Brass instruments have always appealed to me. Okay, the sax is a kind of brass woodwind thing, as opposed to a full on brass instrument like a trumpet, but King Crimson were initially responsible for inspiring me to play one.
Then there were various jazz bands, like Galapagos Duck, an OZ band from the days when the music business allowed such things. And then finally along came Frank Zappa with sax all over the place.
There had been a short dalliance with an alto sax back in 1976, see my bio, but I finally bought another in December 2009. I learnt to play Eat That Question within three weeks, so the first video I ever put up on YouTube, was a document of that. Then, after another three and a half weeks, I was playing the sax melody of We Are Not Alone. It was played in real time, as a one take video along with a guitar track that was recorded earlier that day.
Within a few months of the second video I started getting really ill and couldn't play sax any more. I ended up in hospital three times for significant proportions of 2010. I tried getting back to it afterwards but it kept giving me migraines, so I gave up. In April 2018, I started playing the alto sax regularly - and, I'm happy to say, it's not causing migraines any more - although I still get one every few weeks or so, regardless of what I do.
Soon after starting alto sax again I got myself a bari sax, to get the notes one octave below - it goes down to A3, which is C2 in actual pitch, a major third below the bottom of a standard six string guitar (I use the standard where middle C is C4 which, on a guitar, is notated for the third fret of the A string, but again, the guitar transposes and its actual pitch is C3 - an octave lower). The alto only goes down to B♭3 with actual pitch D♭3 (which, on the guitar, is notated as D♭4 and played at the fourth fret of the A string), but since the orignal design of the saxophone, it was found relatively easy to engineer the extra note on the large bari sax.
What used to be in the YouTube band section were songs that contained lots of examples of my sax playing, but they have been taken down because the final versions are now on my album Delusions Of Grandeur. Lot's of sax playing on that album. In the Zappa Covers section, Holiday In Berlin, where the bari sax plays the entire piece as its backbone, as it does in Duodenum, another example.
Below is a recording I produced in the lead up to Moo-Ah! 2026 and a video of me practising the bari sax section of my composition Antelope Tweeds. There's a few years between the two and a definite improvement in my playing. Things keep moving forward.
Note: I've been working hard at my sax practice, so much so, that I just can't listen to my beginner videos any more, so I've deleted them from YouTube, in spite of their documentary significance to me.
On the topic of brass instruments, I got a B flat trumpet and an E flat alto horn at the start of this new thing as well, but after trying to play those, things started to get a bit overwhelming, so I decided fairly early on that it was just too much. Having made that decision, what remains has turned out to provide quite a nice balance for me and has been rolling along pretty smoothly since. I may try a trumpet again at some point, once the dust settles on my current plans, but I've been able to get some interesting samples from my two.
If you have seen those beginner videos at some point, then a caveat, in case it wasn't obvious: those were documents of my early progress learning to play an alto sax - they were not contenders for any kind of Frank Zappa covers type of competition.
I remember coming across a video on YouTube of a guy playing a piece on a tenor sax, at a much more advanced stage than me on alto sax at the time, that he had posted as a document of his progress with that particular piece. Some of the comments that were posted on that were awful - these are nasty people who were just missing the point - he wasn't claiming to be Ornette Coleman or anything like that. YouTube has never been the exclusive domain of polished professionals and is a very useful resource that enables posting of links to videos on internet forums and so on.