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[godream]

Me on May 14: "I haven't pulled an all-nighter in a while, but it's scary how fast it comes back."

Me today, and also yesterday, 11ish: "*yaaaaaaaaaaaaaawn* oh god I am not functional after 10."

Less than a year, seriously, what happened? I swear I used to be more hardcore than this.

-

In non-whiny news: my brother has loaned me his sax, so now I have a borrowed alto and a borrowed c melody to mess with, and the alto even works consistently. Might be time to supplement teaching myself with a few real lessons. I've never had real lessons on an instrument before, but hey, why not?

It's interesting -- I can choose interesting things to play and I can learn the scales and whatnot, but the sax seems to have a lot of interesting wrinkles that make it way harder to teach yourself than guitar or bass or piano. If my B is always flat, how come? What makes that octave jump happen accidentally sometimes? And so on. Vibrating columns of air are way less intuitive than vibrating strings, it seems.

Comments

[jessiehl.livejournal.com]

Saxes are awesome (I played in middle school)!

They are also notoriously hard to keep in tune. This is because everything affects your tuning when you play the sax. The angle that you hold the sax affects it. The position of your mouth and how hard you press your lip against the reed affects it. How tightly you have the reed screwed into the mouthpiece affects it.

There is no recipe for having your tuning automatically come out right (though if it is always coming out wrong, and it's always the same approximate sort of wrong, the first thing to try is probably changing how tightly your reed is screwed into the mouthpiece). You just have to develop enough intuition about how little changes on the fly will affect your tuning, listen to yourself as you go along, and make them as required.

In some ways, though, the finicky tuning is a feature, not a bug. Once you learn how to control it on the fly, you can also play around with it on the fly. It can be very emotionally expressive to subtly manipulate the tuning of notes as you go along.

[godream.livejournal.com]

The angle you hold the sax at affects the tuning? That ... makes a distressing amount of sense. Hmmmm. Interesting, thanks for the tips!

Sax seems to be a lot more like singing than it is like piano or guitar (which I suppose makes all sorts of sense -- vibrating columns of air...) I'm really enjoying it, but it's much less "right key/right fret produces the expected result"...

[jessiehl.livejournal.com]

Sax is in fact more like singing.

However, when I played in middle school band, which is mostly instruments involving vibrating columns of air, it still seemed to have the everything-affects-tuning property more than the other instruments. Our band director took it for granted that the sax section would need a tuning check each day, but he would yell at, say, the French horns, if they weren't in tune. The clarinets, or the flutes, hardly ever had to have a tuning check. I think our section had to have more tuning checks than all the others combined - and judging by individual competition results, honors band qualifications, etc, we were one of the strongest sections in the band in terms of ability. I don't know what about the sax makes its tuning so fragile, but something does.

I actually thought that sax was easier overall than guitar or piano, because manual dexterity is not my strong suit. :) But you definitely have to care about a different set of factors. At least with the sax, though, unlike piano or guitar, if you know that your tuning is wrong, you can sometimes fix it as you play, instead of having to stop and fiddle with knobs or strings (and the sax equivalent of fiddling with knobs or strings, fiddling with the mouthpiece, is easier).

[godream.livejournal.com]

Huh, interesting. I never played in band in high school/middle school (though sometimes I really wish I had) so I don't have exposure to learning curves and quirks of particular instruments from there -- sounds educational in more ways than the obvious.

Re sax vs guitar vs piano -- different shaped learning curves, maybe, shallow then steep vs steep then shallow. My goal playing piano is to be able to amuse myself and maybe play with others, not to play Rachmaninoff pieces or something, and it feels like getting to that good-enough state on piano was way easier than it will be with sax. (Or maybe I am discovering that it is harder to learn stuff as a more-or-less grownup than it was a little kid, surprise surprise. :p)

Fiddling with mouthpiece is easier than fiddling with strings? Really? Heh, hope I get to that point eventually. :)

[jessiehl.livejournal.com]

Fiddling with mouthpiece is easier than fiddling with strings?

Fiddling with mouthpiece requires less precision, as there are other factors affecting tuning and you're going to be playing with them anyway. Fiddling with strings, you have to be precise, or the note won't sound right.

[godream.livejournal.com]

Makes sense. Oddly, I think that's pretty much exactly why I think fiddling with strings is easier. ;)

[rainbwfairie.livejournal.com]

I am starting to lose the late night gene. It makes me sad that college is coming to an end. What's new with you.