Create Beauty, Don’t Avoid Ugliness

Cal Newport's blog Study Hacks has been a fascination of mine for a while. He's consistently insightful. I've also been having an interesting conversation with Stephen the other saxophonist in The Afronauts, mostly via exchanging links and comments on Facebook, having to do with talent, practicing, advancement, etc. Cal's post entitled Flow is the Opiate of the Mediocre: Advice on Getting Better from an Accomplished Piano Player brings up a point I always tried to convey to my saxophone students about an internal sound concept. It's so important to hear the exact tone you want to produce before you start to play and work to make it happen acoustically as opposed to just blowing into the saxophone, hearing what comes out, and trying to adjust from there to polish it.