Original subtitles

Hi, I'm Alistair Parnell, and I've been playing and teaching wind synths for

about four decades now. I hope you find this video useful, and if you do, please

remember to like and subscribe.

The Aerophone is a digital wind instrument. That means it doesn't have

limitations of a typical acoustic fingering system.

It's a good idea to take advantage of these additional features.

it might help you play some of those tricky passages a little bit easier.

Now, any of the side keys or palm keys or the little finger keys

can be used with something called key function.

What that does is it allows us to say that we want that key to do

something in particular. So rather than it just being the same as a regular

saxophone key,

We can make it do something slightly different to enable us to do some new

things with the fingering system.

Now, some of this will be a bit new to you, and some people might say, ah, but

hang on, we should be able to do those fingerings.

Without making these changes, you're probably right, and ultimately learning

of your scales and keys correctly is by far the best idea.

But, you know, even top professional players sometimes like to use a little

-out -of -jail -free card by using some of these special tricks.

We've talked about some of these settings before. Now, you'll find key

just as... fingering mode. I usually have mine set to sax.

If you go a little bit further, you'll get the user fingering settings. But

we're looking today at key function.

Let's just see how we change that setting if we want to.

Firstly, we're going to press the key that we want to change the function of.

for this first example, I'm going to press the lowest right hand side key. I

call that the side B flat key.

And then in the display, you'll have some options. If we press menu,

we can change this option from being either a sax key, which is the

default position.

But if we go on to the right, you'll also see we can make it be a semitone

a semitone up, a whole tone down or a whole tone up.

And going back the other way.

we can actually turn that key off.

So let's have a look at why some of those might be very useful to us.

The first one is we could use it to turn a key off.

Now, why might we want to do that? Well, personally, I don't use this, but I

have sometimes had people get in touch and say that they're finding...

perhaps the palm keys they're catching by mistake.

And in order to just see if that's something that's happening, it might be

useful for you to touch the side key, D key, and in the settings, make the key

function be off.

That way, you won't affect any of the notes if you accidentally press those

keys. Of course...

you won't be able to use those keys either. That might not be a problem for

But it is a way of checking out whether you are accidentally pressing a key or

simply you just rather would have that key deactivated. The second use for key

function would be to set one of your side keys perhaps as a trill key.

Now, the way we would do this is we would set one of those keys to, for

instance, always play a semitone up.

Now, going back to my first example of the side key B flat, of course, usually

on a saxophone, if we press two fingers and add that right hand side key, we

would get an A sharp or a B flat. OK, that's a very standard fingering. But

actually. Some of the trills, if we're doing them for a semitone, can be a

little awkward.

For instance, if we're going from G to G sharp with the left little pinky,

that's a little bit awkward key to use.

I can do it, but I'm a little bit limited with that.

Well, if we set our side key B flat to always play a semitone higher,

now any note that we play, We'll trill up by a semitone using the

side key B flat.

We can do that on any note we choose. And don't forget, you can set any of

keys to be a semitone up.

Now, I think using the side key B flat for that is probably the best choice.

But you can use others as well.

The third function would be to take the idea of what is sometimes referred to as

EWI standard fingering.

So we can make our own combination of sort of saxophone slash EWI fingering.

And the reason that can be very useful is we can kind of use it as a little bit

of a scale cheat or an easier way of playing some of those most difficult...

scales.

Again, I can't emphasize enough, if you really want to be able to get into

playing an instrument well, knowing all of your scales properly in all keys is

very useful.

But even some of the most professional players I've spoken to occasionally want

to use this little trick to get them out of difficult situations when they're

playing certain passages.

So how do we do it? Well, I'm just going to show you a little version here that

I use.

In this one, I'm setting my left pinky key, this is actually the C

sharp key, and I'm setting that to always be a semitone up

from whatever note I'm playing.

Now, to give you a quick example of this, if I play a scale of C major.

If I play C major scale again with my pinky holding down that C sharp key for

all of the notes, I magically get C sharp major or D flat major, whichever

you want to think of it.

So here's C, and then I'll play the C scale straight again, but with the

finger on, and I get D flat.

By the way, my instrument is transposed to B flat, just in case that gets you a

little bit confused with what scale you're playing. But you can start with

transposition. But doing this will save you having to change the transpose knob.

And it's a much easier way of quickly switching into different scales if you

want to.

If we take advantage of the possibilities here.

You could learn the four easiest scales on the Aerophone, but actually be able

to play in all 12 keys very easily.

Yep, it's a cheat, but hey, if it helps, let's incorporate it. If you want to

know how to do that, make sure you like and subscribe, because that video will

be coming along very soon as ISAX tip number nine.

Thanks again for watching, and don't forget, if you want to find out about

great courses for the Roland Aerophone, then visit www .isacs

.academy. I'll see you there.