I always liked the idea of playing the saxophone and the national lockdown of 2020 meant I had an increased amount of spare time, so I thought why not – lets order a saxophone online and give it a go!
Getting started in a remote world presented some challenges. I was fortunate to find a great teacher who offered online saxophone lessons on Zoom, but meeting other musicians to play together was clearly going to be off the cards for a while.
Music technology proved to be a helpful stop-gap
I started by using karaoke backing tracks. There’s a vast selection on YouTube with the vocals removed so I simply replaced them with the saxophone. There are also ‘acoustic’ versions of karaoke tracks, such as piano-only versions. This was an easy way to get started, I’d simply run the karaoke backing and play my saxophone with the sheet music.
My teacher introduced me to an app called iRealPro. This was a helpful progression as it opened up a whole bunch of new options. On the app, there are plenty of chord charts you can download, or you can create your own. But crucially, you can adjust the balance of the instruments to tweak the backing to your liking. I used iRealPro extensively for my first Christmas playing the saxophone, which included “Last Christmas” and the Spanton family favourite “Walking in the Air”.
Before I started playing the saxophone I’d played a bit of piano on a Yamaha P-45. This gave me the confidence to try using GarageBand, a fully featured musical app. I owned a keyboard and an iPad with GarageBand, all I was missing was a £10 cable to connect the two! This brought a new level of personalisation for my backing music as I could now record the piano and fully create my own multi-layered music. This is actually easier than it first seems as GarageBand enables you to record at a reduced speed and then the quantisation feature automatically aligns everything to the beat (essentially magnifying my otherwise relatively basic keyboard skills).
I publish my recordings on YouTube, which could be anything from a simple chord loop for ‘Believer’ by Imagine Dragons, to a modern take on a classical piece such as ‘Prelude in C Minor’ by Bach (I think Bach would have totally loved a saxophone and 808 beats if they’d been around back then!) – all of which are created using GarageBand!
I discovered Sax Bandits in 2023, and it’s been great to finally be able to play with other musicians – in particular my first gig at BunkFest in September. In between rehearsals and gigs, I still use GarageBand plenty to make my own backing tracks and I still enjoy playing along to a karaoke backing to de-stress after a busy day at work. This pocket-sized music technology is easily accessible and allows me to take my own band with me when I’m not playing with other musicians in person.
Excellent and well done you, lots of great tips here. If only Bach could time travel and see what’s available now.
This is a great blog post John and I’ll definitely look up GarageBand. It’s so interesting to share stories of our Sax journeys, particularly when we approach from different directions. We can all learn so much from each other.