The Saxophone Mythbuster
Blowing fast air improves tone at pp dynamic levels.
Hogwash! I heard this one million times when learning how to playand it made sense to me too, sort of, until I actually thought about it. The whole formula is, "Raise your tongue and increase air support. The air going over the arch in your mouth speeds up like air over an airplane wing. Fast air makes a better, more focused tone, just like a nozzle on a garden hose focuses the water into a fast stream".
We can easily test the airplane wing/garden hose nozzle theory using an actual garden hose and it will show us something very important about playing the saxophone. To make a valid comparison though, we must realize that the hose nozzle is in fact, the equivalent of the embochure/reed aperture, where the air does speed up and shoot into the mouthpiece in a fast stream.
So, the water is turned on and we have a nice, focused stream of water shooting out of the nozzle. Let's then put a bend in the hose just before the nozzle and crimp it a bit, the equivalent of raising the tongue. Every kid who ever played with a hose in that way knows you can hear the water gushing past the crimp in the bend, so it does speed up dramatically. The fast, focused stream of water coming out of the nozzle however, has been choked to a mere fraction of what it was before. Reducing the diameter of the hose before the nozzle, increases the water speed at the reduction, but also reduces the water pressure and stream velocity at the nozzle. We have to increase the source water pressure considerably to get the original stream from the nozzle.
This is exactly what happens when playing the saxophone. Raising the tongue and constricting the oral cavity reduces the air pressure at the embouchure/reed aperture. One must then increase air support to get the same air pressure and dynamic level as with the tongue lower. So, with raised tongue and increased air support we have the same amount of air entering the mouthpiece, at the same speed, but the tone is much better. What changed? What is the secret?
Harmonic Resonance.
The saxophone is a system consisting of the reed excitation mechanism with it's own resonance, positioned between two resonating chambers and acoustically coupled to both. The the resonating chambers are the player's vocal tract and the horn body. The sum of the resonance characteristics of all three determine the tone of the instrument.
Tone is all about the amplitude relationships between the fundamental and it's overtones. The stronger the harmonics are, as long as they are not stronger than the fundamental, the richer and livelier the tone will be. At very soft dynamic levels the saxophone harmonics are practically non-existant. A fundamental sounding all by itself, is basically a sine wave - very dull and lifeless - as pp dynamic playing can tend to be.
As changing the saxophone body tube length tunes the frequencies of that tube's resonances, changing the postition of the tongue tunes the frequencies of the vocal tract resonances. It is easy to hear this by just breathing with your mouth open. Just by moving the tongue from an "ah" postition to an "ee" position, I can change the vocal tract pitch almost 3 octaves and I have precise control as well. All I have to do to improve my dull, lifeless, soft dynamic tone, is to raise my tongue to tune my vocal tract to the octave (first) harmonic of the fundamental I'm playing, while increasing air support to maintain the same pp (or whatever) dynamic level, and it now has some harmonic richness and focus.
So, the correct and still simple pedagogical formula would be:
Raise the tongue to tune the vocal tract to the octave (or desired) harmonic and increase air support to compensate for the reduced air flow.
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