Posture When Playing the Saxophone

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Now, you have successfully assembled your saxophone but there are still a few more steps and a few things we got to talk about before we play our first notes. First, positioning and adjusting the saxophone. There are a lot of different ways to adjust the position of a saxophone. You can raise or lower the sax strap, you can swivel the neck of the saxophone if you loosen up the neck screw and you can rotate the mouthpiece on the neck. All of these adjustments are perfectly good and perfectly legal to do. The key point is this, you want to make sure you have the saxophone adjusted in such a way, so that it comfortably falls into your mouth with your back straight, your head up tall, your neck straight, no bending or no contorting whatsoever. Good posture is very important when playing the saxophone. Now, I am not harping on this thing about good posture because I am some kind of old school madam who insists you sit up straight. No, it really does affect the way you play the saxophone. Try this for once, imagine, if I were to play the saxophone with the strap too low and maybe the neck a little bit off tilted and I am doing this kind of thing. Now, hold this position and try to take as deeper breathe as you can take. You can not take a very deep breath this way because you are bending your air pipe all every which way but when you stand up straight, when you have your neck straight and your head up tall, then you can take a big breath. So, that is why good posture is so important in playing the saxophone, not because I care about etiquette but because I care about breathing. Now, of course, there are always exceptions to these rules. One of my favorite saxophonist is actually, my favorite saxophonist of all time, the great Lester Young, this fellow right here who made all those wonderful recordings of that first great Count Basie band. Lester Young is just an exquisite saxophonist and boy! Did he play the saxophone in a strange way? He would play out at the side of his mouth with the neck kind of turned and the mouthpiece rotated kind of like this. If I saw any of my students play saxophone like that, I get very upset but Lester Young was able to pull it off and I would not argue with him. I do not know it is an interesting historical note, it turns to the reason he did this, was because he got his start in Woodville. His family had a Woodville act when he was a boy and one of his childhood tricks in the Woodville show was to play the saxophone upside down. Alright, one more thing I got to talk about involving the position of the saxophone and that is standing up versus sitting down . Both are fine. You can play the saxophone standing up, you can play the saxophone sitting down but you are going to have to make different adjustments depending on what you do. If you sit down, you will probably have to hike up the sax strap a little bit, maybe rotate the neck a bit, you are going to have to make changes. Now, most saxophones you play to the side of your right leg, like so. Our alto saxophone however, gives you two options both of which are fine. You can play it to the side like the other saxophones or you can play it between your legs, straight on. Now, if you do that, you are going to have to make different adjustments to the neck, the strap and the mouthpiece. Alright, we are going to take a short digression right now and talk for a few minutes about the care and selection of your reeds.

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