Saxophone Altissimo Fingering Chart

What Is the Altissimo Register?

Everything above written high F♯

The standard range of the saxophone runs from written low B♭ to written high F♯ — low B flat to high F sharp — 33 notes. That range is the same on every saxophone, and the fingerings for it are the same on every saxophone. The altissimo register is everything above the regular range.

Because saxophone music is written in transposed notation, altissimo starts in the same written place for every player. Altissimo G is written on the same line whether you are holding an alto, a tenor, a baritone or a soprano, even though the concert pitch sounds different on each. This is why sax altissimo is usually discussed in written pitch, and why every note name on this page and across our altissimo charts refers to written pitch unless stated otherwise.

The important difference is how altissimo notes are produced. Every note in the standard range works the same way: you open tone holes down the tube in sequence, shortening the effective length of the air column, and the pitch rises. Run out of tone holes and you run out of range. Altissimo does not work like that. There are no more holes to open. Instead, an altissimo fingering vents the tube in a way that destabilises the fundamental, so that one of the upper partials in the harmonic series becomes the strongest resonance and sounds instead. Your oral cavity then does the job of selecting which partial you get.

In short, the fingering makes a note possible, and the voicing decides whether you actually get it. A correct altissimo fingering with the wrong voicing gives you the low note, a squeak, or silence. This is also why two players can use the identical fingering on the identical horn and get completely different results.

Altissimo G on Any Saxophone

Two fingerings worth trying first, whichever horn you play

Altissimo G is the logical place to start for any student. It is the one note where the four saxophones come closest to agreeing with each other. Two fingerings in particular have the potential to speak on all of them, which makes them the sensible thing to try before anything else. Treat them as a starting point — each horn has its own longer list of alternates, and its own first choice. Even within saxophone sizes, there is a huge variation in alitissimo fingerings between horns made by different manufacturers, especially when playing vintage instruments.

Why Altissimo Fingerings Differ Between Saxophones

And why standard fingerings do not

Standard saxophone fingerings are identical across the whole family. A written G is the same shape on a soprano and on a baritone. The instruments are different sizes, but they are proportionally scaled versions of the same design, so the same fingering produces the same written note on all of them. One chart covers every saxophone.

Altissimo fingerings are not scaled in the same way. An altissimo fingering does not simply shorten the tube — it introduces vents at particular points along it to suppress the fundamental and favour a specific upper partial. Whether a given combination succeeds depends on precisely where those vents fall relative to the pressure nodes of the partial you are chasing, and that depends on the exact bore taper, the tone-hole sizes and placements, the neck design and the keywork of the instrument in front of you.

Those things differ between a soprano and a baritone by a large margin. They also differ, by a smaller but still meaningful margin, between two tenors from different manufacturers, and sometimes between a vintage and a modern horn from the same manufacturer.

In addition to the particular quirks of the instrument you are playing, your own physiology has an impact on your altissimo fingerings. The shape of your oral cavity, throat and natural tongue position all change the approach you need when considering altissimo notes. These reasons are why altissimo fingering charts published by different players disagree with each other, and why none of them are wrong.

What this means for you in practice

Treat any altissimo fingering — including ours — as a strong starting point rather than an instruction. Expect to test two or three options for each note and keep the one that speaks most easily and sits closest to pitch on your horn. Expect the winner to be different from the one your teacher uses, and different again from the one in a book. Every individual player needs to have their own set of preferred altissimo fingerings for every horn they play. If you are an alto saxophonist and like playing both a vintage Conn and a vintage Selmer, you will need a completely different set of altissimo fingerings for each instrument.

Forming your own set of fingerings for any given instrument takes a lot of experimentation and time. It also means having a fixed fingering for each note. The fingering you settle on is worth writing down. Once you have found a combination that works on your instrument, it will keep working.

Overtones and Harmonics — The Foundation

The work that makes altissimo possible

Overtones on saxophone — also called harmonics — are higher notes produced from a low fingering without moving your fingers at all. You finger low B♭, keep the fingering completely still, and change the shape of your mouth until the note lifts to the octave above. Then to the twelfth above that. Then higher again.

The saxophone overblows at the octave, so from a low B♭ fingering the series runs: the fundamental B♭, then B♭ an octave up, then F a twelfth above the fundamental, then B♭ two octaves up, then D, then F, and onward. Every one of those is available from the one fingering. All that changes is your voicing.

Saxophone harmonics matter because they isolate the exact skill altissimo depends on. When you play an overtone you cannot cheat with your fingers — there is nothing for them to do. The only variable is the shape of your oral cavity, so the practice is pure voicing training. Players who work on overtones first tend to find altissimo arrives quicker than players who skip straight to altissimo fingerings.

A simple overtone routine

Ten minutes a day is plenty. Consistency matters far more than duration, and this is one of the areas of saxophone technique where a long session is less useful than a short daily one. The learning takes place when you revisit and recall the practice, not through endless repetition.

1. Play a low B♭ with a full, relaxed sound. Do not push.
2. Without moving your fingers, let the note lift to the octave. Think the vowel moving from “aw” towards “ee”. If it will not go, try slurring down from the fingered octave B♭ first so your body learns the target.
3. Once the octave is reliable, work upward through the series one partial at a time, holding each until it is steady.
4. Repeat from low B, then low C, then C♯. Different fundamentals put the partials in different places and expose different weaknesses.
5. Pre-hear every note before you play it. Sing it, or imagine it clearly enough that you could. This sounds like a soft option and is not — a partial you cannot hear in advance is one you will find by accident rather than on demand, and accidents do not survive a performance.
6. Finish with matching: play a note normally, then play the same pitch as an overtone, and try to make the two indistinguishable in tone and pitch. This is the exercise that transfers most directly to altissimo.

That last step is vitally important, DO NOT skip this. Overtone matching forces you to hear the difference between a note that is just sounding and a note that is in tune and full-bodied — this helps train you to make purposeful technical movements in the interaction between voicing and fingerings, building a reliable technique for altissimo notes that can function under gig pressure.

Overblowing in Sixths and Ninths

The other route into the register

The overtone work above starts from the bottom of the horn and climbs the harmonic series. There is a second route, and for a lot of players it is the faster one: take the fingerings you already use at the top of the standard range and overblow those instead.

Finger any note between written A above the staff and high F♯, then push the voicing up until the note breaks upward. What comes out sits roughly a sixth above what you fingered. Push further and you reach the next available pitch, roughly a ninth above. Those pitches are in the altissimo register — you have arrived there using fingerings your hands already know.

These are usually called artificial harmonics, to distinguish them from the natural overtones produced from low fingerings. Both are the same acoustic phenomenon: you are selecting an upper partial with your voicing rather than opening tone holes. The difference is only where you start.

The interval narrows as you climb

One detail makes this much less mysterious in practice. Starting low in that range, the first overblown pitch sounds a major sixth above the fingering. As you work upward through the range, that interval gradually tightens to a minor sixth. It is a gradual narrowing rather than a fixed rule, so expect to adjust as you go rather than transposing mechanically.

Knowing roughly where a pitch should land matters, because it tells you whether you have hit the note you were aiming for or the one above it.

Why this explains the fingering charts

Some of these overblown notes come out close enough to pitch to use immediately. Most do not — they speak readily but sit noticeably sharp or flat. The fix is to add or remove a key, usually a side or palm key, which shifts where the tube vents and pulls the pitch into line without disturbing the partial you have found.

That is precisely what a published altissimo fingering is: a simple overblown fingering that somebody adjusted until it sat in tune on their instrument. It is why so many altissimo fingerings look like slightly odd versions of upper-register fingerings, and it is why they differ between horns — the adjustment needed depends on the tube it is being made for. It also means you can do this yourself. If a documented fingering almost works on your saxophone, adding or dropping a single key is exactly the right next move.

How to practise it

1. Start on a comfortable note in the upper standard range and overblow it. Do not change the fingering at all — only the voicing.
2. Aim to get two or three different pitches out of the same fingering. That flexibility is the point of the exercise.
3. Work upward through the range one fingering at a time.
4. Once several are speaking, string the results together and see how much of a chromatic scale you can assemble in the altissimo register from these simple fingerings alone. Most players can build close to an octave.
5. Only then start refining intonation by adding or removing keys.

Which route should you use?

Both, ideally, and they reinforce each other. Natural overtones from low fingerings build the widest voicing range and the most control. Overblowing the upper register gets you into altissimo faster and makes better sense of why the fingerings look the way they do. If altissimo G has stalled after a few weeks of overtone work, switching to this approach for a fortnight often breaks the deadlock.

One caveat by instrument. Alto, tenor and baritone can all be extended by an octave or more this way. Soprano is more limited — roughly a sixth of usable extension — which is one reason the soprano altissimo chart covers a shorter range than the others.

Voicing: The Technique of the Throat and Tongue

A complex internal dance

Voicing gets described in vague terms — “support more”, “think higher”, “open your throat” — and players are left guessing. Here is what is physically happening.

The column of air inside your mouth and throat is part of the instrument’s acoustic system. It has its own resonant frequency, and that frequency changes as you change the shape of the space. When your oral cavity resonance lines up with a particular partial of the note you are fingering, that partial is reinforced and becomes the one that sounds. Voicing is simply tuning that internal space.

What to aim for

The back of the tongue does nearly all of the work. Say the word “ee” and notice the back of your tongue rise towards the roof of your mouth, narrowing the channel and speeding the air passing through it. That is the shape that favours high partials. Now say “aw” and feel the tongue drop and the space open out — that is the shape that favours the fundamental. Moving between those two positions while playing is voicing, and it is the entire mechanism.

Common mistakes

DO NOT move your jaw. The most common mistake in the altissimo register is biting: clamping upward with the lower jaw to force the note out. It occasionally works, which is why the habit sticks, but it chokes the reed, makes the tone thin and sharp, and becomes impossible to sustain over a phrase. If your altissimo only speaks when you bite, you have not learned to voice it — you have learned to force it, and the two feel completely different once you have experienced the real thing.

Keep the embouchure firm at the corners, the chin flat, and the jaw pressure roughly the same as it is on a middle-register note. Then let the tongue arch. Air speed should increase, but that comes from support and from the narrowed channel, not from blowing harder in the sense of pushing more air volume.

If you do need more firmness as you go higher — and in the upper altissimo you will — there are better ways to find it than clamping. Turning the lower lip out very slightly, taking a little more mouthpiece, and bringing the lower jaw marginally forward all increase support without closing the reed down. The thing to guard against is the throat tightening as the lips firm up: the resonating space behind the embouchure has to stay open.

How to feel it happening

Play a low B♭, then move slowly between the “aw” and “ee” shapes without stopping the note. Somewhere in between, the note will flip up to the octave. That flip is the moment your oral cavity resonance crossed over to favour the second partial. Once you can find that point carefully and deliberately, you can voice, and altissimo becomes a matter of learning where the crossover point lies for each note.

How to Play Your First Altissimo Note (G)

The gateway note

Altissimo G — referred to by saxophonists as High G — can be found immediately above written high F♯. Most players begin here - it is the first note after the standard range, so the leap in voicing is the smallest. High G is the most forgiving of imperfect technique. Some players find that the fingerings for it are the most consistent across different instruments, so a published fingering has the best chance of working on your horn without modification.

Get altissimo G solid before you go anywhere near A or B♭. Players who chase the whole register at once usually end up with an unreliable altissimo register - useless in performance.

The route in: find it as an overtone first

Before you use any altissimo fingering, learn what the note feels like without one. Work up the overtone series until you can produce the pitch of altissimo G from a low fingering using voicing alone. It will be unstable and it may not be beautiful. That does not matter. What matters is that your body now knows the oral cavity shape that produces that pitch.

Then take that exact shape and apply it to the altissimo G fingering for your instrument. The fingering’s job is to make the note stable and repeatable; your voicing has already found the note.

What it should feel like

A correctly voiced altissimo G feels surprisingly easy. There should be no sense of strain, no clamping, and no need to blow harder than you would for a high D. The air feels fast and narrow rather than forceful. The note should start cleanly when you slur up to it from high F♯, and it should be possible to hold it for several seconds without the pitch sagging or the note dropping out. If any of that requires effort, something is being forced — check the troubleshooting section below.

Approach it by slurring up from below rather than tonguing it cold. Tonguing an altissimo note from silence is a separate and harder skill; build the note first, then learn to start it.

Altissimo G on your saxophone

The specific fingerings, and the alternates worth trying if the first one does not speak, live on each instrument’s own page — this is exactly where the four saxophones tend to stop agreeing with each other.

Why Altissimo Isn’t Working — Troubleshooting

Four failures and what each one means

Altissimo fails in a small number of characteristic ways, and each one points at a different cause. Identifying which failure you are getting is most of the diagnosis.

If you have worked through all four and altissimo is still not happening, it is very often something a teacher spots in thirty seconds and a player cannot spot alone — jaw movement and tongue position are almost impossible to self-diagnose. Saxophone lessons are available in person in South East London and online, and altissimo is one of the most common things players come with. Get in touch to book.

Choose Your Saxophone

Dedicated altissimo fingering charts for each horn

Everything written on this page applies to every saxophonist and every saxophone. Finding a set of consistent and reliable altissimo fingerings is down to you. A few altissimo fingerings do carry across the family; but the alternates worth trying, the ones that will actually settle on your instrument are specific to you and your horn. Get started mapping your own altissimo register:

Still building the standard range? The standard saxophone fingering chart covers all 33 notes from low B♭ to high F♯ — start there if you are not yet playing above high F♯.

High Notes Cheat Sheet

What to expect from each note in the register

A quick reference for the order to learn the altissimo notes in and what each one demands. This is the high notes cheat sheet in short form — the note-by-note fingerings live on each instrument’s chart.

Two things worth repeating. First, please remember this order is only a guide — some players find B♭ easier than A, and if a note out of sequence is speaking well, use it. Second, prioritize reliability over range. Five altissimo notes you can hit every time in performance are worth much more than nine you can hit in the practice room on a good day.

Recommended Reading

Four books worth owning

Altissimo is a subject where the standard texts disagree with each other, and reading more than one is the fastest way to understand why. These four are the ones worth the shelf space.

You will notice that none of these books lead with fingering charts. Every one treats the register as a voicing problem that fingerings then make repeatable — which is exactly the order this guide recommends.