together the neck. This is the neck of your saxophone, and your mouthpiece and the reed. So, the first thing you want to do when you open your saxophone case, is put on your neck strap.

Okay, that's the first thing neck strap on. Second thing, get out your neck, your saxophone neck, you will grab your neck, you get your mouthpiece, and what you want to do is put it on gently and being very careful of this little guy the register the register, key thing here, this thing can break really easily. So when you're holding it, you want to be very cables so you're not putting undue pressure onto that. So like I say, we've got got your mouthpiece, put it on the end and twist it gently, maybe back side to side, so that it's probably roughly in the right place. Now, having said that, different saxophones have a slightly different all saxophones, a different mind slightly different to yours. The brands are different, and they vary in size by just a little bit.

Now, I know with my saxophone, you can see here, the cork, I know with mine, if I just show a tiny little bit of the cork, maybe what, you know, not even half of half a pinky fingernail size. Then mine's in tune. And this is how you tune this. One of the ways to tune the saxophone, you can put it you know, like that, or shove it in and that changes the tuning. So, like I say different saxophones are different duh. So if you want to put yours in very good Carefully, and maybe have a little bit of cork shine, don't shove it all the way in, but in the same breath, you know, don't just rest it on the end.

So with mine, I know that mine is in tune round about there. Okay, again, being careful, careful with this careful with the register register key mechanism. Next, we want our read. And here is a saxophone read. So you want to probably you might have brand new one or take it out of its little little case and give it a lick. I mean, don't dribble all over it, but just give it a lick so it's just a little bit wet.

And then what we want to do is and this is going to be a little bit hard to see, you want to position your position your read, so that I'm sorry if this is difficult to see, so that there's a tiny, tiny little bit of the mouthpiece poking out. You don't want to have it too high. You don't want Have a too low, you want to have just a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little bit of the mouthpiece being visible. Now this is actually a little bit tricky. So and throw into the mix as well. You want your this is called a ligature.

There's different kinds of ligatures, but this one's mine. Being careful reads are expensive braids are disappointingly expensive. So when you put on the ligature to hold the reed in place, be very careful, very slow, very deliberate, so that you don't break the read, done about reads where you are, but here where I am, reads a quite expensive, they're probably three or $4 each. And you know, the simple accident with ligature, click break, photos, poof, gone, so you don't want that. So being again being very careful. This with my ligature, the screw goes on the back.

And there's no screw here my luggage is sort of made of some kind of leathery stuff. So again, just carefully there angling, you can just see a tiny, tiny, tiny little bits of the mouthpiece at the top and the read is almost almost to the top. Now similarly, there are different kinds of ligatures. And here's another one. This this kind has the screws at the front. So being very careful when you put your read in.

Sometimes it actually might be a good idea to put the read in from the top rather than putting the read on holding it with your thumb and then putting the ligature on top because like I say, it's easy to break. So maybe a suggestion, put the ligature in from the top That way it's not gonna break. But again, with this kind of ligature disk, the screws go the front, the same, the same side of the mouthpiece as the read. Whereas with this one here, subtly different. So your ligature will do what your ligature does. Anyway, the last thing that's, I want to show you is Sorry, just out of reach, mouthpiece covers, mouthpiece covers really good because again, rates break quickly.

So when your saxophone is not being used, even between songs sometimes but if it's not being used, if you have to even know you're going to use it, carefully, put the mouthpiece cover on. And what that does, is it protects the raid. So protect your read. They're expensive. You don't want to break them if you can avoid it. Take the mouthpiece cover off when you're ready to play.

Thank you We'll put the saxophone together in the next lesson. Thanks