From: www.Hellosaxophone.com
Chromatic scale instructions for the saxophone
And we are going on with another exercise. This a quite a tough one. It's probably going to take you a while to do this,. but it's the most important exercise I think you'll ever do on the sax. You see, it's very useful at this point to start to develop a good mental picture of the saxophone in your head. When you look at the saxophone you probably still feel some confusion as to:" which notes are located where". When you look at a piano. You can see all the notes neatly lined up next to each other form low to high. On the saxophone this isn't so easy, because you can't see the order of the notes on the saxophone with your eyes. If I was to say to you:" Play an F, and now play the note that's 6 notes above that". If you were playing piano you could just count up 6 keys and you would have found it, but that's not so easy on the saxophone. If you can create the ability to see the order of all the saxophone notes in your head, then you make things much easier for yourself in the long run. So we are going to have to create a good mental image of the saxophone notes, and using this you are going to get all the notes into your fingers.
How do we do this? Well, I also hit this problem of course, and it's the reason why I ended up creating the piano chart. What it does is quite simple. It shows you the order of the saxophones notes exactly as on a piano.
Now all you have to do for this exercise is play all of them. Like a scale. From the lowest note (the Bb3) all the way up to the C#6. Feel free to try and go up even higher if you can, but it's ok to save that for a little later.
Once you have done this for a while (2 weeks or so) you will start to find that you begin to see the saxophone as a whole in your mind. You will be able to locate every note easily and you will be able to count up and down the range. It's the foundation for everything else. So take all the time you need to practice this until you can play it and name the notes almost without thinking about it.
Now I will go into this more later, but while you're doing this exercise realize and remember one thing. The white notes on the piano chart are the "whole" notes and the black notes are the "half" notes. This will become important later so keep it in mind while you practice.
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