WOW! Five years is a LONG TIME.

The saxophone came out of its case and amazingly, miraculously, I can still play it.

Can I play it well? Oh my sweet christmas I CANNOT. I SUCK! I put sax parts onto three songs including the instrumental where the sax plays the melody. It sounds awful, my playing is awful, and the whole thing is just awful and I don’t care because oh my goodness was that fun.

I lasted about 10 minutes before my body started to reject the whole experience. I mentioned calluses in the last post. When you don’t play guitar often you lose your calluses and it hurts. It is a similar thing with wind instruments except it is about muscle strength. There are muscles in your mouth and around your jaw that you don’t use very often that are used A TON when you play a woodwind instrument. I made it about 10 minutes before those muscles decided they were done. I would then play for 20 seconds or so and follow up with a 2-3 minute rest. After about half an hour of that I had to stop. For now at least. I am going to break for lunch and maybe watch a TV show and then see how I feel. It’s entirely possible the 2025 saxophone experiment might be over. We’ll see.

Speaking of lunch, one thing about playing sax that I forgot all about is that it makes you wicked hungry. I think that’s a wind instrument thing in general because I remember everyone in my high school band complaining about how they were starving at the end of each rehearsal. Yeah, I needs me some lunch now.

Saxophone, babie! I can still play!