Adrian writes “I’ve been teaching sax for a number of years and a problem I’ve encountered in beginning students has me baffled as to its cause. They can blow a note ok but as soon as they start to try tonguing produce lots of squeals on the start of the note. I can’t figure out exactly what they are doing wrong. I get them to relax the embouchure and try to keep the tonguing as light as possible but the squeals persist. Any help on this would be much appreciated.”
First, what size reeds are they using? I try to get my students up to 2 1/2 or 3s in about 2 months. I find that after about a week most students squeak on 1 1/2 reeds if they practice a lot….
Second, check for leaks. Young students have a tendency to trash the instrument without knowing it. A key not closing right would cause endless problems.
Third, the embouchure should remain constant. What it sounds like, if you checked the above things, is that they are doing something with their throat and/or air stream and/or tongue.
Your tongue should be flat when you try to tongue. Sometimes students seem to try to lift the whole tongue instead of just the tip. The air stream needs to be constant too. I always give my kids this little analogy.
"Think garden hose with a nozzle on it. If you are going to spray your friend, you want it to be ready. Right? So when you attack you have all that water ready to go when you squeeze the handle. What good would the garden hose be in attacking your friends if you pressed the handle and the water had to come all the way from the house again? Your friends would have ample time to push you into the pool or get you wet with whatever weapon they have."
A similar idea occurs when you tongue. You want to think of the tongue as the nozzle. You need to have all that pressure ready to go.
But, if you have a real soft reed on, then all that pressure is going to kill the poor reed. Hence, get them up to 2 1/2s or so. The cheap Rico sax reeds (the no name ricos) are not any harder to play on than the 1 1/2s.
Also, you should make sure that they throat is open as well. You don’t sing with a closed throat (at least I don’t think you’d want to). When you tongue, you don’t need to close the throat off. I’ve seen some of my students have that problem.
So, try flat tongue, constant air pressure, open throat and a stable embouchure (IE: no squeezing, no relaxing, just the same regardless of what they are doing). Try that.
and then the next day my sound was nasty thin with no depth to the sound…then later on the nice sound came back the sound seems to jump back and forth everytime i have a practice session, its annoying and i cannot figure why this is happening. I was thinking maybe my embouchure isn’t consistent or something like that…any suggestions??
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