Disassembly / cleaning

When you are finished playing the saxophone, it should be taken apart with the same care with which it was assembled.
1.	Unhook the neck strap from the saxophone body.
2.	Remove the neck from the body.
3.	Feed the weighted end of a sax swab into the bell and turn the saxophone over so that the weight drops out the other end. Pull the swab through the instrument bore a couple of times.
4.	Put the end plug back into the neck receiver and put the body back into the case.
5.	Remove the reed, wipe off the excess moisture and place it in a reed case/holder.
6.	Remove the mouthpiece from the neck and store it in the case with the ligature and cap on it.
7.	Use the sax neck cleaner to clean out the neck.
Periodically, you may also want to do the following:
	Use the soft cloth to polish the exterior of the saxophone, in particular the fingerprints left on the keys.
	Use a mouthpiece brush and warm soapy water to wash out the buildup inside the mouthpiece (Figure 6).

Assembling Saxophone

1.	Place the strap around your neck.
2.	Hold the neck in one hand and gently push on the mouthpiece in a twisting motion (Figure 2).
3.	Place the reed against the mouthpiece with the flat side down and the tip (thin end) lining up with the tip of the mouthpiece. Secure it with the ligature. The standard position is where you can just see the tip of the mouth-piece above the tip of the reed (Figure 3).
4.	Grasp the bell of the saxophone body and remove it from the case (NEVER grab the keys or rods). Remove the end plug and loosen the neck receiver screw.
5.	Grasp the neck in your other hand and carefully place it into the neck receiver with a twisting motion. (Be careful not to squeeze the octave key on the neck or to jam the octave key loop into the octave key stem on the body. This could result in mechanical problems with the octave key.) The brace on the underside of the neck should line up with the octave key stem on the body. Once it is lined up, tighten the screw on the neck receiver (Figure 4).
6.	Finally, attach the neck strap hook onto the strap ring on the saxophone body. Adjust the strap so that the mouthpiece comfortably reaches your mouth.

Saxophone Technique

Saxophones use wide varieties of sound or saxaphone technique. Some techniques like a "growl" can give a saxophone a rocky sound to it. Other techniques such as vibrato are commonly used with all music. Some saxophone techniques include:

• growling
• vibrato
• laugh
• circular breathing
• flutter tongue
• pitch bending

Growling is a very popular technique used in rock or aggressive sounding music. Growling kind of mimics a growl by singing a note into the sax while playing. Usually the note you sing in the sax is a little off pitch than the note you play. To actually get a growl sound out of a sax play a note and at the same time sing a note off pitch to the note you play until you get a "growl" sound.

Vibrato is used in both singing and instrumental music. It sounds like a note being bent upward (usually a half step up) and back down giving a good sounding note. To do vibrato on sax move your jaw slightly up and down while playing. Vibrato is played at a fairly fast speed. Average speed for vibrato would be an eighth note triplet.

A Laugh on sax is a technique used to mimic a human laugh. To do a laugh play a note and kind of laugh as you play but sing a note as you play as well.

Circular breathing is used to be able to play a note for a very long period of time(as long as you can keep the technique up). To circular breath puff your cheeks full of air and play normally. When you run out of air, blow with the air you have stored in your cheeks and breath in through your nose while using the air in your cheeks to catch breath. After That process puff your cheeks full of air again and repeat until you want the note to end. A saxophonist famous for circular breathing is Kenny G.

Flutter tongue flutters a note fast. To flutter tongue on sax trill your tongue while playing and get a good flutter sound out of the sax.

Pitch bending is also commonly used in instrumental music. Its used to "bend" a note up and down without changing fingerings. To use it just play a note with your jaw more open and slowly tighten your jaw to get the pitch to bend upward.

History of Saxophone

The saxophone was developed in the 1840s by Adolphe Sax, a Belgian-born instrument-maker,flute player, and clarinetist working in Paris. While still working at his father's instrument shop in Brussels, Sax began developing an instrument which had the projection of a brass instrument with the mobility of a woodwind. Another priority was to create an instrument which, while similar to the clarinet, would overblow at the octave, unlike the clarinet, which rises in pitch by a twelfth when overblown; an instrument which overblew at the octave would have identical fingering for both registers.

Prior to his work on the saxophone, Sax made several improvements to the bass clarinet by improving its keywork and acoustics and extending its lower range. Sax was also a maker of the then-popular ophicleide, a large conical brass instrument in the bass register with keys similar to a woodwind instrument. His experience with these two instruments allowed him to develop the skills and technologies needed to make the first saxophones. Adolph Sax created an instrument with a single reed mouthpiece like a clarinet, conical brass body like an ophicleide, and the acoustic properties of the flute.

Having constructed saxophones in several sizes in the early 1840s, Sax applied for, and received, a 15-year patent for the instrument on June 28, 1846. The patent encompassed 14 versions of the fundamental design, split into two categories of seven instruments each and ranging from sopranino to contrabass. In the group Sax envisaged for orchestral work, the instruments transposed at either F or C, while the "military band" group included instruments alternating between E♭ and B♭. The orchestral soprano saxophone was the only instrument to sound at concert pitch. All the instruments were given an initial written range from the B below the treble staff to the F three ledger lines above it, giving each saxophone a range of two and a half octaves.

Adolphe Sax, the inventor of the saxophoneSax's patent expired in 1866; thereafter numerous saxophonists and instrument manufacturers implemented their own improvements to the design and keywork. The first substantial modification was by a French manufacturer who extended the bell slightly and added an extra key to extend the range downwards by one semitone to B♭. It is suspected that Sax himself may have attempted this modification. This extension was adopted into almost all modern designs.

Sax's original keywork was very simplistic and made playing some legato passages and wide intervals extremely difficult to finger, so numerous developers added extra keys and alternate fingerings to make chromatic playing less difficult. While the early saxophone had two separate octave vents to assist in the playing of the upper registers just as modern instruments do, players of Sax's original design had to operate these via two separate octave keys operated by the left thumb. A substantial advancement in saxophone keywork was the development of a method by which both tone holes are operated by a single octave key by the left thumb which is now universal on all modern saxophones. One of the most radical, however temporary, revision of saxophone keywork was made in the 1950s by M. Houvenaghel of Paris, who completely redeveloped the mechanics of the system to allow a number of notes (C♯, B, A, G, F and E♭) to be flattened by a semitone simply by lowering the right middle finger. This enables a chromatic scale to be played over two octaves simply by playing the diatonic scale combined with alternately raising and lowering this one digit. However, this keywork never gained much popularity, and is no longer in use.

KL FeiYang concert

Date: 20/9/08 saturday 7.45 admission

Theme: PRIME POINT 原点

Songs to be played:


Blues brothers

Rosalind

Symphony no5

Sousa'holiday(star and strip forever)

Asian selection 2

Sand castle

What a wonderful world

Fairy tale (童话)

Goodbye my love

Guidance by Ikeda Sensei

The human spirit is the strongest force there is.
As long as our spirit remains unbroken, there is no defeat.
In life, spiritual defeat always precedes actual defeat.
Guard against laziness, cowardice, carelessness, impatience, resignation and despair which corrode the human spirit and sow the seeds of defeat.