Reddit reviews A Complete Approach to Sound for the Modern Saxophonist

Long tones. Overtones. Transcribing. Patience and perseverance.



For TONE, if you're on your own, I'd recommend using "A Complete Approach to Sound for the Modern Saxophonist". It takes the best of classic books like Rascher's "Top Tones", as well as adds its own exercises, but above all explains everything very clearly - that makes it easier to follow if you're practicing without guidance.

You can download demonstration sound clips of some of the exercises [HERE](http://www.benbrittonjazz.com/completeapproach/Complete%20Approach%20Sound%20Clips%20(Demonstrated%20on%20Tenor%20Saxophone\).zip "20MB zip file!!").

Ben Britton also wrote a follow up book for more advanced overtone exercises: A Complete Approach to Overtones: Vivid Tone and Extended Range.



BUT, "sound" is not just about "tone", it's also about articulation and time feel. You can have the most mind blowing harmonic approach and tone, if your time feel and articulation isn't solid, you will always sound like an amateur. A few things to work on to develop good time and articulation:

• make your metronome your new best friend
  
• slow scale practice with mixed articulation (fundamentals never stop being cool...)
  
• transcribing and focusing on imitating articulation and time feel. Coltrane and Rollins had radically different approaches for example. Transcribe both guys and find out why and how.
  
  One of the best exercises for developing a solid time feel is to play bass lines on the saxophone. After all, if you can't play quarter notes with a solid time feel, with that forward momentum a good bassist has, how can you expect smaller subdivisions to sound better? It's also a fantastic voice leading exercise, and makes refreshing or learning tunes efficient and entertaining. I'd explain more of the concept, but I got it from a Will Vinson video lesson so I'm not sure it would be cool. This and the other lesson on melodic improvisation are well worth the price IMO (less than the price of a box of reeds...).

Get a teacher man. Even if it's for a few lessons to get you started. I'm mostly self-taught, and only started taking some lessons here and there later in life and I really wish I had started earlier as I wouldn't have had to correct some bad technique. Tone production and articulation are so esoteric that it's nice to have someone explain to you exactly what you need to do and getting instant feedback on whether you're doing it right or not will make you progress 10X faster. The rest (fingerings, scales, chords, etc) is easy to learn on your own.

If you REALLY can't get a teacher I'd recommend the following books:

• A Complete Approach To Sound For the Modern Saxophonist. There are other books on saxophone tone production but they are antiquated and too often sort of unclear (like Rascher's "Top Tones For the Saxophone" or Dave Liebman's "Developing A Personal Saxophone Sound".) This is a clear, well organized and well explained book about everything related to tone production. Every concept has corresponding exercises and clear explanation on how and why to practice them and achieve the set goals. Also, most of these exercises have sound sample demonstrations downloadable for free on the guy's website.
  
  
• The Jazz theory Book
  A great start, again very well explained, on theory. Scales, chords, etc...
  
  The rest (like fingerings) you can find easily online for free, or figure out by listening and transcribing.

As somebody who taught himself, developed a bad habit or two, and corrected them with the help of a book (that is to say, no actual teacher), I'd say it's neither hard to teach it to yourself nor hard to correct bad habits on your own, given the right materials.

It's not that I wouldn't have preferred a teacher; I just wasn't ever in a position where I could learn from one. Probably the best book I ever bought was A Complete Approach to Sound for the Modern Saxophonist, by Ben Britton. If you wind up teaching yourself, regardless of what other books you work from, you should pick that one up. It takes all of the "this is what to do to play with proper technique" advice that you see in so many books and gives you much better explanations for how to achieve these things, what to listen for, etc. etc., and it happens to be the sole reason I recognized and corrected my bad habits.