We have a lad at school playing the Alto Sax - it is VERY, VERY loud. How does one solve this? His teacher, though very good, teaches all the woodwind instruments and sax is not her 1st instrument. He is about Grade 1 standard and practices regularly. He is using a 1½ reed.

Saxes are loud, and it takes quite a bit of experience to be able to control the airflow to play quietly, with a nice tone and in tune, a harder reed will help. But, to be honest, at this level I think you might just have to live with it - playing loud is good to get the air support developing properly and if you start asking him to play quietly this might suffer, the temptation is to slow the air flow down then the note starts to fail, so you bite to support it, play sharp and get into all kinds of bad habits.

... entirely. Might be worth letting him know that he can aim to play more quietly as time goes on ... but the risk is that this will make him v self-conscious!

Nick

Thanks for that; it was just that the volume and uncontrolled sound was one of the reasons he failed Grade 1 a few weeks ago. The examiner was VERY clear on that!

There will be exercises he can do to learn control more rapidly, especially if he practises regularly (e.g. simple crescendo/decrescendo on long notes. Or just long notes!). If he isn't concentrating on this, he'll never get better, so he might as well put the effort in. Getting a nice loud clear tone is some sort of success - now he just has to learn to control it!

nick