let's learn how to put together our alto sax in a previous lesson we learned how to put together our mouthpiece Reid and neck we're going to put this to the side for a minute but before we do we need to protect our Reed by putting on our mouthpiece cap so we carefully place the mouthpiece cap over the reed without bumping into it and we're going to put this to the side look in your saxophone case and find your neck strap it should look something like this on one end we have the hook that hooks into your saxophone we have the strap and then we have this plastic piece which allows us to adjust the length of the strap we need to learn how to adjust our neck strap to be shorter or longer so we can have the correct playing position when we're holding our saxophone with one hand grab onto this plastic piece where we adjust the length of our neck strap and with your other hand pull the strap through like this that makes the neck strap shorter and if we want to make it longer we hold onto this plastic piece and we pull the strap this way and that will make the neck strap longer so play around with your neck strap and make sure you can get it to go shorter or longer because that's very important for having proper playing position let's put the neck strap around our neck and get ready to put together our saxophone most of the time in band we'll be sitting down when we play so let's sit down in a chair and have our saxophone case on the floor next to us when we pick up the body of the saxophone out of the case we're going to use our right hand to grab on to the bell of the saxophone so the fingers of your right hand should go inside the Bell like this the bell of the saxophone has a nice curved shape to it and that fits very nicely on our knee place the body of the saxophone with the curve of the bell sitting on your right knee and the hole at the top of the saxophone and the bell are both pointed to your left the side of the saxophone that has all the keys should be facing away from you looking down at your saxophone if you go about halfway down the body you should see a metal loop sticking out that is where we attach the neck strap so let's take our neck strap and hook it into this metal loop now we can pick up the mouthpiece and neck that we set to the side earlier we can take the mouthpiece cap off and you see at one end we have the mouthpiece at the other end we have the hole where we're going to attach the neck to the body at the top of the body of the saxophone you see a screw this screw is going to loosen to let us connect the neck and then once we have the neck in there we're going to tighten it to keep the neck in place let's start by loosening the screw a little bit don't loosen it too much we don't want it to fall out our left hand is going to connect the neck push the neck into the body of the saxophone with a back-and-forth twisting motion we want the mouthpiece and the neck to be pointed straight up towards the ceiling now we can tighten the screw to keep the neck in place it doesn't have to be super tight just tight enough that the neck won't move around now that we know how to put our saxophone together properly we're ready to learn proper holding position and we'll learn to play our very first note you