The other day I mentioned an article written by Sue Terry, in which she likens sound to light. Just as light is made up of multiple colours that can be split apart and seen through a prism, so too is a specific tone comprised of multiple frequencies that blend together. Taken in their entirety, these sound frequencies are what are known as the overtone series.¹
When saxophone players talk about tone—oftentimes because they want to improve theirs—they may not be aware that there are actually multiple aspects of it. Over the years I’ve read all kinds of different names for these 3 aspects of tone, but I’ve found that the names that Sue Terry² uses are easy to remember, and work quite well. She uses the terms: main tone, shadow tone, and overtones.
Illustration by: H. Kahlke
The main tone is what we hear the most of. It really forms the core of our saxophone’s sound. The emphasis on this core sound was fashionable for years, and certain players, such as Paul Desmond, had a very solid core sound, with very little of either overtones or shadow tones. To achieve this type of sound, players would use a mouthpiece piece with a closed tip, and a hard reed.
The shadow tone is really just a very plain echo of this core sound. When I was in junior high, my first private teacher had me practice listening to my tone by having me play against a wall. This is the best way to hear your shadow tone. I still use that technique today—some 30 years later—and I still find myself hearing new things sometimes in my tone, that I haven’t heard before.
As Terry³ points out, don’t be surprised if you notice that your shadow tone seems to change in pitch to your main tone. Depending what kind of saxophone you are playing, the direction of the air changes as it follows the curves of the instrument. This can result in the shadow tone being more than a whole tone different than your main tone, depending on what notes you are playing.
The easiest way to hear your overtones, is to stand against a wall and play, just as you would to hear your shadow tone. If you’ve never heard an overtone before in your playing, the easiest one to hear comes from playing low Bb. Stand against the wall and blow a low Bb. Depending on how good your ear is, you should year the F, an octave and a fifth above the low Bb. In the on-line sax community, this note is commonly referred to as F2.
A tone rich in overtones is a more modern sound. David Sanborn is good example of a player who has many overtones in his tone. To achieve this type of sound, players would use a mouthpiece with an open tip, and soft reeds.
This was really the introduction for a multi-part series on saxophone tone, that I’ll be writing over the next little while.
In part 2 we’ll take a look at where these 3 aspects (main tone, shadow tone, overtones) of a saxophone’s sound come from, and how to work towards changing one’s tone.
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Coincidentally, we are having a similar discussion on SOTW:
http://forum.saxontheweb.net/showthread.php?133869-Tones-and-harmonics-overtones&p=1386100#post1386100
Thanks Helen! Great post. I was familiar with the main tone and overtones, but hadn’t heard ‘shadow tones’ so much. Would ‘shadow tone’ be the same as subtone?
Hi Neal.
Actually, shadow tone and the subtone are very different animals. In Sue Terry’s article, Performance: The Secret Of A Good Woodwind Sound, she writes this about the shadow tone:
This idea of a shadow tone was really difficult for me to get my head around, when I first started trying playing against a wall in junior high. I really had no idea what I should be listening for. My instructor did not have as clear a description as Terry uses.
Stop it. It’s too early in the AM to think like this. You’re making my head hurt. 😉 (See attached pic.)
Seriously though, thanks Mal-2 for this well thought out comment. You’ve covered some of what I was going to in my article about overtones.
Within the general heading of “overtones”, there is also a distinction between low overtones (of which your twelfth is the second — generally this includes partials two through six, or overtones one through five) and high overtones (everything above that). Low overtones, unless they are out of balance, tend to add “complexity” to the sound, especially since they do not all have the same attack profile as the core sound, they build somewhat more slowly except when the attack of the note is abrupt. In that case they can actually reach full power (or overshoot full power and come back down) BEFORE the core tone, which helps with the crispness of the attack. The softer the attack, the more the overtones sort of slide into place after the core has set up shop.
The high partials are more difficult to relate to the core sound, and usually come across as “brightness”, or maybe as “sparkle”. They are still harmonically related, but the ear does not necessarily perceive them that way. It is these partials that the closed tip and hard reed players of the past were relatively lacking.
If you were to take a sound spectrum of Desmond’s sound, you’d find that the first and second overtones are actually quite prominent in his sound. The first overtone may actually be stronger than the fundamental. The reason they don’t “stick out” is that the nervous system quickly and accurately assesses these as overtones and links them to the fundamental in a coherent way. This does not always happen with the higher overtones (particularly the sixth, eighth, and tenth, which sound “out of tune” compared to 12-TET).
Note that I consider the fundamental to be the first partial, but the octave to be the first harmonic (and second partial). Thus there is always one degree difference between a partial and an overtone. The third partial is the second overtone, the fifth partial is the fourth overtone, etc. I am much more accustomed to thinking in terms of partials rather than overtones, so if I screw up the conversions it’s my own fault.