Scales are important, they are one of the most important things you can practice on saxophone, but they are not magic. If you aren't looking for the right things, just playing through them won't give you any special abilities at all.
There are two reasons to play scales on saxophone- and each requires a different sort of practice. Fortunately, if you are clever, you can combine them.
The first reason is technique. When you are playing a song, it is too easy to hide inconsistencies behind the natural expression of the music. Scales leave you no room to hide. They are like a control group for you to experiment with your technique on. Any error is laid bare.
Use a metronome, most of the time but not all the time. You want to develop good rhythm and make sure you are playing notes evenly. Practice with all different sorts of articulation and again, make sure you play evenly. For example, if you are playing slur two, tongue two, a lot of people will tend to rush the slurred notes. Varying dynamics is a good idea too. Play loud and soft and practice crescendos and diminuendos. Also, practice both swinging and straight eighths. This is a good time to get your technique together for those fast bebop runs and that sort of thing. If your fingers are having trouble (if they aren't having trouble you need to get more ambitious: play faster) practice micro scales. That is where you take just a part of a scale, say five notes, and run them up and down, over and over again. Just to be clear, you don't repeat the note at the top or the bottom, this is a smooth continuous exercise. This can help to isolate those tricky transitions on the horn.
The other reason to practice scales is improvisation. You need to learn all these different sets of notes so you can follow chord changes. This is trickier to practice; if you are playing a solo you don't want to just be running up and down scales, but you need to know them intimately. Start out by making sure you know all your major scales. Ideally you could play every mode from every scale at the drop of the hat, but just getting comfortable in all the major key signatures is a good start (I'm not going to talk theory here, if you don't know what I'm talking about then you aren't ready to practice this stuff yet anyway.) Do the same thing for melodic minor, those scales are just as important. Practice all the scales from the top of the horn to the bottom, you don't want to be confined to a one octave range per key. Here is a challenging exercise to try. Get out the metronome, turn it on and then pick any note from any scale and start playing up from that note on that scale. After four beats keep playing up but switch to the next scale on the cycle of fourths. When you get to the top of the horn turn around and come back down, but keep switching keys every four beats.
-Neal Battaglia
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