[Steve]

Hey Busso – Welcome! Looking forward to hearing you play and learning with you. Have a look around and feel free to comment on anything that moves you 🙂

[Busso]

Hi Steve,

I already subscribed, just before my trip. I play a TS Mark VI and a Yana Curved SS. As I am travelling a lot I just ordered a travel saxophone ( https://odiseimusic.com/) I want to try it on my evenings in hotel rooms. Have you heard about this EWI?

After spending an hour with the material I wanted to give you my first feed back. From the introductory video I was not sure about the sequencing of the lessons. It would be good to have some advice on whrere to start. So, first I thought “Confirmation” is difficult, Body & Soul is a slow ballad, easy, so I started with that one. I tried to memorise the chords in the first section. Not easy., especially in the second last bar of the A section, where there are 4 chords in one bar. Then, it is difficult for me to memorise the diminished chords. I never really understood the logic of how to construct diminished chords. Is there a shortcut way to understand the concept?

So I switched to Confirmation. Here I would love to have a video with the full melody at a speed of 120. as the second variation of the A section is rhythmically difficult and difficult to learn when listening to Charkie Parker playing at 180.

So far so good. It would be great to get your thoughts.

Best regards

Busso

[Steve]

Hey Busso – thanks for the feedback here!

-Yes, have heard of the travel sax 🙂 Pretty awesome little instrument!

-Confirmation is indeed challenging. The organization of these lessons is designed that any level of player has a path from beginning to end so what you are doing here is great – just take one unit at a time and practice what interests you. It is impossible to get it all in one day but monitor your improvement and ask questions as they come up 👍 RE: the Confirmation track at 120 BPM – this is great to practice. There is not a track that slow because I felt it would be better to practice that slowly without the track and gradually work up the tempo of each section to 150 BPM before trying to use a track. What I would recommend doing is downloading the practice track sections of the melody and listening to those a few times to get them in your head and then work on getting them under your fingers.
-Body and Soul is definitely also a challenge but a great one! When building diminished chords you want to think all minor 3rds stacked on top of eachother. Root, 3rd, b5 and bb7 is how they are built. In the case of F#dim7 you would have F#, A, C, Eb. You can also apply an F# Whole Half diminished scale to this sound and practice getting that into your ears too. F#, G#, A, B, C, D, Eb, F, F# – go slow and play up and down the chord and scale while visualizing just that chord.

As you play through the exercises over the progression and start to learn them, the sound of the diminished chord will become more familiar to you and how it fits in with the chord progression.

Let me know if this makes sense and if you have any other questions 🙂

[Knowatall]

I fully understand your query on diminished chords. My experience has been that once I understood that the diminished chord is the upper structure of a dominant 7th b9 (from the 3rd), the sound and technical aspect fell into place much faster. Thank you Barry Harris!

[Steve]

I appreciate this response! Barry Harris is the ‘go to’ when it comes to having a clear explanation for theory. His method is very specific and helps provide clarity to this broad topic of complexity – I strongly approve 🙂