Playing any woodwind instrument takes time, patience and a lot of practice. If you are working on learning saxophone, there are some fantastic apps that can help you achieve your goals a whole lot faster.
In this article, we are going to tell you about some of our favourite saxophone apps that can help improve your technique.
Whether you’re a beginner learning saxophone fingerings for the first time or an advanced jazz player looking to improve your transcribing skills, read on for a selection of the best saxophone apps to incorporate into your practice sessions.
Improving Your Saxophone Fingering
Finger placement is just as important as breath control when playing the saxophone. But for a beginner saxophone player – especially when trying to play a chart with quick chord changes or odd fingering – it can prove challenging to remember every finger placement.
Fingering is a saxophone app that helps overcome this problem by focusing on finger placement training. It covers several woodwind instruments, but it is particularly popular with alto saxophone, tenor sax and soprano players.
The detailed saxophone fingering chart will get you up to speed with the fingerings needed for major and minor intervals and will also help you with major and minor third fingerings. It also provides you with a library full of alternative fingerings so you can experiment and choose something that better suits your style.
The app also has a lot of visual guides about where the notes are located on the saxophone, making it easier for visual learners to memorise the instrument’s structure.
Reframe
Reframe is an app that works a lot like a photo editor for audio tracks and allows you to ‘reframe’ them.
With this app, you can upload any audio track that contains saxophone and then modify different parameters to help you focus on the sound of the sax.
For instance, if you want to remove all the vocals from a track so you can focus on the tenor saxophone, you can do that in Reframe.
If you want to mute a certain instrument, that can also be done. In fact, you can remove everything from a track aside from the saxophone solo to get a better picture of that section in the track.
This is a helpful feature for beginner sax players looking to transcribe by ear.
When you play a track in the app, it will slice it into the different layers/instruments and gives you the option to mute, edit, isolate and crop.
It also comes with a number of preset options such as ‘solo brass’ or ‘remove vocals.’ With Reframe, you can quickly learn to play your favourite saxophone solos.
Saxophone All-in-One
This saxophone app is an excellent choice for any saxophonist, regardless of skill level.
Saxophone All-in-One gives you a comprehensive range of features, including blues scales, minor and major scales, practice routines, transposing capabilities, and much more.
It is worth noting that when it comes to transposing, this app only works for alto sax.
It has tutorials that are great for complete beginners and advanced guides and features for more experienced players. You can also use this app as a reference to help you check scales and fingering positions.
If you are looking for an app that offers a bit of everything and works for both basic and advanced level concepts, this is the one for you!
Anytime Pro+
Anytime Pro+ gives you a few unique features like being able to manipulate pitch and tempo independently of each other. It’s an excellent app for those who practice by ear or want to transcribe a standard or solo.
With a simple tap, you can increase or decrease the tempo of the sax and adjust the pitch by two-octave (24 semitones) shifts.
If you’re learning to improvise with a backing track this app is very useful for practising the tune in all 12 keys and different tempos.
The interface is easy to navigate and visually represents the audio quite well. When you upload a song into the app, it is represented in the waveform so you can easily identify the section that you want to work on rather than having to scroll through the entire song and remember specific times.
With your sections identified, you can also place markers to highlight a chorus or solo. Additionally, you can create a loop between the markers to practice that section on repeat. All these features combined make this an excellent app for music students who prefers to learn by ear.
Tuner and Metronome
Every player needs a tuner and metronome. This app contains both along with recording capabilities so you can listen back to your practice session and make sure you’re in tune and in time.
What makes this app stand out from the other tuners and metronomes is the user-friendly interface.
It’s very easy to use, and everything is conveniently displayed on the main screen. You can toggle the metronome, access the tuner and make a recording of your playing all from the main window.
Another feature of this app that makes it stand out is the visual beats section. If you are practising without headphones or are in a noisy environment and can’t hear the metronome, this feature will represent the tempo visually.
The flashlight of your camera becomes the metronome and flashes on and off to the tempo of the song.
It also has additional features that you can install through in-app purchases.
ForScore
This is an app for iOS users and is a great way to organize your sheet music and keep track of what you’re working on.
You can import PDF files, or you can connect the app to a cloud service and access your sheet music from there.
It gives you the ability to organize your sheets in different categories. You can have them sorted according to genre, composer, period, or other classifications. You can also add notes and markings to the scores and personalise them in any way you want.
If you want to send an edited score to a friend or store it on another device, you can share it through Bluetooth and the cloud storage options.
It isn’t the cheapest saxophone app out there but considering all the features it offers, its $9.99 price tag (at the time of publishing) is quite modest.
The apps here help break down the different parts of your saxophone practice and simplify the process behind each task. Most of the main features are available for free, but if you want to pay for the additional services, it can be well worth the investment.
Thanks for reading!
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