Picture this scenario: you’ve spent months and months preparing your upcoming recital and feel great about how you're playing. Performance day comes and you feel that everything goes well. Eagerly anticipating your recordings from the event, you can’t wait to hear how it sounded from the audience’s perspective. You start listening to your recordings and much to your surprise, it doesn’t quite sound as good as the performance perhaps felt. Almost every musician has experienced something similar to this at some point in their careers. It’s impossible for us to be in two places at once; therefore, we can’t always be sure if what we are hearing on stage is the same as what the audience hears. Fo
Think back to last year’s all-region audition: you go into the audition room with your heart pounding out of your chest with anxiety, you shake while seated in the chair, your mouth is dry but your hands are sweaty. Sound familiar? If you have ever experienced any of these audition day symptoms, it’s probably because you felt you weren’t as prepared as you could have been for the audition. Here are 4 steps to audition preparation that have proved to cure the curse time and time again! 1. Planning: “There’s no way I can do this! It looks impossible!” So did landing on the moon, but with enough careful planning, mankind reached new heights, and so can you! Get a clean copy of the music without
The hunt for that elusive “perfect reed” is one with which every saxophonist and clarinetist is surely familiar. As an educator, the success of my students in lessons and performances, as well as their disposition in the practice room, is largely dependent upon the cooperation of their reeds. As a performers, we all put our faith in the reeds that we select and trust that they will be reliable when the time comes. In a clinic recently, a student asked me if I could recall the single best reed that I had ever performed on and I realized that I have not dealt with many of the troublesome reed issues plaguing students in some time. This article aims to delineate my own personal process for brea
Adolphe Sax's original design for the saxophone included many different versions and variations, and while we do have literature that includes bass and sopranino and maybe even contrabass and soprillo, saxophones are most popularly seen in a quartet variety of soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone. Almost every beginning student starts on alto: its design is compact enough for younger students to hold and it seems easy enough to produce a sound when players are first starting out. Then there is soprano, which is usually not explored until students reach upper-level high school material; however, it seems when soprano is called for in a piece, every saxophonist tries to jump at the opportunity
