I stumbled upon the following saxophone mouthpiece exercise long before I really knew how to play the sax. Back when I was in high school, I needed some kind of trick to cover my butt when I was jamming with other musicians–typically rock bands in those days–and needed to disguise the fact that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. One evening at a kegger, having exhausted my meager bag of licks, I got the sudden inspiration to pull my mouthpiece off of my horn and play it by itself. The idea certainly commanded attention, captivating my listeners for a good five seconds, though I’m not sure it was the most musical extravaganza they had ever experienced.

Anyway, many years down the road, I still make occasional use of the sax mouthpiece exercise. I’m not sure what else to call it, other than screwing around with the mouthpiece making sounds like a goose gargling. But in all seriousness, I believe you can find some value in the technique, both as a creative tool and as a means of sensitizing your oral chamber for purposes of tone color and pitch control.

The exercise is simple: cup your hands together to form a sort of pouch, as in the first picture (click on it to enlarge it). Then blow into the mouthpiece. You can then “play” the piece by opening and closing one hand, as in the second photo. The result is a sort of demented warble that sounds like some kind of marshland bird on an acid trip.

Them’s the basics, but of course, you’ll want to experiment. You can actually control the pitch with your hand, and you’ll also want to see what kinds of sounds and pitch-bending you can do by adjusting your embouchure. The point is to explore the colors you can generate using just your mouthpiece, your hands, and your embouchure and air column. You can get some surprisingly expressive effects. In my “Eyes on Mars” album with Ric Troll, I performed an entire piece using this technique. Is it music? I guess that depends on your philosophy of music, and frankly, I wasn’t thinking about the question at the time. I was just having fun trying something different and creative. You know–being a kid.

Give the saxophone mouthpiece exercise a try and see what you think. And check out my jazz page for more tips, technical exercises, and solo transcriptions to keep you occupied.