I haven’t played in over a month!
How to learn to play the tenor sax
How I did it: I spent the entirety of my junior year in high school nagging my band director to let me borrow one of the old school tenors so that I could learn and be in jazz band for my senior year. Well, a year later, I'm still not in jazz band because I am not quite that good yet, but it's been great to learn -- so much fun that I don't want to give it back before I graduate! I love playing the sax, and hearing myself progress, and knowing that I started with a sound like a dying goose and have ended up pretty darn good at the thing. And it helps my flute embouchure, too!
Lessons & tips: Perseverance. Yes, you will likely sound horrible when you begin; my first sounds were the mixture of a foghorn, a dying fowl, and too much spit in my mouthpiece. But if you stick at it, and spend time making sure that you sound better, you eventually will. The old saying really applies, practice does make better.
Resources: Rico reeds. Honestly, they're not that bad.
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I’m borrowing a school instrument and I can hardly make a sound. It’s so different from the flute! I need to find a fingering chart and set to work on scales before I can do anything else.
I am hopefully going to begin this one after vacation because my band instructor was too lazy to look for a spare instrument before we left for Christmas, so I was not able to teach myself these past ten days. This and the euphonium are my two hopefuls; one so that I can play in the jazz band and one so that I can audition for DCI!



