Warming up is an essential part of many activities in life. In sports, you need to play slowly and controlled to begin your practice. In working out, you need to stretch before to loosen your body up. If you want to learn to play saxophone, you can start with warm ups that are called “long tone” exercises. We play long notes and focus on creating sound with good quality and intonation. These are best warm-ups for woodwinds (and probably ANY wind instrument). Long tones are typically scale or interval based. Some of my favorite long tones utilize different scales like the major scale and chromatic scale. Other kinds of long tones utilize intervals like octaves or 5ths, or both!

Below is the Chapter One warm-up from my book, Beginning Saxophone—Everything and More You Need In The First Year Of Playing. This is the first warm up exercise introduced and this is at the most basic level. Additionally, there are articulation exercises at two different speeds. Notice how we use the first few notes of the G Major scale. Feel free to download and practice!

For something more advanced, you can utilize a one octave, full range, or the chromatic scale to play a slur long tone warm-up like the one below. Notice the fermata and slur as you change notes. Each note is held out for one entire breath (or close to it), then breathe, articulate the same note and slur up to the next note. The same is done as you descend back down the scale. This is one of my favorite exercises for long tones! I typically do this utilizing the full range chromatic scale ascending and descending from low Bb to high F#. Feel free to download and practice this one as well.

For more warm-up exercises and a complete beginning saxophone method you can purchase my book online by visiting the website HERE. If you are interested in private saxophone lessons I am teaching online via Zoom for the remainder of the year. I hope to resume teaching at my private music lesson studios in Mountain View and Cupertino soon! Good luck practicing and let me know if you have any questions using the contact page. Until next time!