A sax from zero.
A synthesised reed you can play with six fingers and a keyboard, and the things a first lesson actually starts with — wetting the reed, the shape of the mouth, and the air.
96 BPM
Read this first
This is a synthesised approximation.
Everything you hear on this page is made by an oscillator in your browser. It is not a recording of a saxophone and it is not a saxophone. It exists so you can learn the shape of the instrument — which finger makes which note, how the notes sit next to each other, how a phrase in five feels — before a horn is anywhere near you.
What it cannot teach is tone. Tone comes out of a reed vibrating against a mouthpiece inside your own mouth, and no synthesis substitutes for that. The written lesson below is real and is worth doing with a real instrument; a reed, a horn and a teacher are how you actually learn to play.
01 — Before any notes
The reed.
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01
Wet it first. Put the reed in your mouth for thirty to sixty seconds before you do anything else. A dry reed will not vibrate properly, and no amount of blowing fixes that.
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02
Flat side to the flat table. The mouthpiece has a flat face — the table. The flat side of the reed goes against it.
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03
Line up the tips. The tip of the reed sits level with the tip of the mouthpiece. Not proud of it, not buried behind it.
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04
The ligature holds it there. Tighten it just enough that the reed cannot shift. Tighter than that is not better.
02 — How the mouth holds the mouthpiece
Embouchure.
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01
Bottom lip rolls slightly over the bottom teeth, so it cushions the reed. A little. Not swallowed.
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02
Top teeth rest directly on top of the mouthpiece. They sit on it; they do not bite it.
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03
Corners draw inward, like a drawstring — not outward into a smile.
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04
Chin flat and pointed downward, rather than bunched up.
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05
Roughly 1 to 1.5 cm of mouthpiece goes into your mouth. That is the whole amount.
03 — The thing that actually makes the sound
Air.
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01
Breathe from the belly, not the shoulders. If your shoulders rise, the breath is too high to be any use.
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02
Blow a steady, fast, warm stream. Think “hoo”, not a pinched hiss.
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03
Start each note with the tongue. Touch the tip of the reed lightly with the tip of your tongue and release, as if saying “tah” or “doo”.
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04
Stopping the air ends the note — not stopping the tongue.
A first sound before a first note
Play the mouthpiece on its own, with no horn attached. A steady, focused pitch means the embouchure is working. A squeak, or a thin airy sound, means too much or too little mouthpiece in your mouth, or a bottom lip that is too loose.
04 — The first six notes
Play it.
The saxophone has three main pearl keys under the left hand and three under the right. These six fingerings are identical on alto and tenor. Hold a key down and the note holds; let go and it stops, because on a real horn the note ends when the air does.
Click and hold, or hold the letter key on your keyboard. Sound is off until you do.
The left thumb rests on the thumb rest. The octave key sits beside it, and raises whatever you are fingering by an octave.
05 — Your first phrase
Five beats, three notes.
One note per beat, grouped three then two — the grouping this whole site is about. It uses only the three left-hand notes you already have. It runs on the same clock as the ring in the corner, so it lands where the ring says it lands.
Sound is off. The bar above still shows the phrase.
This phrase was written for this page. Every phrase on this site is original.
Two caveats.
The saxophone is a transposing instrument
The note names you finger are not the concert pitches anyone else hears. On an alto, which is in E♭, a written C sounds as concert E♭. On a tenor, which is in B♭, a written C sounds as concert B♭. So “play a G” means a written G, and what comes out of the bell is a different note from a pianist’s G. This page sounds the written names directly, because it is teaching fingerings, not pitch.
On the famous one
The best-known saxophone piece in 5/4 is Take Five. It is not quoted, transcribed, approximated or evoked anywhere on this page, in the phrase above or in any preset. Nothing here is derived from it.
What is making the sound
The patch.
A reed is rich in harmonics, has a formant character, breathes, and wobbles a little once a note has settled. Each row below is read out of the object the synth actually builds every note from — it is the graph, not a description of one.
- Oscillators
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- Lowpass, tracking the breath
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- Formants
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- Vibrato
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- Breath noise
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- Attack / release
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- Attack scoop
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No samples, no recordings, no external audio of any kind. If it sounds like a saxophone, that is the formant pair doing the work; if it does not, that is the honest limit of six oscillator nodes.