yes – i love reading/youtubing what these Pro’s have to say, these are the guys who you can trust to pass on good advice, based on their own years of experience. Johnny included!
As an example, my sax teacher who is a pro, classically/jazz trained keeps telling me to spend several weeks just playing with every muscle in my body relaxed & as limp as possible. he doesn’t like the way my fingers look so tense on the keys, he wants me to touch the keys very gently, with relaxed fingers. I find that difficult to do on my yamaha as the keys seem to need a lot of pressure to hold them down, and keep them down, another reason why i am seriously looking at getting a Pro sax, as everyone says they are a lot easier to control (mainly the latest models) and will allow you to advance a lot faster than a student model.
But it wasn’t until i saw a basson player doing a masterclass on the basoon, that i could see the advantage of playing with relaxed fingers, he showed the difference in how the fingers/tension of hand changed the sound of his bassoon vastly, he had a lot more control over the smoothness of his dynamics.
Similar to Big Daves demo’s – he does one where he says various words like ‘hee’, ‘ha’, ‘heh’& displays on the mouthpiece how what happens when you play using these words and how they change the way pitch sounds, because your tongue is in a different position with different words, some words open the throat more etc..
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