2025 Saxophone Goals

In the simplest form my goal for improving my saxophone this year is to touch my saxophone every single day. In Atomic Habits by James Clear, he writes that habits are more important to goals. Establishing small consistent habits will lead to life changing goals. So I am developing the habit of consistently playing my saxophone everyday, even if that only means for a brief few minutes.

Specifically I want to improve on a couple of things throughout the year. First, I want to improve my tuning throughout the range of the saxophone. Pitch has always been a struggle for me. In my daily practice I will work with long tones and tuner to improve this area of my playing. Second, I want to specifically improve my improvisation ability. This will involve practice in a few areas. One, theory, being able to identify chords more fluently and being able to play appropriate arpeggios and modes over those chords needs improvement. Two, I will focus more on playing those chords and modes in other variations such as thirds and fourths, etc. Finally I want to work on hand/finger technique. Using proper chromatic fingering is imperative. Over time I have developed some bad habits and tendencies that should be improve, specifically my tendency to overuse bisc Bb.

As with many things some of the skills overlap with each other. But I believe with a consistent habit of working on these things daily I can significantly improve my saxophone playing ability. What things are you hoping to improve on this year?