Practice This!
December 2008

Neil Welch is a Seattle-area saxophonist and educator who has recently released his debut recording, Narmada. In this installment of Practice This! he discusses how musicians can explore and expand their sound palettes.

Music is a beautiful, empty canvas, a vacant space that must be carefully and tactfully introduced with the color of sound. As improvisers and musicians, we explore a wide variety of colors I call the “sound palette.” The sound palette can be viewed simply as an approach to making music—it is our tone, inflection, use of space, articulation, etc. Given the aural and textural possibilities at our disposal, most jazz musicians explore sound in a very confined context, and therefore, our challenge here is to re-examine the sound palette in a new way.

Consider “sound” in a broader context, free of genre, the notion of good or bad, consonance or dissonance. The masters of improvised music, jazz or otherwise, carry with them a deep sense of musical and aesthetic color that many of us never scratch the surface of: the place where sound becomes more than a lick or phrase and transcends into something deeper. If we can step back and view our music in this larger context, we can begin to sculpt our sound as a new language with a new set of rules, nuances, and syllables, full of new possibilities. You will find that specific physical techniques – articulation, mouthpiece placement, finger and embouchure movement can become completely foreign. What a new and liberating feeling!

As a daily exercise, take your instrument and create sounds you have never produced before—even for the jazz novice, this can be enlightening. Amplify gentle key clacking on your instrument, or scream through your horn while playing any pitch or lick. Plug into a loop station, distortion or delay pedals. Hum against any fingered pitch to create harmony, both consonant and dissonant, or try over-blowing the instrument while varying different articulation techniques. Exploration and an unbiased ego are the key. Finally, ignite this new musical world by researching the masters of sound exploration and transcribe their techniques. Exploring the full range of the sound palette will help you define or even break down the barriers of your own music making and help you create a deep and personal sound.