Vibrato

Vibrato is one of the most important aspect of a saxophone player's skills and technique. If you've listened to many saxophone players, each player, has a different style of vibrato that he she incorporates into their own style of playing.

Quick Note
By following this lesson, you will learn the basic mechanics of achieving a vibrato. This vibrato is not meant to be used in actual songs (Unless you want to sound like a robot!) You will notice the vibrato I use in my "Lover Man" example is a lot different then the mechanical vibrato I use in step 7. To fully how to use vibrato; when to use vibrato, and what style of vibrato to use is a different topic all together and will be covered under the "exercise" portion.

Let's get to the basics. What IS vibrato?

If you a person who listens to music, you've probably noticed in a singer's voice there is fast oscillation of pitch. This is a vibrato, the quick fluxuation in the pitch of an tone.

Take for example a simple sine graph. If you imagine this to be a graph of your pitch, you can see that the pitch oscillates between a lower and higher pitch. This is vibrato.

Here's a audio example of me playing "Lover Man".



You're probably thinking "Well, that's all fine and dandy, but how do I do vibrato?"

Vibrato on the saxophone can be achieved in primarily two different ways. The most common, jaw vibrato, and the less common, diagram vibrato. In this lesson, I will cover how to achieve a vibrato through jaw vibrato.

Because vibrato is the oscillation, or the change in pitch, we first have to be able to learn how to bend our pitches. Check out the bends lesson if you haven't already. If you are already comfortable with you bends, please proceed.

The first thing I'm going to have you do is put on a metronome and set it to 50 BPM (beats per minute). If you don't have a metronome, you can use an online one here http://www.metronomeonline.com/

IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU DO THIS WITH A METRONOME!

1) Once you have your metronome ready, go ahead and play a 'G' above the staff on the saxophone. A 'C' works too if you're more comfortable with that note.

2) Next, for every down beat of the metronome, bend the pitch downward to as low as comfortable. For the following pitch, bend the note back up and past the original pitch, so the pitch will be a bit sharp. Look at the above graph for a visualization. It will sound like this.



3) Make sure your bends are in time and consistent. We want every single bend to sound consistent with the last bend. We don't want your vibrato to sound all over the place!

4) Once you feel comfortable with 50 BPM, go ahead and crank up the metronome to 60 BPM. Once you feel comfortable with 60 BPM, go on to 70 BPM and so on and so forth.

5) Once you get up to 120 BPM, drop back down to 60 BPM. This time, for each beat of the metronome, you will bend down and come up. So, for the first 8th note, you will bend it down, the next 8th note, you will bring it up. Thus, the vibrato will be 2x faster.



6) Continue doing the 8th note vibrato pattern until you get back up to 120 BPM. Make sure the vibrato is consistent and precise!



7) After you comfortable doing it at 120 with 8th notes, take it back down to 80 and try doing triplets or 16th notes. Here's an example at 80 BPM with 16th notes.