Some Blues for Michael

[Kevin]

https://soundcloud.com/kevin-sinclair-715456887/ttig

Michael, You gave us a scare! Been thinking about you the last 2 days hoping that your 2nd opinion would give favorable outlook.
James had put a link to someone performing this song some time back and it was easy to find a backing track, and give it a go.
Know you like the Blues, so here’s one for you to sink into till you get back in good form! “The Thrill is Gone”
Struggled to keep the higher notes from being sharp, which is my ongoing struggle with this sax, or in particular the neck that it came with.
But hope it gives you some “Blues” to get you through the next 60-100 days…

[Anonymous]

@Kevin – it is possible, going by what my teacher says, the reason for the too sharp high nites is down to having the mouthpiece in the wrong place, according to him it needs to be about 1cm from the visible end of the cork at all times – then he made me relearn my embouchure – so now the higher notes aren’t as sharp and the lower notes are more in tune. by pulling the mouthpiece further out means those lower and higher notes will never be in tune.

[Kevin]

I’m not sure I can fully understand/agree with that comment. If all mouthpieces had the same volumetric cavity, all reed/mouthpiece combinations played identically with regard to intonation, and if all saxophone necks (and cork lengths) were made to identical specs, then this one setting fits all perspective would make sense. But with all the variances in how saxes, and MP’s are made, (throughout decades), temperature variations? How about the physical features differences?
I’m going to have to contemplate this one a bit more. My guess is there are a lot of other Professional sax musicians, equipment engineers, technicians that would not see eye to eye with this method.
My embrochure development is not matured so I will have different perspectives each year, perhaps moreso after I begin to learn/control overtones. But I will give this 1cm adjustment a try.
My experience has been when I get things adjusted up top then the embrochure/lip adjusting required to get the low notes in tune results in reed breaks into overtones. I haven’t progressed out of a 2 reed strength yet though so that may be contributing…

[Anonymous]

take it or leave – i’m following the advice of a pro, i’m getting results

[Michael]

Hi Kevin,
Thanks for thinking about me! 🙂 You’re such an awesome, genuine guy to say the least. I’ve always found you to be very, very encouraging and I always have tried really hard to apply myself to pointers you point out in my playing. If you think I gave you guys a scare, just think how I personally felt…..it’s kind of hard to describe what I’m feeling right now, but it’s a mixed feeling of feeling crushed, enraged, demoralized, upset, discouraged, etc.. you get the point. Over the last couple of days that I’ve had to just calm down and think more clearly, I’ve decided to take the advice of my Instructor in an e-mail he sent me yesterday morning. He told me, quote, “The pain that your dealing with now is only temporary, the pain of quitting will last you for the rest of your life.” That hit really hard with me, so I decided that I simply am not going to let this set back get the best of me. He assured me that all of the greatest players in the world have had to deal with struggles/setbacks and that I have to be willing to take the hits, something to think about for sure. I had an assignment to present an Improvised Sax cover to Van Morrison’s “Moondance” to my Instructor on the 30th of this month and I was going to upload it here first for Johnny to critique this weekend (it’s nice having the extra insights from Johnny to say the least). He told me just to take a “chill pill” and we’ll take care of it after I heal. I tried listening to your upload on soundcloud and it’s saying that it’s “unavailable”, weird. Sometimes these cpus have minds of their own LOL Check it out when you get the chance, I’ll try checking it out again in a while. Thanks for thinking about me Kevin, very encouraging 🙂 As soon as I get the chance, I’ll at least make a video to show you guys my new home recording set up.
Here’s a link to pro Sax player Pete Thomas’ “Taming the Saxophone” on Tuning and Intonation. Pete is a ferocious sax player to say the least and the only player whose going to ignore his insights are the inexperienced ones. If you read his article carefully, you will see that there are some things that simply can’t be turned into hard and fast rules without having the ability to adapt. Especially with MPs, there’s too many variables to make the 1 cm a hard-and-fast rule, but it’s a good general place to start. Notice what he says about tuners….they should never replace our ears, especially when playing the Blues. He mentions when using a tuner in the wrong way, it can be counterproductive.
https://tamingthesaxophone.com/saxophone-intonation-tuning

[Anonymous]

well say what you like, the 1cm rules working for me, with the exercises i’m doing i’ve got the sax in tune in around 2 weeks of practice, it’s reduced all the sueaking, the high notes are in tune as well as the low notes. initialy to play in tune i had to use the mouthpiece in the middle of the cork, but the high notes were badly out of tune – so i followed the pro’s advice. And funny enough i do recall reading in some old sax book, that the sax doesn’t play properly in tune, until the mouthpiece is shoved all the way in. Still i guess everyone has to learn the hard way.

[Kevin]

Michael, I think I had a link setting issue. I always put my videos to private, only to be shared with those I provide the link. Hopefully I got it right this time with the link in this comment. I’m pretty sure I selected the link after posting it to verify all was working, but upon checking it just now it was not.
James- The more I try to understand the tuning topic the more I am intrigued with aspects of it.
One thing is for certain in my experience with learning music myself and observing other students learning- different solutions work for different people to achieve the desired result. We all perceive and learn things in different ways. An instructor that clicks with one student and can teach him to excel, can fail with a different person for reasons that are due to the way that person perceives and learns.
James- I would like to know more what exercises you were instructed to do to work this method. To me what is interesting about this is how much the embrochure/oral cavity has to do with playing in tune, and it’s not just a mechanical setting.

[Michael]

Very, very cool Kevin 🙂 The Blues is THE thing down here in the south. It’s so big that if you can’t play the Blues, then no one is interested in playing music with you. I mean, the Blues came from the Southern US as you know, not much has changed in that regard. There’s some cool documentaries on youtube of the Origin of the Blues, check some out when you get the chance…take note of what region of the US they all talk about with the Blues. I hear so much of it everyday…and it has had a big influence on how I play the Saxophone 😉
There’s 2 things that really stand out to my about your playing in this Blues tune: Your warm, open tone and your licks are very simple, but melodically and rhythmically accurate. You know how you can hear someone playing and their tone sounds ‘congested’, right? That’s usually because they have a closed oral cavity and they need to open it up more. I can tell that your Oral Cavity is nice and open, really helps project that tone 🙂 You make a great point about how we all perceive things differently…that’s the whole point I’m getting at when I shared that link from Pete Thomas, especially when it comes to our perception of sound. In one of our first lessons together, the man I’m working with right now talked to me about good/bad reasons for changing MPs and how our perception of sound is so different from one person to the next. Even with his King Cleveland Tenor Sax and Otto Link MP that he let me mess around with for a little bit, I sounded very different than he did. He used the opportunity to show me how our own internal anatomy like our diaphragm, oral cavity, voice box, etc.. and the perception of sound that we have fixed in our head is what makes us all sound so different. He’s telling me “you love all that old R&B, Motown, high-screaming blues thing, right? So to get that sound, you’re not going to be listening to Coleman Hawkins all the time, are you?” His point to me was just by changing the things we listen to have huge effects in our playing because it changes our own perception of sound, and how we carry that perceived sound onto the Sax. Great job Kevin with your playing; thanks for thinking about me 🙂 My wife has been having to talk me through the frustration of the timing of events…it’s burning me up really, really bad to say the least. As soon as I can I’ll make a video of my home recording equipment, at least you can all see that for the moment–I’ll try to do it Monday as I don’t have to work Monday, everything is closed. Thanks again Kevin 🙂

[Anonymous]

Fantastic – its great to see that normsl service has resumed in the forums, and everyones back to showing there true colours – and we can all get back to passionately discussing sax related topics which is the main thing that keeps people walking away from this site.

The Uk paricipation in this site appears not to have grown, and i can only put that down to the fact that we probably have more music teachers in our tiny densly populated country, so they maybe leas reliable on web site?

[paddy jordan]

Kevin a lots of cool stuff going on there i like very mearsured very paced, it may be just me but i though some your ending notes ended a bit short, but yeah nice one.

[Author]

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