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Look out Boots, here I come!

PostPosted: Wed May 15, 2019 5:23 pm
by Doug Working
I finally did it! After months of letting that saxophone sit in the corner of my room, I finally took the plunge and began to learn how to play the durn thing.

Actually, I have excuses, because I ran into all sorts of obstacles. I didn't have reeds. The one that was in it is chewed up. Didn't have cork grease. Didn't have a lanyard. And to top it all off, I didn't know where the heck to even start! I wanted to know the very basics of how to hold it, how to set it up, etc. I didn't want to start off on the wrong foot developing incorrect habits from the get-go.

So after all these months, I now have all accessories, and I found a beginner's video on Y'tube, and yesterday I actually blew a note! Ta-da! Sounded like a sick moose in heat, but hey...at least it was a note.

Mom was holding her ears. She said how awful it sounds. I was like "Mom! What do you expect for the first day???" There's not a room in the house where I can close the door and blow away, and the god awful noise seeps right through the walls, so I guess my last option is to go out and sit in the car to practice. (With the windows closed, so as not to give the neighbors a treat. They'll hear me someday when I am on stage and world famous, yuk, yuk.)

Anyway, I give myself three to five years before I can play halfway decent. That sounds about reasonable.

In the meantime, Boots has nothing to worry about.

Re: Look out Boots, here I come!

PostPosted: Tue Jun 04, 2019 5:23 pm
by Doug Working
I am making slooooooooow progress on this instrument. Turtle slow. But that's ok. There was a time when I couldn't hit a single note on the guitar. persistence....ahhhhhhhhhhh, persistence! My greatest friend and companion in life!

But I'm trying to figure out the very basics, of course. I discovered something that I'm trying to make heads or tails of. I've been getting my "sax education" classes on Y'tube. So the first three notes the guy teaches are B, A, G. Weird thing was when I juxtaposed the recording of the guy teaching, what he said was "B" turns out to be D on my guitar. "A" is a C, and "G" is a B flat.

So now I got to figure out what causes the discrepancy.

And my guitar is perfectly in tune, and I'm going to assume the same for his sax.

Oh well. Back to the ol' drawing board.