Taah-Taah-Taaahhhh!

When I was in middle school, in an attempt to awaken a very dormant musical spirit in me, my mom signed me up for saxophone lessons at our local music shop. After over a year of practicing, fighting tooth and nail every week not to go, that sound is still something I can remember vividly - that repeated note my teacher told me to blow into the saxophone to get the right sound to come out of it. Taah-Taah-Taahh!

My teacher told me that there are three reasons to make the same sound:

1. To teach you how to position your lips on the mouthpiece
2. To learn how to blow into the instrument without getting winded
3. To hear how the saxophone sounds when steps 1 and 2 have been done correctly

As I said, I dreaded going to my lessons each Tuesday evening, and so I also refused to practice during the week. You can probably guess that this made each lesson feel a bit uncomfortable, to say the least. Those 30-minute lessons sometimes felt like hour-long interviews.

The other vivid memory I have of those lessons is what my teacher would say to me after I blew into the saxophone and it did not sound right. No matter your level of musical proficiency, when an instrument is played incorrectly, you hear it, and you want it to stop immediately. So that’s what I did. Whenever I played a wrong note or went through the warmup and it sounded bad or unpracticed, I stopped playing immediately. To my surprise, that was the opposite of what my teacher wanted from me.

After some time of going to lessons and not practicing, I eventually decided to give it the good old “middle school try” and practice the week leading up to my next lesson. While I didn’t quite master the scale the way I was supposed to, I came into that next week’s lesson much more confident. During my time of taking lessons, I didn’t receive many compliments on my understanding of sheet music or my technical skill with the saxophone. The biggest compliment I ever received from my teacher was actually when I played the entire scale incorrectly.

My teacher obviously wasn’t super enthusiastic about my performance, but he was excited that I was finally starting to understand that I wasn’t going to play every note perfectly. What did I change? When I played the note wrong, I went back to the basic rhythm we had gone through at the beginning of every lesson: Taah-Taah-Taaahh!

Some years have gone by since then, and while I could not play a single note right now for the life of me, I still think about that lesson very often. When I make a mistake or stumble, is my first instinct still to put the instrument down and wait to be reprimanded? Or has God shown me through my past mistakes to slow down, recenter myself with the knowledge of God’s grace, and take it note by note, back to the basics of the warmup: Taah-Taah-Taahh!

“The godly may trip seven times, but they will get up again.”
Proverbs 24:16