Baritone Saxophone Tongue Warm Up Drills

Video Transcript

"I'm EJ John Erickson with Vital Flame Productions, and thank you for joining us on our sessions focusing on the baritone saxophone. So we're moving along kind of quickly. You've made a sound, you've gotten your fingers to move real basic; just getting things going. Now, everything that we've talked about so far you're just blowing, and keeping the air going while you're moving your fingers. Nothing else. Your O, and the teeth on the mouthpiece, O, is the same. We're going to talk real briefly about tonguing. Tonguing gives it the staccato and the punch, that especially for a bari. Sax you've got; you know if you're going to play like Doc from Tower of Power, you've got to know how to tongue. So, that's pretty critical. So from what we've talked about for embouchure, O, its TU, and you literally take your tongue to the bottom of that reed, and you go TU. You come right back; you aren't stopping the air support, you're not going HU, HUHUHUHUHU, you're not huffing. You keep that support in the air and you're going TU, TU. Now if you want to do a short one you go TUT, and you go TUT, but the pressure is still right behind the tongue. So let me demonstrate that. Here's no tonguing, just blowing and moving the fingers. Except I tongued a little bit at the end there, hard not to. O.K. so lets talk about; well let me do the first three notes we talked about between slurring, tonguing and tutting. That demonstrates the three, let me do it again, slur, tongue, tut. Which, I'm basically taking my tongue off and slapping in right back down, still keeping the air pressure behind that tongue. TU, TU, TU, TU. TUT, TUT, TUT, TUT. TUT, TUT looks like rain, got to have that."