In The Shed: Extended Techniques

A while back I had my saxophone adjusted by the great Montreal saxophonist and repairman Al Mclean and one of the things he did was adjust my key heights. Truthfully in the time I’ve played saxophone I never stopped to consider my key heights and how

they might affect my playing. Al lowered pretty much all the key heights on my soprano and the horn has never felt better, the response is faster, I feel less encumbered by the action and overall it has improved my relationship with the horn. There was however an unintended consequence in that by lowering the key heights I lost every single multiphonic I had previously worked out on the horn, they just didn’t come out anymore! The same fingering and embouchure positions no longer resulted in any usable sounds at all. As someone who has spent a good deal of time working out and becoming accustomed to my multiphonics I was rather distressed but went back to the drawing board to rediscover how to get some of my workhorse sounds back. I found after a bit of experimenting that all was not lost and most of my fingerings still worked with some moderate (and not so moderate) embouchure adjustments. I could get nearly all of my favourite multiphonics back, crisis averted, but it took a while to remember some of my less commonly used fingerings. I realized that I didn’t have a reference for all of my fingerings, a source I could refer back to in order to track all of the different multiphonics I had figured out. So I decided to make one.

If you are a woodwind player, which I assume you are if you’re reading this, you should check out Bret Pimentel’s blog. Bret is a woodwind doubler, performer, academic, and blogger extraordinaire whose website is a treasure trove of all things woodwind performance and pedagogy. One of my favourite parts of his website is the fingering diagram maker (demonstrated on the left), which allows woodwind players of nearly any instrument to make custom fingering diagrams for multiphonics, microtones, or just plain old alternate fingerings. I think this is an invaluable tool as anyone who explores extended techniques will discover that not every fingering works on every make and model or size of horn. I first worked out my multiphonic fingerings on alto and when I switched to soprano I found a number of fingerings did not transfer and I had to rebuild my “deck of cards” so to say. I’ve been using Bret’s fingering diagram maker to document all of the multiphonics and quarter tone fingerings that work on my particular instrument so that I can reference them as I compose and interpret music, you never know when you’re going to get a sheet asking for a sound and you might need a custom fingering for it. If you’re new to extended techniques on saxophone, or are wanting to brush up on these concepts you should check out Roland Caravan’s ‘Preliminary Exercises & Etudes In Contemporary Techniques for Saxophone’. I found out about this book from Sam Newsome’s blog and it is the best resource for extended techniques in my opinion. Other important resources for me have been Daniel Schnee’s multiphonic fingering chart, Johan Van Der Linden’s quarter tone fingering charts, and Mark Charette’s website.

If you have any favourite resources for extended saxophone techniques drop them in the comments and I’ll check them out, happy practicing!