do you ever feel like there's so much stuff to learn on the saxophone and you just don't know where to start do you ever feel like you've got so many things you want to practice but don't have the time to get it all done in this video I'm gonna show you a really important strategy to help you manage your practice sessions so you can get more accomplished with the same amount of practice time my name is Jay Metcalf and on this channel I post videos to help you become a better sax player so if you're
new here consider subscribing everyone knows that the key to getting better at playing saxophone is practice but not everyone knows exactly what they should be practicing or perhaps more importantly how they should be practicing if you follow the three tips I'm about to share with you you will see a huge difference in the amount you can get accomplished with the same amount of practice time tip number one organize your practice session I tell my students to break their practice sessions up into three parts the first part is the warm-up in the warm-up you want to
focus on your fundamentals the things that are important no matter what kind of music you're playing this includes tone sound exercises long tones stuff like that this also includes scales arpeggios and other technical exercises you want to be spending about 25 to 30 percent of your total practice session on the warm up the next section is where you work on new material that you cannot yet play well this could be an a2 that you're working on this could be learning the melody to a new song this could be how to improvise over a set of
coin shade chord changes it could be really anything but it needs to be challenging it needs to be something that you're unfamiliar with yet and you're working towards this section you want to spend about 40 to 50 percent of your total practice time the third section is where you play for fun and just the enjoyment of playing the saxophone it should be about twenty to thirty percent of the time you're playing here you want to relax and just focus on making music but at the same time incorporate the elements of the the new material you
worked on in the middle part of your practice session as well as always keeping in the back of your mind the fundamentals that you focused on in the first section the warmup the reason we limit ourselves to just 20 or 30 percent of having fun is we wanna the majority of our practice time to go towards improvement this will make the last 20 to 30 percent feel sort of like a reward but it's going to be even more of a reward each time as you're improving and you sound better a good idea in this section
is to record yourself so over time you can see some progress and hear the progress and how much you're improving from one session to the next tip number two is have a plan just like any other activity having a plan for your practice session before you start is going to help you get more done and get better results the best way to formulate a plan is to ask yourself what are your long-term goals on the saxophone what do you want to learn how to play or - this could be something specific like learning to play
the melody - take five [Music] or something more broad in general like learning how to improvise over a 12 bar blues choose a specific goal or two and write it down somewhere next you're gonna want to break that goal up into mini goals smaller goals that you can accomplish in one practice session or maybe in a week of practice sessions in my place acts by your course we do exactly that we take a large goal and we break it up into six small lessons that you go through one per day tip number three is consistency
the most important thing you could do to get better at playing the saxophone is to play every day it doesn't have to be for hours and hours but just getting the saxophone out putting it in your mouth and playing for 30 minutes or more every day is going to make an enormous difference try using the tips I'm giving you here and applying it to a practice session every day for a week if you've ever tried starting to go to the gym and went every day for a week you may have noticed that at the end
of the week you're just feeling really sore but you haven't actually lost any weight this can be troublesome for your motivation to get back in the gym and a lot of people stop the good example of that a lot of people stop exercising because they're not seeing the results they were hoping for I can tell you with confidence that practicing the saxophone every day even for a week you're gonna start seeing some noticeable improvement and this is gonna go a long way for getting you motivated to continue now turn that week into a month turn
that month into a year and more and then you're really on to something if you follow these three tips that I've outlined for you I promise that you will get more done with each practice session and you will see faster progress over time now if you'd like some ideas on what to practice head over to better sax comm where there's tons of resources for getting better at playing saxophone I recommend my free play sax by ear course as a great place to start if you got some value out of this video please click the like
button and if you haven't done so already consider subscribing to my channel my question for the day for you all is how long do your practice sessions last typically and how many days a week do you practice let me know in the comments below [Music] [Music]
