4 Tips for Preventing Saxophone Playing Tension

Playing tension and physical tension is a common challenges when learning to play the saxophone. Let's talk about why this happens and how to work toward overcoming it.

Why is playing tension a problem when playing the saxophone?

As mentioned in our post on the top beginner saxophone tips, playing with a lot of tension can negatively affect your tone and technique and possibly cause playing injuries as well. When you're tense, you can't produce a good tone, you might squeak, you can't play notes as quickly, and you may not be able to take in as much air.

How to reduce playing tension on the saxophone

The good news is that you can easily work on and reduce playing tension with a three-pronged approach:

#1 Practice Awareness

Try to stay aware of your physical body while you're playing and look out for any spots where you may be feeling tension. Here are a few suggestions for where to focus your attention (these are common tension spots for saxophone players):

1. Keep your shoulders relaxed. When thinking about reducing tension in our hands, we often focus on relaxing our hands; however, the tension almost always starts in our shoulders. We have a piece of metal around our neck, and we're putting in a lot of effort, so our shoulders may automatically tense up. Then that tension travels down to our forearms, all the way down to the tips of our fingers. So start with your shoulders. Stretch. Be aware. Drop those shoulders.

2. Floppy hands - Flop your hands and arms - silly, but it helps! It allows your muscles to relax and can break the tension cycle. Kind of like a reset. I also find that doing this feels like it sends a message back to my brain that "hey, we're relaxed, not tense."

   
   

3. Also silly...but pretend you've been given a mild sedative in the face. Trust us- this is a good (and fun!) visualization to help relax our embouchure. We want our facial muscles as relaxed as possible while still being controlled enough to play. So just pretend that the muscles around your jaw are totally limp. Then increase muscle engagement until the note speaks. And watch out for the return of tension- don't let it happen.

TRY THIS FACIAL RELAXATION EXERCISE: Play a G long tone, and slowly relax your embouchure muscles until the note stops speaking and it’s just air. Then slow firm up your embouchure little by little until the note speaks again. Next, focus on playing G again with the most relaxed embouchure possible that still allows the note to speak.

#2 Proactively Prevent Playing Tension with a Few Stretches

Stretch your hands when you warm up. Preventing shoulder tension is step one, but let's give our other muscles some nice, stretchy relaxation too. Try extending one arm straight in front of you, palm out. With your other hand, grab your pointer and middle finger and gently pull them back until you can feel your forearm muscles stretching. Now repeat, but stretch your pinky and ring fingers back. Do the same with your thumb. To see these stretches in detail, you can check out our full set of warm-up stretches here.

#3 Integrate Tension Reduction Into Your Playing and Practicing

Keep your fingers curved and close to the keys, and use "gentle fingers." Even when you aren’t using some of the keys, keep your fingers curved and gently rested on the key pearl. That's right, even when some of your fingers aren't being used, they should rest on the keys. Also watch out for “flying pinkies.” Since we don’t use our pinkies for as many notes, they tend to stray from the keys more than our other fingers. Flying pinkies means it takes more effort to reach the keys when you need them, which means more tension.

Gentle fingers are exactly what they sound like - move your fingers and press the keys as gently as possible. Rigid, tense, "grippy" movement exacerbates playing tension.

Try using a mirror for this. Sometimes you think your fingers are close to the keys and being gentle, but the mirror will keep you honest.

These tips will do wonders for keeping you relaxed while you play, allowing you to sound better and play faster!

We hope you found this article about how to reduce and prevent saxophone playing tension to be helpful!

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