[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 🙂