Do you want to be able to access the full range of your dynamics on saxophone? Do you want your low and your high notes to pop out every single time without any over-blows or under-blows?
We all want to sound better on sax. And knowing how to approach these techniques is the foundation of good tone – and it’s all about mastering your air.
What is air control?
Air control is the ability to master your air flow as it goes towards the saxophone. And it’s done by using different internal mechanisms inside the body. Understanding what each mechanism does, and how to control it, gives you the ability to master your air control.
In this video, we’re going to be looking at:
- how to properly blow into your sax
- how to activate and control your throat
- how to understand the balance between the air force and air speed
- how to combine them to get great control of your dynamics, as well as overblows and underblows.
This video is a section from a full lesson on Mastering your Air Control inside our Sax School Members’ Area. You can get access to that with a 14 day free trial here.
Terms we will be using
I’m also going to be using a few different terms.
The first term is air force. And we can think about force as how hard or soft we’re playing. If you increase the force of the air, you push the air harder, and so you play louder. You can try this away from your sax by trying to hold a whisper and then increase the whisper in dynamic.
The second term is speed. And this is simply how fast the air is moving. It’s controlled using a different set of internal mechanisms to force. And we’ll talk more about that later.
The third term I’m going to be using is energy and this is the combination of your air force and your air speed and it refers to how the air is being manipulated overall.
A high force and a high speed will result in high energy. A low force and a low speed will result in low energy. And there’s a huge scale in between that you can access as well.
Part 1: Checklist for Blowing
So when we blow into a saxophone, there’s a checklist of things that we want to go through to sound better on sax.
The first is engaging the diaphragm.
And the diaphragm is a dome-shaped structure that interacts with your lungs when you breathe. It’s tricky to explain the feeling of engaging your diaphragm. But the best way that I’ve found to describe it, is to tense your abdominal muscles, and then try and push out from the centre of your body between your belly button and the bottom of your sternum.
It’s the same kind of feeling you get when you tense up as if you’re about to be tickled. When you feel that tension it’s allowing you to push air from your lungs up towards the sax with more air force.
The next step is how we blow into the saxophone itself. This is a common trap that beginners fall into because they tend to blow into the sax as if they were blowing out a candle.
There are a couple of reasons why this isn’t a good idea. The first is that the point at which the air begins to accelerate is towards the front of your mouth. And that means that we can’t use any of the internal mechanisms that we want to use to control the air speed, such as your throat and the back of your tongue.
Secondly, it makes your cheeks bulge outwards. At higher levels, this is something that you can control while maintaining a good tone. But for now, it’s just going to introduce instability into your air and it could make your intonation flat as well. So it’s best to avoid it to sound better on sax.
How do we blow into the sax correctly?
So how should we blow to sound better on sax?
The best way I’ve found to describe this technique is to imagine that you have a cold mirror in front of you. If you blow as if you’re blowing out a candle, then it’s going to be cold air onto the cold mirror and nothing happens. Instead, if you blow hot air from the back of your throat, the mirror will mist up.
That’s the technique we want to use.
You can check these two methods by holding up your hand in front of your face. Blow in the two different ways and feel the temperature change across your hand, to check which method you’re using.
Remember when we’re blowing into the sax, we want to keep our cheeks from bulging out by keeping the corners of our mouth pinched in almost like an ooh shape.
We have loads of awesome lessons about embouchure inside Sax School and they talk about this in much more detail. So make sure to click the link below to sign up for a 14-day free trial.
Part 2: Controlling Your Air Speed
The next step is to learn how to activate and control your throat. But why is it important to use your throat at all to sound better on sax?
Well, your throat is a cylinder. And as you blow air, the air passes through that cylinder. We can change the size of the cylinder to affect how the air passes through it.
Imagine you have a tube with a hole that’s around the size of your head. If you blow air into that tube, the air is going to go forward at a normal rate.
If you then shrink the tube to the size of a straw and blow the air through that straw, the air is going to shoot out of the other end at a much faster speed.
So contracting the cylinder down increases the speed and expanding the cylinder decreases the speed.
On the saxophone, when we want to play a higher note, we need to get the reed to vibrate faster.
This is because higher frequencies, or higher pitch notes, vibrate at faster rates. So we need to accelerate the air.
The reverse is also true. If you want to play a low note, we need the reed to vibrate more slowly, so we need to decelerate the air.
Why does air speed matter?
You might be asking, well why do we have tone holes on the saxophone if it’s all about accelerating the speed of the air?
The tone holes are very important, but you can still play out of tune when you’re playing a note. So the tone holes act as a foundation for a good note, and then we use internal mechanisms to fine-tune the pitch of the note.
And saxophone players were pretty fortunate to have an octave key to shift us up into the upper octave. Other instruments like the flute don’t have an octave key so they require an increase in airspeed to get into the higher register.
How your throat expands and contracts
So how do we cause our throat to expand or contract?
Well, there are a few different techniques you can use. The first is by utilizing different vowel shapes.
So the vowel shape “Aw” opens the throat and the vowel shape “Ee” closes the throat.
There are loads of other shapes that you can use in between. And for me, I generally use them in the order “Aw”, “Ah”, “I”, “Ay”, and “Ee”. “Ee” is the most open or is the most closed off.
Another technique you can use with this is raising and lowering the back of your tongue. Now this doesn’t change your throat itself, but for some people, it can happen as a by-product of your throat changing. Whereas for other people you need to lift the back of your tongue as a separate action.
By raising the back of your tongue towards the roof of your mouth, you can make the chamber inside your mouth more narrow, which increases the air speed. To practice this, try putting the tip of your tongue on your lower front teeth. Then move through the vowel sounds and feel how the back of your tongue raises up and down.
If you’re struggling to do this, try and mimic the hiss of a cat because that can get that tongue to move upwards. It’s also important and useful to practice this stuff on a mouthpiece, because that ensures that your tongue is positioned correctly, to articulate as you would if you were playing.
Pitching or Voicing
The third technique, and in my opinion the most important technique, is called pitching. Some people call it pitching, some people call it voicing. If you hear either of those things, they refer to the same thing. Pitching a note is when we imagine what the note is going to sound like inside our heads before we play the note.
And we can make this easier by singing the note as well.
Going through the following process in both directions will help you develop your pitching skills, which is essential to sound better on sax.
- First of all, sing a note out loud and try and feel the shape of your throat as you do.
- Then, stop singing and try and hear that note inside your head.
- Whilst doing this, try and keep the shape that your throat was in when you were singing.
- Next, reverse the process.
- Try to imagine the note you’re going to sing inside your head, feel the shape of your throat, and then produce the pitch of the note out loud.
Part 3: Balancing Force and Speed
So we’ve talked about how to blow into the sax, and we’ve talked about how to engage our throat and our tongue to help control the airspeed. So what’s next?
To understand how we get the most out of this control in any situation, we need to go back to the basics. How do we play a note?
When you watch somebody play the saxophone for the first time, you often hear them getting this kind of sound. (Listen as I demonstrate.)
The reason this happens is because we say the phrase ‘blow into the sax’. And so the beginner player generates force, pushing the air forward towards the saxophone. And at some point, the note will engage. So we have high air force because we’re pushing the notes quite hard. But we have low air speed because we’re not using our throats to help engage the notes.
So the overall energy of the notes is very middling. And that’s why it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to get the note to engage at all.
And I’m using the word engage, which is just saying the moment at which the tone of the note begins.
So now watch what happens when I keep the force of my air the same, but I contract my throat to accelerate the speed of the air. Remember the processes we can use to contract the throat are pitching and vowel shapes.
You can hear as I’m tightening my throat that the note is getting closer to the point where it will engage. And then when the air speed is just right, the note kicks in. So here we have a medium amount of force and a medium amount of airspeed. And that combines to produce a good amount of energy overall, enough to get the note to start.
I like to think of this process as being very similar to the bite point on a clutch in a car. You’re increasing the revs of the engine and gradually releasing the clutch. And then the moment when it’s just right, the clutch engages and the car begins to accelerate and move forward. Every note on the saxophone has a bite point just like this.
And this is where mastering your air control allows you to get the full range of your playing and helps you sound better on sax.
Part 4: Implementing the Knowledge
So how can we use this to avoid over-blows or under-blows?
An over-blow can happen for a few different reasons, but the most common reason is that the air speed is too fast for the note to engage at its normal pitch.
If the air-speed is too fast, that means our throat is too tight and it’s accelerating the air faster than it should be.
To fix this, we need to think about pitching low and using open vowel sounds.
Try this on a low E
If you think about pitching high notes while you’re playing low E, then low E won’t pop out, but octave E will.
Listen to how it sounds for low E on alto, and tenor.
The reverse is also true. If you try and play palm key D while pitching a low note or using an open vowel sound, listen to what happens.
Whereas, if you pitch high, the note sounds. In this instance, the force of the air remains the same, but by increasing the air speed, we increase the overall energy of the sound. And that produces a drastically different result.
Pro tip
One thing that’s important to be aware of is that sometimes when you increase the force of the air, you can cause your throat to expand as a result of that. By doing that, you may accidentally cause your airspeed to be slower. So if you try and play a palm key note loudly, often the airspeed will be too slow to get the note to engage and the note will fail. So when you go for a high note, try to make sure you don’t blast too hard. This will help you sound better on sax.
It’s also important to know that other things can cause over-blows. Things like being too tight with your embouchure, using a little bit too much mouthpiece, or a leak in your saxophone. So keep an eye on these aspects as well.
Dynamics
As well as using this knowledge to control overblows and underblows, you can use this to get a much greater level of control over your dynamic range.
Changes in your dynamics come from an increase or a decrease in the force of your air.
- Blowing harder will cause you to play louder
- Blowing softer will cause you to play quieter.
Most people can play the sax loudly because you just need to increase the force of the air to get it to play louder. And more air force means we’re safely past the point where the note will engage. But to sound better on sax, we want a greater dynamic range for more expression in our playing.
But if the note has a bite point, the point at which the notes will engage, surely lowering the force too much will cause the note to fail.
Well, remember high force and high speed equals high energy, and low force and low speed equals low energy. But we have a huge range in between we can work with.
So if we want to play a note more quietly, as we reduce the air force, we need to counterbalance this by bringing up the air speed.
That way we prevent the overall energy of the air from dropping below the bite point.
Let me show you two demonstrations.
In the first demonstration, I’m going to start by playing a note loudly. Then I’ll reduce the force of the air down, but not increase the air speed by tightening my throat.
Notice that we reach the point where the note stops engaging, and suddenly the tone just drops. On top of that, the intonation becomes very flat as well.
Now watch what happens as I keep decreasing the force of my air, but I tighten my throat to increase the air speed.
I’m able to access so much more of my quiet dynamic by doing this and that doubles my expression to massively improve my playing ability, to sound better on sax.
Next steps
So hopefully you’ve learned a whole bunch about how your air supply works and how to control it to sound better on sax. And if you’re a member of Sax School Pro, you can go to the website and watch this video in its entirety, where we run through a whole bunch of exercises to maximize everything that we’ve learned.
Not a member yet? Get access with a 14 day trial – click the link below.
Keep practising hard. And I’ll catch you on the next one.