What saxophone practice style is best?

We all know that how you practice saxophone is just as important as what you practice, but what is the right way to practice so that you can make the best progress on your sax?

Today we’re discussing which saxophone practice style is best. We’ll be looking at two different practice styles. 

These are techniques that have helped us in our own  sax playing, and they also help our thousands of students in Sax School. Hopefully by sharing them with you, they’re going to help you to improve today as well. So there’s lots to dig into.

Hey, also, real quick, if you do enjoy learning how to play saxophone and you love the podcast, could we just ask you to share it with one other person? It would really make a massive difference to us, help us to reach more friends like you. Okay, let’s get stuck in. 

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Importance of saxophone practice styles

Nigel: So, Joel, when I first started learning, there wasn’t a lot of time spent teaching me about how to practice. I had to pick that up along the way. What about you? 

Joel: Yeah, the same really. You just assume that you practice saxophone in the same way as you practice anything else, like doing your normal homework when you’re at school, or things like that. So you just have to work it out for yourself. At least I did at first, and I wasn’t a particularly good student. But we’ll get into that later.  

N: Yeah, it was the same for me. I had to work it out along the way. And don’t forget, we grew up in a different time. the time when we were first learning saxophone, where we didn’t even have as much stuff available to us.

So in a way, probably, particularly if you were learning back in school, your learning path was quite defined.  You might have been learning from one of those Rubank Elementary method books like I did. Or maybe you learned with the school band program, or you were studying with a teacher. 

But these days, you’ve just got a million things available to you on YouTube, or Instagram, or TikTok or whatever your preferred social media is.

And that makes it very difficult. And we, in fact, see that happening with our thousands of students in Sax School, don’t we, Joel?  

J: Yeah, we definitely do. There’s a lot of confusion about the best way to go about the best saxophone practice style. And as we’ll see today, I’m sure there’s maybe not one best way, but there’s the best way for you.

N: Absolutely. 

4 Part Practice Routine Explained

N: So the first method I’d like to have a quick chat about is what I call a 4 part practice routine. Now, I  have been using this with the thousands of people inside Sax School for years now.  Predominantly, I formalized this idea because I saw that a lot of the students, particularly adult learners that we help, were getting overwhelmed.

They were getting distracted by lots of different things. So they were trying lots of stuff, but the end result is not necessarily making the progress that they wanted to. Because you’re trying lots of different things, instead of focusing on just a few things. Hence the 4 part practice routine.

So really simply, this is how the 4 part practice routine works.

The 4 elements

Free Practice Planner

N: The 4 elements that I think needs to be included in every practice routine is:

• a warm-up
• technique exercises
• something new
• something fun.

So we’ll dig into each of those four elements some more.

But I think, along with knowing what the elements are, it’s important to understand a strategy for how you can break them up time-wise.

Now, I don’t know about you, Joel, but I naturally fell into a routine like this in my practice decades ago, because I felt that it covered all the bases. I was working on a warm-up, obviously, which has got two elements to it, the warm-up and the technical stuff. Then I was working on something new and then playing something fun. Is that something that you ever did as well?

J: Yeah, I did a very similar thing. I think it’s quite a natural way of working. At least that’s what I felt I should be doing when I was practising. So I knew the warmups were important and I did do warmups.

Obviously, the technical side of the instrument is really important. So that’s practising your scales and your arpeggios and patterns and all that good stuff. That’s always important to do because that improves your technique.

I was quite repertoire-based as well. So I wanted to learn loads of jazz tunes. That was a really big part of my saxophone practice style, and improvisation as well.

However, I found I didn’t practice in blocks like I was supposed to. I would just flit around a lot. I was a terrible student.

By the time I got to the conservatoire and was studying music, I got a bit more advice. I was told to practice in these blocks. And I used to find it incredibly difficult to do it like that.

And I was the same with my homework as a child. I couldn’t just sit there and do two hours of maths and two hours of English. I’d flip between them all.

So I carried that into my saxophone practice style and felt quite guilty about it. But I’ll talk about that a bit more.

Different learning styles

N: Yeah, it’s interesting. I say this to you all the time, Joel, I love having you on our team of tutors. Because you and I get on great. We’ve known each other for years. And at the same time though, we’re also very different. So we have approached learning in a different way.

And so that means we approach teaching in a different way. And the point is, there’s lots of different types of people, right? So there are different ways to approach things. And I like to have those different viewpoints because amongst our students. I can see some of them learn in different ways too.

I guess I’ve always been quite good at working in blocks of time–  a block of this, a block of that. It worked for me.

Getting the balance right

What I found in my practice,  is that sometimes those four sections – the warm-up, the technical stuff, the something new and the something fun – get out of balance.  And actually something I’ve seen in other players, both other pro players and also in some of our students.

For example, I’ve seen some people who spend way too much time just focusing on technical practice and neglecting fun stuff. Or they neglect also working on repertoire like you mentioned Joel.

Conversely, other people just focus on the fun stuff and don’t work on the essential warm-up or technical stuff.

So I think it’s important to cover all those bases.

How to plan your practice time

So this is the advice that I give to our members and it’s something I use in my own practice schedule as well.

So think about the time that you’ve got for your practice. Let’s say we’ve got 30 minutes to do some practice.

Half of that practice time should be allocated to working on something new (15 minutes).

So this is something that’s challenging to you. And it could be a part of a piece that you’re already working on. It could be a new tempo for a piece that you’re working on. Or it could be an entirely new piece. The point of it is spending half of your practice time working on something that’s stretching you.

Then, take the remaining 15 minutes and you divide it amongst those other three sections in our four-part practice routine.

That means we’ve got five minutes to do our warmup.

We’ve got five minutes to do some technical practice.

Five minutes at the end for something fun. 

So using that guideline, you can obviously expand it out.

If you had an hour to practice, it would be:

• 10 minutes for your warm-up,
• 10 minutes for your technical practice,
• half an hour for something new
• 10 minutes at the end for something fun. 

That seems like it works for me. What do you think about that system, Joel?  

Joel’s saxophone practice style dilemma

J: Yeah, I think for a lot of people, that’s a really sensible system if – unlike me, you can stick to blocks. And this is what I struggled with. And, the guilt carries on because obviously I’ve been teaching at conservatoire level for nearly 25 years, a quarter of a century, (and I’m only 29!), But I felt really guilty in the fact that’s the way you’re supposed to learn.

Surely you’re supposed to divide things up into blocks. You work on one block, followed by the next block. And that is exactly how I taught my students because that’s the way you’re taught to teach.  So they went off and did that, and I went home and didn’t do that. And I felt quite bad about it because I’d still flit between things.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t be doing warm-ups at the end of my practice session while I was playing tunes. I’d do warm-ups, but I’d intersperse them with technical things. And then I would go back to some warmups and then some technical things. And then I move on to some transcriptions maybe, or working on something like that.

But then I go back to some technical things. So there’s this endless overlap through my practice. 

Interleaved Practice Method

Anyway, what basically happened is this. I really like reading research papers, particularly the research papers that come out of places like Juilliard.

And they did a particular bit of research on a type of practice called interleaved practice. Now, obviously, governments don’t want to spend money on how we practice our instruments and there’s zero investment in that kind of thing.

But what they do spend a lot of money on is sports research because they all want the kudos of that gold Olympic medal. So there are billions of pounds spent on sports research. But if you think about it, we’re not so different to sportsmen and women, where it’s about motor action and repetition and physical movement. So there’s a lot in common with what we need to train to do.  And this interleaved practice came directly from that.

So let’s say you were a tennis player. The way that you used to practice is you used to do a morning of backhands and then an afternoon of forehands and then an evening of serving. And that’s great. And you will make progress, obviously doing that kind of thing.

But what they found is this classic “two steps forward, one step backwards” pattern. Because when you come back to it the next day, you don’t seem to be quite where you were from the previous day. So that was where the research started off.

Staying motivated

Now, if you take a four-year-old child, and you show them a new toy, it’s very exciting. There’s a new toy and they’ll play with that toy. And then if you show it to them again, 10 minutes later, it’s still exciting. They’ll play with the toy. But if you show it to them a third time, they’re not bothered anymore.

And this is a thing called habituation. It’s about getting into the habit of things. Our brain wants to Dopamine and it needs new, exciting stuff all the time.

And that really ties back in with what you were saying about doing something new in your practice routine. We need that. We need that to keep our energy levels up, to keep us interested and motivated. So that’s a really important factor in there. 

They’ve turned this into a way of practice for sports people. We’re most familiar with this as reps in the gym. You don’t just do half an hour of bench presses, followed by half an hour of cycling. You do some reps of one, some reps of the other, and you keep coming back and forwards.

And Julliard had basically applied this to practice routines. We can learn from this in our saxophone practice styles.

Interleaved saxophone practice styles

So let’s say you were doing three different things in your warmups –  maybe some long tones, maybe a tuning exercise and something else.

Maybe you were doing three things in your technical section.

And let’s say that you wanted to spend half an hour on your warmups, and half an hour on your technical and you were doing three things. So you’d be doing 10 minutes on each of those.

What interleaved practice suggests is you take all those and you put them into a block in itself. But instead of practising them one at a time, you interleave them.

So you do three minutes of one, three minutes of the next, three minutes of the next.

And once you’ve done that, you go back to the beginning and do that again. So you still do the same amount of time, but you rotate it around.

Now, When I read this, I felt more guilt – but also a bit of relief because what it proved to me was I’ve been practising in quite an intuitive way. I was actually practising in an interleaved way and feeling bad about it, basically.

And from that point on, I started teaching this method to my students who absolutely loved it. It just makes it more fun because you’re constantly changing.

The science bit

J: The important science bit of this, is the difference between practising something once for 10 minutes and practising something three times for three minutes is you have to re-remember how to do that task.

So it’s remembering it once and then getting into the habit of doing it versus remembering how to do it three times for shorter periods. And I find that a lot of students who were like me and didn’t get on with block practice,  love this method.

There’s nothing wrong with block practice method. Sometimes that is exactly what people want. I’ve got lots of students who didn’t get in on interleave practice and they just stayed in their block. So we’re all really different, which is what we said earlier.  You’ve got to find your own path for practice.

Benefits of interleaved practice

J: But the students that like interleaved practice absolutely love it.  I was asking one student how they were getting on with interleave practice, and I think this was my favourite comment. They said “Oh, it’s amazing. I’m getting so much more done and it’s really efficient…. I’ve even started practising things that I’ve avoided for years.” (They were an older student)

And I said “what have you started practicing that you didn’t practice before?” And they said “I’ve started practicing sight reading again.”

So I said, “what is it about interleaved practice that has made you do that?” He said “I’ve only got to do it for three minutes.”  Obviously, he comes back and does it again.

And I think this has been really useful from the point of view of particularly warmups. Because even though it’s a super-important thing that sax players should be doing in practice every day, I think the first thing to go for a lot of people is warmups. Those long tones get replaced with a nice tune and stuff like that. And this really helps break up that if you’re the type of person that is easily distracted, like I am. It means that you get through all these things.

And the final benefit I’ll mention with this is if you have less time one day, then you just do fewer reps. But it means that you always get through your entire practice routine, all the subject matter. And it’s not at the expense of one thing and of the other, because today you’ve only got half an hour to practice rather than an hour, for example. 

N: Gotcha. Really interesting. I guess it sounds a little bit like circuit training in the gym. And you mentioned doing reps, but also doing a circuit where you have a series of exercises, you do them one after the other, and you keep going around that circuit. But you’re applying that to saxophone, which sounds really good.

Why you need a practice plan

N: I’ve got a question for you though, Joel. Do you think that this type of interleave practice works better if you’ve got a longer time to practice, like maybe an hour, or something versus someone who might be struggling with finding just 15 minutes?  

J: It depends on how many things you’ve got interleaved in there. So it depends on your original thing. I think the biggest downside of interleave practice is you really got to have a very detailed practice plan because you’re flitting around. It has got to be timed and you’re moving from this to that.

So actually the first stage of interleave practice is sitting down and almost planning out what you’re doing for the next month and following that. And you can set some targets and goals within that, so you can actually just get straight into it.

Now, this is an important thing, I think, to do with any type of practice. A practice plan is a really key thing if you want to do proper practice. It stops you from going off on tangents or forgetting what you’ve been practising, or just finding new things all the time and never finishing old things.

Free Practice Planner

I think it’s important to have a plan, but it’s really important in interleave practice.

So I know what you’re saying. Maybe if you’ve got a very restricted practice time, you could do fewer reps. But if your reps are quite complicated then you still might not have time to do it.

Find your own saxophone practice style

J: So I think it’s just balance. Maybe you do some things in blocks, but some things as an interleave thing, like we said. You’ve got to find your own pathway. But all these methods out there just give you an alternative saxophone practice style to try, especially if you’re struggling with your practice. If it’s for you, you’ve found your way of practising. If it’s not, you try something else until something settles with you. 

N: I think the other thing that’s tricky is if you’re brand new to learning a new instrument like a saxophone, you’re not even sure what things you need to be practising. And that’s why we help our new students with a real clear structure. We’ve got practice plans and learning pathways to keep them on track and tell them very clearly the stuff to work on. 

For me, I would encourage somebody who’s brand new to the saxophone, to start with maybe the 4 step method that I was describing.

But if you are more advanced, possibly look at the interleaved practice model, because you’ve got a clearer idea of the sort of skills that you’re trying to build. Does that make sense to you, Joel? 

J: Oh yeah, I completely agree. I definitely won’t be starting any beginners or even early intermediates on interleaved. It’s definitely for when you’ve started to build up quite a repertoire of practice material that you want to get through and that you’re interested in doing. 

Because music and learning an instrument is one of those things – every time you open a door, there’s 10 doors behind it. And it’s exponential as you go on. So there comes a point where it’s just a bit overwhelming. And when you get to the point that you find you have to choose what to practise rather than being directed what to practise, and there are loads of things you want to do and you don’t seem to have time – that’s went interleave can be really useful. Because it can help you fit in more things, more efficiently without the expense of losing something else.

So I would 100% agree that the block method for beginners, and the method we use in Sax School is exactly what’s required as you’re starting off.

But as you get to that higher intermediate level into the advanced level, and you realize that there are loads of other things you could be practising on saxophone, then maybe interleaved starts to become a little bit more efficient.

Make our day

N: Hey, just a quick reminder that if you do want to improve your sax playing this year, don’t forget to follow the podcast.

And hey, if you’re feeling particularly generous today, it would be so awesome if you would just take a couple of seconds out your day and give us a five-star review. Honestly, you’d be making our day. We’d have a little party and dance around in the Sax School headquarters here, so thanks a bunch.  

Get your practice planner

N: Hey, just one last thought, Joel, before we wrap up this important conversation. You mentioned before needing a spreadsheet or a system of planning your interleaved practice.

Similarly, with the 4 step practice routine that I was describing, I think it’s important to have a clear plan. And something that we do with our members in Sax School is we use a practice planner. If you’re watching this on YouTube, I’ll show it here.

If you are listening to this, then check out the show notes because we’ll put a link to some more information where you can find out more about the practice planner and how we do it at Sax School.

Free Practice Planner

But the point of the practice planner is it’s a simple sheet where you can write down the four things that you are working on. And you can also log your practice each day.

We like to encourage our members to do a 30-Day Practice Challenge inside Sax School. So you get that momentum going of practising every day, and then also logging and recording the things that you’re working on those four elements in each practice session.

I found that makes such a big difference to the momentum that our students have. And some people think keeping a practice diary is a bit arduous. And it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But I do find it really helps. What about you, Joel? Do you have some sort of system? You’re a pretty systematic kind of character. So do you have a big spreadsheet where you keep track of all the stuff you’re working on?  

J: Yeah, it’s very similar. I think it’s really important, even if you’re starting out, to use something like the Sax School Practice Planner. We’ve got loads of different practice plans in there to suit everyone.

Free Practice Planner

Joel’s pro tip

I think it’s really important try to write down what you intend to practice tomorrow, rather than writing down what you’ve practised today. I think that’s a tiny little thing that makes a really big difference. because then when you come to your practice, the next time, this is what you’re doing. You’ve not got to ask yourself “What am I doing? What did I do yesterday?” It’s already there. You’re writing down what you plan to do, and that can be inspired by what you’ve done today.

So maybe you found a little technical problem, so you can write it in the right area so you’ve got something extra to work on. And it’s a great way of actually organically building your practice time…. There’s no standing there procrastinating, wondering what you’re going to do. It’s already written down. It’s a tiny little thing that adds so much efficiency to your practice. It makes it flow really naturally and grow really organically.

What is your saxophone practice style?

N: Awesome. So what type of practicer are you?

Are you the sort of person who likes to do a 4 part practice routine? Or are you the sort of person who likes to do interleave practice? We’d love to know. 

So you can shoot us a message or leave us a comment. Either way though, I hope you can employ this in your practice and I hope you see some benefits from it.

We certainly do with our own practice and with our students too. So I hope that’s helped you. Don’t forget if you’d like to revisit this episode, you can get the full transcription from today’s show over at saxchoolonline.com/podcast.  

J: And if you’re not already a member, remember we’ve got a 14-day free trial where you can grab all our lessons and practice plans.

14 day free trial

Hey, thanks so much for listening today. It’s been great to spend some time with you. Thanks, Joel, for your insights, as always. So everybody else keep practicing hard, and we’ll catch you next time.