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Playing the saxophone as a beginner can be a fun and rewarding

experience. Here are some steps to get you started:

1. *Rent or buy a saxophone*: Choose a beginner-friendly alto

saxophone, as it's the most common type. Make sure it's in good
condition and properly fitted with a mouthpiece, reed, and
ligature.

2. *Learn proper posture*: Stand or sit up straight with your feet

shoulder-width apart, holding the saxophone at a slight angle.

3. *Form an embouchure*: Place the mouthpiece on your lips,

forming an "O" shape with your mouth and lips. Keep your jaw
relaxed and your teeth aligned.

4. *Choose the right reed*: Start with a soft reed (2-2.5 strength)
and gradually move to harder reeds as your embouchure
develops.

5. *Practice breathing exercises*: Develop lung capacity and

control with exercises like long tones, lip slurs, and finger
exercises.

6. *Learn basic fingerings*: Start with simple notes (C, D, E, G, A)

and gradually move to more complex ones. Practice scales,
arpeggios, and simple melodies.

7. *Practice regularly*: Set aside time each day (20-30 minutes)

to practice, even if it's just for a few minutes.

8. *Find a teacher or online resources*: Consider taking lessons

from a professional saxophonist or using online resources like
video tutorials, apps, and websites to guide your learning.

9. *Listen to saxophone music*: Study recordings of famous

saxophonists to develop your ear and inspire your playing.

10. *Be patient and persistent*: Learning to play the saxophone

takes time, so enjoy the process and don't get discouraged by
initial difficulties.

Remember, the key to progress is consistent practice and a

willingness to learn. Good luck, and have fun playing the
saxophone!

Proma music is here to help you

SAXOPHONE BEGINNERS COURSES

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TABLE OF CONTENT 1

The Saxophone 3

Saxophone accessories 3

Saxophone Key Guide 4

Saxophone assembling/set up 5

Saxophone assembling/set up 6

Saxophone assembling/set up 7

Saxophone assembling/set up 8

Saxophone assembling/set up 9

Saxophone labeled parts 8

Saxophone keys 9

Proper posture on the saxophone 9

Embouchure 9

Lip Positioning 10

Tongue Positioning 11

Breathing 12, 13

Music, terms and guides 14

Music Notation 15
Finger replacement /Fingering 13

Major scale 16

Improvisation 17

Natural minor scale 20

Major pentatonic 18

Minor pentatonic 19

Blues scales 20

Chromatic scales

Songs and Praises

Hymns

The saxophone

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The saxophone (often referred to colloquially as the sax) is a type of single-

reed woodwind instrument with a conical body, usually made of brass. As with
all single-reed instruments, sound is produced when a reed on
a mouthpiece vibrates to produce a sound wave inside the instrument's
body. The pitch is controlled by opening and closing holes in the body to
change the effective length of the tube.

The player blows air into the mouthpiece, which vibrates the reed. The
saxophone also uses keys to change pitch, and the player closes or opens
holes to choose the note. Commonly, saxophones have about 22 keys.

The saxophone is most commonly found in four voices: soprano, alto,

tenor, and baritone saxophones

A person who plays the saxophone is called a saxophonist or saxist.

The saxophone was designed around 1840 by Adolphe Sax, a Belgian

instrument maker, flautist, and clarinetis.

ALTO SAXOPHONE KEYS LABELED

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ALTO SAXOPHONE KEY LABELED

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SAXOPHONE ACCESSORIES

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IMPROVISATION

A great topic! Improvisation on the saxophone is an art form that requires

creativity, technical skill, and a deep understanding of music theory.
Saxophonists who excel at improvisation can create spontaneous,
expressive, and meaningful music that resonates with listeners.

Some legendary saxophonists known for their improvisational prowess

include John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, and Wayne Shorter.
They have inspired generations of musicians to explore the possibilities of
improvisation on the saxophone.

Improvisation on the saxophone involves creating music in the moment,

often in response to a chord progression, a melody, or a rhythmic pattern.
It requires a strong foundation in scales, arpeggios, and chord
progressions, as well as the ability to think creatively and make split-
second decisions about phrasing, tone, and articulation.

If you're interested in improving your saxophone improvisation skills, I can

offer some tips:

1. Listen to and study the playing of great improvising saxophonists.

2. Practice scales, arpeggios, and chord progressions to build a strong

technical foundation.

3. Experiment with different tonal colors and phrasing approaches.

4. Play with other musicians to develop your ability to respond to

unexpected moments.

5. Record yourself improvising and listen back to identify areas for growth.

Remember, improvisation is a journey, and the more you practice, the

more comfortable and expressive you'll become.

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Assembling the Saxophone

How to Put a Saxophone Together
1. Put on the neck strap
2. Attach the mouthpiece to the neck.
3. Attach the ligature to the mouthpiece.
4. Slide the reed under the ligature.
5. Remove accessories.
6. Attach the neck strap to the body
7. Slot the neck in place.
8. Adjust the neck strap or harness

PROPER SAXOPHONE POSTURE

 Stand upright, with your weight evenly distributed on both legs, as if
a rope were pulling you up from the crown of your head.
 Stand with your feet shoulder width apart. In that way your balance
is optimal.
 Shoulders, arms, fingers and throat should be relaxed; the tension
you need to produce the air to blow into your horn comes from your
torso.
 If you let your sax hang loose the mouthpiece should come to the
height of your mouth and not lower.
Tip: stand upright and then adjust your saxophone, instead of the
other way around.
 Keep your wrists straight. Tip: have a look in the mirror while
playing and check your wrists.
 The hands: the fingers should be relaxed and slightly bent as in
natural position.
 Press the keys with a definitive movement, but do not move your
fingers too far away from the keys. Your fingers should stay bent
while pressing the keys.
 The thumbs should remain still, the octave key is pressed by your
thumb tilting your thumb slightly.

EMBOUCHURE ON THE SAXOPHONE

This embouchure involves tucking your bottom teeth under your lower lip
until your teeth are covered. Once this is accomplished, close your lips.
Next, put the mouthpiece in your mouth and form an airtight seal all the
way around by pressing the corners of your mouth and your top lip
against the mouth piece. Proper saxophone embouchure is the way to
make your tone beautiful and unique to you.

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Embouchure therefore is defined as, “the way in which a player applies

the mouth to the mouthpiece of a brass or wind instrument.

This piece will address the issue of building a proper saxophone

embouchure for exactly that reason.

LIP POSITION
The first step in forming a great embouchure is learning how to place your
bottom lip in relation to your bottom teeth. This is the most common issue
with my beginning and intermediate level students; they often have it
rolled either too far over their teeth, or sticking too far out leaving the lip
totally unsupported by the teeth.

You ideally want to have just the inner lip skin rolled over your bottom
teeth, leaving the outer skin totally untouched. This is most easily
achieved by using the letter “V” as your reference point; you must say the
letter “V” and however much of your lip is rolled over your bottom teeth is
how it should be when playing on the mouthpiece.

One thing to keep in mind, is that while your lip is getting support from
your teeth, you by no means want the teeth to be doing most of the work,
this will just lead to you cutting into your lip into it starts to bleed

You must remember that your lips are controlled by muscles, and it is
these muscles that you should engage in order to put pressure on the
reed while playing; the teeth are just lending some minor support
underneath.

Tongue Position
The next step in a great saxophone embouchure is getting your tongue in
the right shape. This shape is similar to an airplane’s wing, highly arched
so that the air traveling over it will be sped up with no extra effort given
on behalf of the sax player.

In order to get our tongue sufficiently arched, we must form the word
“Ew” when blowing. Using this particular word when we play serves a dual
purpose; the “E” in ew forces your tongue to arch upwards towards the
top of your palette, and the “w” or “wuh” of the word ew helps to round
the shape of your lips, and engages your lip muscles to help support the
reed.

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The most overlooked aspect of great lip position, is where exactly you
should put your lip on the mouthpiece. With lips correctly positioned, this
enables the reed to sing out at its most resonant. With lips anywhere else,
however, and your reed will either quack like a duck(in the case of putting
too much mouthpiece in your mouth), or be stuffy and soft (if you put too
little mouthpiece in your mouth).

Fortunately, there is an easy solution! All one must do to find the perfect
spot to place their lips, is to put your reed on your mouthpiece, then get a
good side view of the mouthpiece until you find where the reed starts to
physically touch the mouthpiece and voila.

Exercises for Practice

Once you’ve made the changes necessary to improve your embouchure,
the next thing to do is to get to work on making these changes into
muscle memory.

BREATHING

One of the key skills of a saxophonist is air support (or breathing

control). It is essential to start developing your lung capacity as early
as possible. As a woodwind instrument, the saxophone requires
consistent and proper airflow to produce the right sound. Without it,
you'll not be able to produce a proper pitch, the right intonation,
volume control, and stability.

Diaphragmic/Abdomen breathing is not always an instinctive habit for

many players but with careful attention and focused practice, this method
of breathing can be mastered and will greatly enhance a saxophonist’s
performance ability

The saxophonist should practice this exercise by inhaling for two seconds
and exhaling for eight seconds. With practice, a performer will develop the
ability to inhale a large quantity of air in one quick breath allowing long
phrases to be played with no loss in tone quality or control.

 Breathe in quickly and deeply through the mouth

 Fill up the body with air from the bottom up

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 The waist should expand outward while the shoulders remain

motionless
 Breathe out by pushing the air upward with the diaphragm
 A narrow consistent controlled stream of air should be blown out
 The waist should contract back to its original position
 Proper air pressure should be maintained in the oral cavity
 With proper air pressure, less jaw and lower teeth pressure is
needed.

SAXOPHONE KEYS
Our class lessons will be based on piano which is the fundamental for
learning any instrument.

Our focus is saxophone for all levels, the basic; intermediate and advance,
understanding the piano will give you the basic understanding of your
saxophone techniques.

THE MUSICAL ALPHABET

We use letters to help us assign names to particular musical pitches.

Unlike the actual English alphabet, the musical alphabet has only seven
letters that repeat over and over in sequence.

The letters are: A-B-C-D-E-F-G

Rather than writing the letter names out for each note on the instrument,
we know their names by where they are placed on the Saxophone or
keyboard. The musical letters on piano and the Saxophone are all the
same.

Music key notes are derived from the first seven 7 letters of the alphabet
which are A B C D E FG and it was re-arranged in this order in music C D
EFGABC
Using the keyboard
C,C#/Db, D, D#/Eb, E, F, F#/Gb, G, G#/Ab, A, A#/Bb, C

We have seven (7) white keys and five (5) black keys as seen in the
picture above. The black and white letters on the piano are all keys,
therefore we have twelve (12) keys in total.

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Now that we have known the names of the white keys let's talk about the
black keys, already the diagram has indicated their names but let’s
discuss how they got those names.

The black keys derives their names from the white keys respectively,
learning to play musical instrument requires memorization.

TONIC SOL-FA
Tonic solfas are these “doh reh meh, fah, soh, lah, teh, doh: which are
used to interpret the key notes or to write songs in their pitches or
rhythms.
SCALE
A scale is made up of 8 notes of diatonic major scale which are
“d r m f s l t d’
d' t l s f m r d”

OCTAVE
An Octave is an eight e.g. d r m f s l t d. The last “d” makes the tonic solfa
an octave
TONE

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A distance consisting of two (2) semitones.

SEMI-TONE
The shortest distance in pitch between any two (2) neighboring notes.
SOLO
A solo (meaning alone) is a piece or passage of vocal or instrumental
played or sung by a single performer. The performer is known as a soloist.
PROGRESSION
This means the movement of the right hand (RH) and (LH) left hand to the
most appropriate solfa that is needed at a particular time. This implies the
changing of solfa to play a song correctly and it demands a good listening
ear.

ACCIDENTALS
Accidental notes are notes that does not fail into the note of a key being
given or played e.g. d r m f te so l toh, d.
CHROMATIC SCALE
This is the striking of each and every note on the keyboard in an
ascending or descending order on semitone bases. C, C#/Db, D, D#/Eb, E,
F, F#/Gb, G, G#/Ab, B, C
The 12 Major Scales
Major Scales overview

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Intervals and steps

Intervals: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7

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Semi-notes: 2 - 2 - 1 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 1
Formula: Whole, Whole, Half, Whole, Whole, Whole, Half

SCALE
Scales are the building blocks that are used to construct melodies and
musical ideas. They are sets of ordered notes that, when played in various
combinations, turn into recognizable music.

Scales are important because they appear (in many variations and
combinations) in music all the time. Whether you’re playing classical
music, jazz, rock, Broadway tunes, or Christmas carols, and regardless of
the level, from beginner to very advanced pieces…You’re going to find
scales within your music.

Because you can be fairly sure you’ll encounter scales of some form in the
music you play, it’s extremely helpful to have the patterns of the scales
“programmed” into your fingers – like templates you can employ at will so
that you won’t have to learn everything you see in your music from
scratch. If you already know the scale patterns, you already know a
significant percentage of any new pieces you start learning. Needless to
say, this makes you a much faster learner and makes the learning process
a lot more streamlined and enjoyable.

MINOR SCALE OVERVIEW

Minor Scales overview

A: A,B,C,D,E,F,G,A
A#/Bb: A#,B#,C#,D#,E#(F),F#,G#,A#/Bb,C,Db,Eb,F,Gb,Ab,Bb
B: B,C#,D,E,F#,G,A,B
C: C,D,Eb,F,G,Ab,Bb,C
C#/Db: C#,D#,E,F#,G#,A,B,C#/Db,Eb,Fb(E),Gb,Ab,Bbb,(A),Cb(B),Db
D: D,E,F,G,A,Bb,C,D
D#/Eb: D#,E#(F),F#,G#,A#,B,C#,D#/Eb,F,Gb,Ab,Bb,Cb(B),Db,Eb
E: E,F#,G,A,B,C,D,E
F: F,G,Ab,Bb,C,Db,Eb,F
F#/Gb: F#,G#,A,B,C#,D,E,F#/Gb,Ab,Bbb(A),Cb(B),Db,Ebb(D),Fb(E),Gb
G: G,A,Bb,C,D,Eb,F,G
G#/Ab: G#, A#, B, C#, D#, E, F#, G# / Ab, Bb, Cb (B), Db, Eb, Fb (E), Gb,
Ab

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The major scale has two whole steps (tones), a half step (semitone), three
whole steps, and, finally, a half step. An example is the C major scale, C-
D-E-F-G-A-B-C, which is in the key of C major and contains no altered
intervals. The natural minor scale lowers the third, sixth, and seventh
tones of the major scale by a half step, resulting in a whole step, then a
half step, followed by two whole steps, a half step, and two whole steps.
Thus, the natural C minor scale is C-D-E♭-F-G-A♭-B♭-C.

The harmonic minor scale raises the seventh tone of the natural minor
scale by a half step. The result is a whole step, then a half step, followed
by two whole steps, a half step, a step and a half, and, finally, a half step.
Thus, in harmonic C minor the progression of notes is C-D-E♭-F-G-A♭-B-C.

The third minor scale is melodic minor. This scale differs from the other
minor scales in that it has different intervals for ascending and descending.
The ascending melodic minor scale includes only a lowered third tone,
yielding a whole step, then a half step, followed by four whole steps, and,
finally, a half step. In C minor, the progression would be C-D-E♭-F-G-A-B-C.
The descending melodic minor scale is identical to the descending natural
minor scale—C-B♭-A♭-G-F-E♭-D-C.

In modern music theory, each major and minor scale has a parallel key and
a relative key. Parallel keys share the same tonic (or initial) note. For
example, C major and C minor are parallel keys because they share the
tonic of C. Relative keys share the same key signature and the same notes
but start on a different pitch. For example, both C major and A minor have
no accidentals, so the relative minor of C major is A minor, and C major is
the relative major of A minor. The relative minor key always starts on the
sixth tone of its relative major scale, or a minor third (three half steps)
below the relative major. Thus, a C major scale is C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C. The A
minor scale starts on A, the sixth note of the C major scale: A-B-C-D-E-F-G-
A.

Pentatonic Minor Scales overview

C: C,Eb,F,G,Bb,C
C#/Db: C#,E,F#,G#,B,C#/Db,E,Gb,Ab,B,Db
D: D,F,G,A,C,D
D#/Eb: D#,F#,G#,A#,C#,D#/Eb,Gb,Ab,Bb,Db,Eb
E: E,G,A,B,D,E
F: F,Ab,Bb,C,Eb,F
F#/Gb: F#,A,B,C#,E,F#/Gb,A,B,Db,E,Gb
G: G,Bb,C,D,F,G
G#/Ab: G#,B,C#,D#,F#,G#/Ab,B,Db,Eb,Gb,Ab
A: A,C,D,E,G,A
A#/Bb: A#,C#,D#,E#(F),G#,A#/Bb,Db,Eb,F,Ab,Bb
B: B,D,E,F#,A,B

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Intervals:1,b3,4,5,b7
Semi-notes:3-2-2-3-2
Formula: Whole and a half, Whole, Whole, Whole and a half, Whole

Pentatonic Major Scales overview

C: C,D,E,G,A,C
C#/Db: C#,D#,F,G#,A#,C#/Db,Eb,F,Ab,Bb,Db
D: D,E,F#,A,B,D
D#/Eb: D#,F,G,A#,C,D#/Eb,F,G,Bb,C,Eb
E: E,F#,G#,B,C#,E
F: F,G,A,C,D,F
F#/Gb: F#,G#,A#,C#,D#,F#/Gb,Ab,Bb,Db,Eb,Gb
G: G,A,B,D,E,G
G#/Ab: G#,A#,C,D#,F,G#/Ab,Bb,C,Eb,F,Ab
A: A,B,C#,E,F#,A
A#/Bb: A#,C,D,F,G,A#/Bb,C,D,F,G,Bb
B: B,C#,D#, F#, G#, B

Intervals:1,2,3,5,6
Semi-notes:2-2-3-2-3
Formula: Whole, Whole, Whole and a half, Whole, Whole and a half.

PRACTICAL SAXOPHONE FINGERING CHART

PLEASE TURN OVER

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 CHROMATIC SCALE (Lower Register)
(When open) (When Closed)

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ARPEGGIO
An Arpeggio, (Broken Chord; is a pattern that involves playing
each note of a chord individually)
Most chords involves three or more notes, an arpeggio pattern
also requires three or more notes to be labeled as such
An arpeggio is when the notes of a chord are performed one
after the other instead of all at the same time, for clarity, a
chord is three or more notes that are played at the same time.
If the notes of a chord are broken up and played from low to
high or high to low, the chord becomes an arpeggio.

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MY CURRENT DAILY PRACTICE TIMETABLE CONSISTS OF:

1. Long tones (10 mins)

REST: 5mins
2. Technical exercises - Chromatic Scale, Tongue articulation,
(5 mins)
REST: 5mins
3. Scales/ arpeggios, slurred, circle of fifth (10 mins, rotating
through keys each day)
REST:10mins
4. Play pentatonic patterns (20 mins) "pentatonic patterns
for improvisation on your saxophone training materials")
REST*:10mins
5. Improvise over some 2-5-1s (15 mins) Play along over
some (non-bebop) tune on the Real pro App( 5-10 mins)
REST:5mins
6. Work on a transcription or maybe score songs from your
phone by the saxophone player you like.
Note: Rest is part of practice s rest enough to gain energy and
reduce fatigue
Join our mentorship programme and have access to materials
to practice with daily

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