Saxophones, Guitars, Songwriting, Music Production, Logic Studio, and a bunch more!
You are currently browsing the archives for March, 2009.
I find that inspiration comes from the strangest places, for me I find for some unknown reason that I most often wax lyrical in the shower, I’m not sure if that’s relevant to anything in particular, but I found myself in the shower today with a bunch of social commentary type lyrics in my head. Trouble is, it’s not really convenient to take pencil and paper into the shower, for obvious reasons, so I found myself rushing the shower (don’t worry I cleaned everything well!!) so I could get out and scribble down my lyrics before I lost them.
On the opposite side I find myself unable to come up with a tune without some kind of trigger as inspiration, like a loop, drum break or some kind of musical hook that gets my creativity flowing. I envy those I know that have music, literally spilling out of their heads all day long, and are never lost for a tune.
I’m curious where other people get their artistic inspirations from, doesn’t have to be musical, if you’re a writer, artist, poet, whatever, if you feel like sharing please drop a comment at the end of this post, and share! Inquiring minds want to know!
Obviously when playing a saxophone, or any reed instrument for that matter embouchure and lip support play as big a role as diaphragm and air support in your tone, when any of these things are lacking you lose the clear, clean and controlled tone that allow you to articulate your sound and your tone well, so this posting is more of a post looking for feedback about how you get around the issue of controlling your tone when your embouchure begins to slacken due to endurance issues.
Obviously for each person it’s different, I personally start to suffer somewhere between 1 and 2 hours, which by some peoples standards is a bit poor (I see you nodding your head), which is simply because my time commitments don’t allow me to play nearly as often as I’d like to! Whilst I’m sure there are those of you out there who can play for hours on end before it starts to have any affect, and I suppose it’s the people that have suffered and moved through it that this post is aimed at.
When my embouchure begins to tire, I’ve gotten into the very bad habit of using my teeth to push against my lip to provide that extra bit of support which is not only a bad habit but also cuts the inside of my lower lip to pieces, not good!! I do try pushing more of the lip up when this starts to happen, but it doesn’t last very long before even that gets difficult (since you’re using the same muscles in a slightly different way, right?).
So my question to all of you marathon sax players out there is this:
“How do you keep playing in a controlled manner once your embouchure starts to flag?“
All suggestions and help gratefully received, obviously I realise that more practice will overcome this with time, but I’m thinking more of a band-aid remedy that will help you pull that extra 30 minutes out of the bag to finish the set you’re playing.
So there I was sitting with a tune stuck inside my head that I wanted to get down onto paper. Normally this isn’t an issue as I have several instruments laying around normally where I can articulate my ideas before committing them to paper, but on this particular occasion all I had was my laptop. That’s no problem because on my Mac is a copy of Logic Pro Studio 8 which has a great score editor, so I figured I’d get the music out of my head that way.
For quite sometime I struggled with trying to open up a blank score and start to draw my notes in, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t seem to make it happen as I needed, I looked in the manual and the most helpful information that gave me was that before I could score any notes, “a staff must exist” well… obviously!!!
So if you’ve hit or are hitting the same problem the answer is to create a new empty part in the arrange window, then you can edit the new piece from the score editor as needed. Although it seems really straight forward, at the time I couldn’t figure out why simply creating a new stave and writing to it wouldn’t automatically create a new part to be allocated to the part of your choice. If anyone from Apple happens to read this, maybe in Logic Pro 9 eh??
One of the first posts I wanted to write was about a little known saxophone brand; Bauhaus Walstein. This is a Chinese made horn (although I believe the higher-end models are made in Taiwan?), which has been getting a lot of press lately and quite rightly so. I first came across these when professional saxophonist Pete Thomas mentioned them as offering a lot of horn for the money, and a few conversations were springing up around them on his forum over at the breakfast room.
To be honest they seemed a little too good to be true, because let’s face it, how can you possibly buy a great saxophone for less than £400 ($600 US); all this talk was followed shortly thereafter by some sound-clips played by Pete (the one played in this clip is a high-end model that comes in at around £1,000), and a review by a well known UK saxophone tech called Stephen Howard, followed by a side-by-side comparison with an equivalent Yanagisawa. The evidence appeared overwhelming, so when I was looking around for a new tenor I decided to jump in feet first and give them a shot.
I wasn’t disappointed at all!! The instrument is well balanced with a beautiful warm dark tone, it’s made of phosphur bronze so it’s really pleasing to the eye as well. The mouthpiece that came with mine was a plastic thing that went straight in to the bin (although I understand that they ship with Yamaha mouthpieces now); I replaced it with an Otto-Link Super Tone Master which finished the tone off nicely.
I can recommend these unreservedly, and as has been pointed out several times by others, they make a perfect gigging sax, or beginners sax, because of the price of the instrument. Arguably you get a horn that’s (arguably) almost to the standards of a £2K+ horn for a quarter of the price, not bad going at all!!
If you’re interested in finding out more you can see them on the Woodwind and Brass UK site.
Bauhaus Walstein Alto Saxophone
Well I figured it was as good a title as any. This is where my online musical journey begins, who knows where it will lead or what will come of it. Feel free to tag along, and I’ll see if I can’t be disciplined enough to post here regularly and do my best to avoid banality in the process
