Increase Your Technique Without Tension
Technique is the great equalizer. No one naturally plays Minor 6ths at 154 beats per minute. No one maintains their scales and arpeggios after checking off the box and never touching them again. Technique ebbs and flows; musicians constantly work towards it, just like a basketball player drills the free throw line or a marksman goes to the range. Countless books help develop these skills. Dan Graser’s Chops series is one of the most recent modernizations that takes saxophone technique to a new level. Londiex wrote Exercises Mecaniques, which gives a smaller dose of increasingly difficult chromatic variations that help a saxophonist develop facility beyond scale passages. One essential factor of technique is efficient and relaxed hand position. I wrote a scale packet, Scale Pattern Variations: Broken Rhythms in Major, for my current students to address developing this skill.
I have created a free PDF guide using broken rhythm exercises to help increase scale speed while decreasing tension, using full-range major scales. The packet uses five simple rhythmic variations to isolate different pairings of notes during each repetition without the added stress often incorporated at faster speeds. Imagine a net under a tightrope for your technique. You still work on each grouping but in an isolated environment—an effective way to speed up technique without increased error or tension in your playing. This technique also helps identify note transitions you have the most difficulty with within a passage so you can hone in on specific fingering transitions, saving you practice time in the long run.
I refer to something clearly explained by Dr. Robert Young in a YouTube video here. I studied with Dr. Young for my final semester of lessons during my undergraduate education at SUNY Potsdam. He presented a technique exercise that would improve facility effectively while avoiding the pitfalls of speeding up the BPM (beats per minute) too soon. When practicing our technique at the limit of our ability, we tend to cheat, clenching our fingers down on the keys or choking the horn, causing our tendons to seize up over extended periods. You may notice your forearms burning or shooting pain up to your elbow at the end of a grueling practice session. Even worse, the pain carried into the next day. Tendonitis is a motivation killer, and Dr. Young articulated this to me in one of our first lessons. I took it to heart and spent the semester using this practice tool to increase my scale technique faster than ever before. Once I mastered the variations, I incorporated this technique for tricky excerpts.
Dr. Young is not the only pedagogue who uses variations of rhythms. Dr. Dan Graser of Grandvalley State, the author of Chops, includes a similar set of variations in the appendix of Chops 1 titled “Practice rhythms of varying weight and emphasis.” I assumed these ideas were instilled in both educators because they studied with the one and only Donald Sinta. In my interview with Graser (watch here), he mentioned similar variations from many of his teachers. If you get your hands on the Chops books, you can better see how many nuanced variations you can incorporate when playing within a one-octave range. Graser provides 10 in this portion of the appendix. Both professors explain via the YouTube-linked videos that you can use countless variations to achieve similar results.
Regardless of what method you use to improve your technique. You must create variation and instill flexibility beyond the ink on the score. My lessons with Dr. Umble of Youngstown State University often led to him asking me to read a phrase backward (literally right to left). The idea was that flipping the note order would help improve my execution by disassociating what I had spent precious practice time drilling. The objective is growth. Technique is not a one-size-fits-all monolith, and if you made it to the end of this article, I hope you have taken the time to realize the importance of changing things up in the search for more efficient and effective practice habits. Share your variations in the comments, or download my free PDF practice packet here. Happy practicing!
