welcome to bc 307 about tuning and how to tune your saxophone now tuning is really well being in tune is if i'm playing an a and you're playing an a because they both sound the same if they don't well bad things are going to happen it's going to sound absolutely awful now i'm not a big believer in buying loads and loads of fancy equipment and getting you know spending all your money on equipment i think you should spend money on lessons if anything you're going to spend any any invest any money into playing saxophone you should get a good sax a good mouthpiece lessons that's really all you need you don't really need anything else but one thing that is absolutely critical the one piece of extra equipment that i think you should buy is a chromatic tuner it looks like this oops let's get it level um you can get loads loads of different brands called do a really really good one this is called the second i call it um my psycho tuner a bit strange um i've dropped it that many times it doesn't really work anymore i should really buy anyone but there you go um there is this will actually tell you if you're playing in tune or not literally so if i'm playing say a g and that's as accurate as it's going to get to you really playing with that that'll tell you bang on it'll also tell you if you're a little bit sharp so if the reed's vibrating too quickly or if you're a little bit flat now that's quite useful because it tells you if you're actually squeezing your jaw together too tightly your bottom lip often you know your ombre show can sort of change um you remember the exercise in sort of the one of the first lessons i did whereas i get you to play on the mouthpiece or length and if you do this the pitch that we always say you should be aiming for is actually an a on the piano sounds like this so if you're relaxed enough the perfect saxophone shot through your mouthpiece is that a right there yeah trying to get that sound the same you can use your tuner as well if you get one to try and hold that a now the thing about using the mouthpiece alone is that it's very very um easy to influence the pitch if i squeeze a slightly harder or i loosen off too much that pitch is going to change so i'm trying to get which i get those notes sounding the same if i loosen up so it's really easy to mess around with that sound if you're getting an a on the mouthpiece alone then we can pretty much guarantee that you've got the right sort of shape going on in your mouth and then when you play your saxophone it's going to sound the same it's going to sound good which is of course what we're after so what we're going to do is play the note f sharp one two three and that note there and your second finger of your right hand and what i want to try and play is an a that one there and trying it exactly the same because i've listened to this if you get your saxophones now and have a try usually is the first way to influence your tuning is listen to this note then play yours is it the same now you try is yours the same listen very carefully f sharp without the activity okay so maybe your f sharp was absolutely perfect i don't know i'm not that but what i want you to do now is pull off your mouthpiece quite a lot and just have a listen to that do you remember the a that we played a minute ago now my mouth is exactly the same all i've done is i've altered the distance or the length of the tube of my saxophone what i've done is i've pulled out my mouthpiece of this so here's the tube it's that length i put my mouthpiece on the end there's this much space the longer a tube the more of it that there is to vibrate so the slower it will vibrate given a certain amount of pressure technically speaking so the longer my saxophone is the deeper or the flatter the sound is going to be so what i'm going to do is i'm going to push my mouthpiece on ever so slightly so it's still quite a long way off there from this point now if you've tried that now with your mouthpiece almost at the end of your crook here at the end of the call you should feel that you should hear that your f sharp is a lot lower than this one can you hear that and it doesn't sound very good does it well hopefully it's like no doubt it doesn't sound really good so what i'm going to do is i'm going to push the mouthpiece on over slightly again and now you'll hear that it's sounding a bit closer to that but it's still flat and if you use your tuner you'll be able to see that as well i need the third-handed and that beard part to show you that i'm going to push my mouthpiece on a little bit more i'm still lower mine's still lower i've not messed around my amber sure i'm not tightening up i'm keeping my natural position i'm going to push on a little bit to that more again almost okay so in order to chew my saxophone if i'm using my ears to tune and i think well the question you always have to ask yourself a stupid question am i higher or lower than the other person that i'm playing with it's a bit like playing by ear you know when you're working out of tune what note is that am i playing a higher note to a low note so when you hear that when you hear the note that you want to play in tune with am i higher or lower if you're too high then you need to make your tube longer if you're too low then well you need to make your saxophone tube shorter so i pull out a little bit to make the saxophone tube longer and i push my piece on a little bit to make it shorter and that's how we basically tune our saxophone now the last thing i'm going to talk about is that go back to the fact that the saxophone is pretty out of tune certain notes especially notes with the octave key are generally a little bit too sharp now when you end up tuning a note like that f sharp that we did just there also called consonant a or a40 when we actually tune that note what we end up doing is and what we end up actually doing is tuning one note on the saxophone and the trouble is if we're just tuning one note on the saxophone well the other notes aren't necessarily all going to be in tune so we have to adjust to that so i'm going to have to have a play around for now is just walk up a little walk up a few notes do an f sharp do a g do an a do a b using your tuner there's quite a few online ones as well there's free online tuners that you can get you're looking for a chromatic tuner chromatic tuner um don't worry about the note that they said you're playing for some of them are in c or any platform d part you can alter them but don't worry about that just literally isn't that you're playing in tune so if you get your f sharp so it's bang on tuned by altering the adjusting the position of your mouthpiece and then walk up each note and i just want you to simply have a think about play the note am i too sharp am i too flat what's happening is an a sharp is an a flat is a d with the octave key sharp or is it flat i'll take a guess and imagine that your d with the octave key is quite sharp try that now have a go play a d with the active key on with your chromatic tuner once you've got one are you sharp probably if you've got a really good i'm sure you're probably sharp on that you generally are all right guys so have an experiment with that that's tuning so how to tune your quick recap basically to tune your saxophone if you're too low you push the mouthpiece on if you're too sharp you pull the mouthpiece off but mostly tuning is about using your ears listen to the person you're playing with or the backing track you're playing with does it are you playing there playing an a are you playing it in the same note of course you've got a transposition to taking consideration there but you know we'll cover that later on all right guys hope you found that useful any questions comments please leave them below and i'll catch you next time bye