5 Things to Consider For Your Saxophone Warm-Up

Like everything in life, a little preparation can pay tenfold, whether you’re building a practice routine for college or trying to maintain your skill between a full-time job while gigging on weekends. A warm-up gives you focus, a sense of control and helps you improve as a player. In this article, I address five ideas to keep in mind when incorporating a warm-up into your practice routine.

1. Practical

You can’t do it all. You literally cannot do it all. You can find countless books and resources to improve saxophone technique and skills (I recommend Dr. Dan Grazer’s Chop’s if you’re looking for something that has a bit of everything). These resources are great, but they can also be overwhelming. Between Improving range, intonation, scale memorization, and extended techniques, you could spend hours working on various saxophone skills and never get to rep. Whatever you are doing, be practical. If you are a university musician, you are at a point in your life where you can build a plethora of skills and improve significantly, but most saxophonists need to think pragmatically. Your warm-up should be practical and salient. If you are a gigging jazzer, do a warm-up that gets your fingers and vocabulary working. If you’re in a funk band and hit screaming high notes nightly, your warm-up might stress your upper range. If you are a classical performer, it should help you play uniformly. A 3-hour practice session can allow a warm-up to take a full hour. If you are only playing 30 minutes a day, it should be under ten minutes. Think practically.

2. Goal

Why are you warming up? Your warm-up should have a purpose. At 28 years old, I was a lost soul of the warm-up. Wondering between occasional long tones followed by inconsistent scale patterns. My warm-up was just… notes; reckless random notes until I thought my reed woke up. Dr. Jim Umble introduced me to a warm-up technique he refers to as the tonal warm-up. An exercise where the player starts on F2 and ascends by fifths. The goal is to match the tone and timbre throughout the horn. It became mediative as I tried to reframe my playing as a classical player. I found myself doing this warm-up at the beginning of every practice session. The goal wasn’t to move my fingers as fast as possible or warm up my brain. It was to find and create a uniform sound that I could produce every time I picked up the horn. It was also frustrating, something that often feels unattainable. However, it did get easier over time and has become a constant reminder to center my sound. Have a goal; it doesn’t need to be as abstract as the tonal warm-up; whether it’s scale patterns or articulation. These goals need to be actionable and attained during your warm-up.

3. Consistency

How often are you warming up? I am not one for a schedule; I want to be; I know I would be more productive if I did… but I’m not. I am the kind of person that changes things up constantly. After two days of waking up early to go for a run, I will decide the next day to go in the afternoon. Identify your goals, and work on your consistency. If your goal is to produce a perfect uniform sound, you presumably need to work on this for years. If your goal is to play your major and minor thirds at 120bpm, you can manage this task in the short term. Be sure to find consistency in what you are doing in your warm-up and make sure it is replicable. If a goal is to produce a low B, but you are only warming up once a week, you will find yourself working on this goal till the end of time. Your warm-up needs to be both replicable and regular.    

4. Routine

Is there a structure? When I began working on the tonal warm-up, I had other goals too. I was working on scale patterns, tuning, double tonguing; the list can go on forever. Managing these goals will benefit from a routine. We tend to focus on the things we do best; this is natural. What we do well makes us feel better about ourselves. No one wants to play the low B entrance to Desenclos repeatedly unless you already body that low B. The same rule should apply to your warm-up. Put time caps on what you work on in your warm-up, and then move on. My routine tends to be a bit more complex; I begin with 5 minutes of the tonal warm-up and long tones for tuning, but my scale patterns alternate between major and minor daily, and I also spend time working on articulation and slurs (which can be found in my free scale study guide five-note patterns). I run through patterns like thirds and fourths along with the turning CD to keep consistent pacing. I am not advising you to scaffold every moment of your warm-up routine, but you should have a routine that consistently hits your goals in a practical way (see what I did there?).

5. Growth

Strive for improvement. As mentioned earlier, we love to focus on what we do well. There was a time where I was building up all my extended techniques and started slap-tonguing entire Ferling etudes. While it was a fun flex, I quickly realized I probably should be investing my warm-up time on something more practical. We warm-up for a reason, and one of those reasons should be to see growth in our playing. After committing to your warm-up routine, be sure to reflect on how effective it is. Don’t be afraid to alter or experiment with it. Hold yourself accountable because the reality of it is, no one is in the shed with you, and you are the only person that knows if what you are doing is working.