Finger Movement for Advanced Saxophone Players

Video Transcript

"Alright. We do want to concentrate on cleanly moving our fingers back and forth. There's a quote that I read recently, "By concentrating on precision, one arrives at technique. But, concentrating on technique does not make you arrive at precision." What that means is, whenever you are playing through your scales and stuff, if you're concentrating on exactly getting your fingers down just fast enough, you're going to eventually build up your technique to do that naturally. When you're changing notes, especially between say the C and the B, you want to move your fingers really snappy. You want to move almost like a machine. As you pop down your fingers, it's going to make the note come out. If you don't get them both down at the same time, you're going to hit a little note in between going between C and B. C and B with a good transition sounds like this. C and B sloppily played sounds like this. So, you're actually getting by not putting your fingers down fast enough you're hitting that extra C sharp in between there. That also goes for F to F sharp. If you play it correctly, sounds better. So, that's something to keep in mind. That goes for all the keys. Those are just good examples of easy ones to mess up. So, make sure when you're playing you snap your fingers down. Nobody wants sloppy fingers."