Playing a Major Scale on the Tenor Saxophone

Video Transcript

" Hi! This is Dave Birkin and on behalf of Expertvillage.com I am going to be talking a little bit about the major scale on the saxophone. Now I guess the most obvious thing to do is just play the C major scale, it seems to be basic scale for all instruments, it is the white notes on the piano. Of course saxophone is transposing instrument, so when I play C on this instrument, it is actually B flat, but for all our purposes we are going to talk about C. And when you play it is if you go down to the, when you play the low C, you know you are basically your left stack and your right stack, three, three here, and then you put your pinky down on this one here, that is your low C key right there. And the way it is designed is you just basically take one finger off for each note, so that is the C, this is the D, you take your pinky off and you got D and then you take in third finger off here and that is E, and take this finger and second finger off and that is going to be F. You notice the way your scale is constructed it is whole steps and the half steps, you have got a whole step between one and two, whole step between two and three and half step in between three and four. You want to keep your fingers as close to the keys as possible, so I am just showing this to demonstrate it, but when you are playing you do not have to take you hand off that way, it is just like that like that, and then we get to the left hand and then it is G. So we are not playing anything with your right hand when you play G… A, and fingers there, B… C just like that, but of course you want your fingers ready to go, you put them just as close as you can to the keys, and then C is played with the middle finger, and we want to play the next octave, you pretty much play the same thing except you starting on this note right here, and you go to an octave above D, which would be just the way you have played in the lower register, but with the octave key, you rock your thumb forward, so to go from this C here to this D here and then you just playing pretty much the same thing you did in the lower octave, that is the beauty of it, you do not have to learn new fingerings for the next octave. "