playing the blues

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the feed back guys.

Just reading through all the comments relevant to my upload.

For the blues my teacher wants me to use this bright mouthpiece instead of the classical mouthpiece that im used to.

I’m having real issues playing it as my lower lip muscles aren’t strong enough to fully control it yet, he’s given a set of exercises to to do that in

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/x3o55qal1tpa33h/AACSavkH2wCJ5855J9MZnDiha?dl=0

which can benifit anyone else playing out of tune in the higher registers as it applies to all mouthpieces.

If you listen to my upload a third of the way my lower lip starts to tire, and then im struggling to keep up the extra air flow to hold the notes steady and this has a knock on effect in trying to keep time with the bars. But the biggest issue is bending all the notes down to keep them in tune.

My teacher assures me if i keep working on the tuning exercises and stop doing overtone exercises then hopefuly in the weeks to come the tuning issues will clear up and then i will have better control of breathing and articulation.

Otherwises i will taking a sledgehammer to this mouthpiece.

Hopefully i’ll find time to do another recording in 2 weeks time,
and get more expression into my playing.

[William Cingolani]

Thanks Jake for the comments and the tip about decreasing and increasing volume re: expression. Yep, the vibrato is there.

[Anonymous]

@William – increasing/decreasing volume is a simple way of setting the mood of the music not paricularly the expression of the piece.
Also growling, fluterring aren’t really classed as expression – more like grabbing attention.
To do true expression you need to play the same key and make emotional sounding – like sad & happy etc these are achieved by bending the notes to make them sad sounding and speeding up the tempo to make them more happy….

[William Cingolani]

Thanks sxpoet. I’ll get on to it on my next piece. I usually start out blowing a sad/happy piece like “the day I fall in Love” and then pass over to “Soul Man” and before long I’m blowing “That’s All Right” Mama any way you can. I’ll go that route for a few days and end up on some R&B that feels good at the time. I think I do better without the backing track. Backing tracks seem to limit the creativity.

[Anonymous]

@William – i’m on your wavelength – somedays i go and sit in the garden for an hour and just improvise away at my own feelings, after playing guitar for over 40 years its easy to do – i’m a long way off doing that on the sax.

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