Sax Attacks: D & T

Following up from my previous post on the "E" throat position, I'd now like to share with you my thoughts on attacking the reed.

By "attack", I mean creating a separation between a given note and the note(s) immediately before it (or, if it's the first note you play, between silence and the start of that note).

I've gotten the best results in my and my students' playing by thinking of just two consonant sounds* to encapsulate almost all of the attacks you will find in jazz:

D ('dee") for an un-accented note and
T ("tee") for an accented note

*there are, of course, a variety of ways to attack or otherwise start a sound on the saxophone: double-tonguing, slap tonguing, and a lot of innovations you'll find in contemporary Classical saxophone, Avant-garde music, and "beatbox" style (see: Derek Brown), but for the most part D and T are sufficient when dealing with classic jazz and bebop

​In the chart above, you see the many ways that humans can speak sounds.

In speech, D and T are referred to as the Alveolar Plosives. This means that these consonant sounds are made by touching the blade of the tongue (the part of the tongue just shy of the tip) against the alveolar ridge. See below for the anatomy:

Applied to saxophone playing, these D and T attacks are great because they use the least amount of distance between the tongue and the reed, and they cause the least amount of change from the ideal "E" tongue shape.

You can see below that the throat and body of the tongue remain even and open as the tip of the tongue moves to achieve the D and T consonant sounds:

Applied to learning jazz, I highly recommend using these sounds to "verbalize" (scat) your lines as part of your practice, and to think them when tonguing the reed.

In my next post...
I will be discussing how the D attack mixed with the sound N (to ghost notes) can get you playing with a more authentic jazz articulation style.

If you have any thoughts you'd like to share on saxophone tonguing, please feel free to respond to this email. Thanks for reading and stay tuned!

Jake