sax lessons : Volume II

well!

apart from today's earlier excitement posted about here
(I've got another saxophone - I think I'm mad)
I had a lesson today - tootled down to North Greenwich for around 12ish. It takes a little less than an hour to get all the way from Harrow-on-the-Hill, which is quite impressive really.

My tone's got better since last time - but there's still a l--o--n--g & winding road left. Our experimentations yield the following golden thoughts;

• my throat's tight & it doesn't want to be!
• my embouchure's too rOundly OO shaped... going back to the german kitchen then.
• need to let my teeth bite down more & let my lip cover it, not flop out like a beak.
• the column of air needs to march out evenly and fill up from the bottom & squirt out from the top down. Methinks more diapragging needs doing.
• if I don't think about it, it sounds better!

so, not going to run out of things to work on then...

I went down bearing a bottle of merlot & a couple of mini-pizzas, so we had lunch post-lesson, then Sophie went off to TCM for her arrangement class & I wended my way back up to Harrow! She's just got into the semi-final of the TCM concerto competition - which is pretty much the main TCM competition each year, so that's great!
:)

what have I done?

I just ordered a Trevor James tenor saxophone!

I must be bonkers!

I can't believe it, even if it was on special offer (like, half previous price!)

I'm mad - they're coming to take me away - but I'm really into the sax thing, and I really want to play the sax well.

Maybe it's the wine I took over to Sophie's as payment-in-kind for today's lesson?
but we only had a couple of glasses of it...

Maybe it's the fact that when I rung saxophones.co.uk the guy they put me through to was Jim Cheek - who was an oboe-player in NYOS & Camerata while I was there (moments of reminiscance over the phone going on!)?

Maybe I'm just utterly insane and need someone to bash me over the head with a large lettuce?

who knows... I've got ANOTHER saxophone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
how excited am I - all I want to do now is go and play Mr. Socks (my little Yani to you) and get better at playing him so that together we can welcome the new honk-machine into the house on Wednesday by UPS
heee heee heeeeeee!
lucky, bonkers, meeeee!