[Steve]

Mike!! Great to have you on here and looking forward to working with you on whatever you may have questions about. Life catches up with us and we can all use a break sometime but I can safely say that when you do this from the standpoint of wanting to have fun rather than making it feel like work, it becomes a lot easier!

Looking forward to hearing you play and reaching our goals together. Rock on!

[Steve]

Awesome lol… Most of these can be used at the next concert band rehearsal 🔥

Thanks Becky!

[Steve]

👌 so accurate… 🤣

[Steve]

I can’t wait to use this one on the bandleader… 😅

[Steve]

Ha! Perfect – love it.

[Steve]

Hey Robert – Welcome aboard and thanks for sharing this with us! Welcome back to the saxophone, the community is very glad to have you. I can say that this journey of playing the sax for the past 30 years for me has been quite an interesting one but I am thankful for every minute of it 🙂
We can’t wait to hear your playing and how your progress is coming along. I think you will be very satisfied with the results you get from practicing these methods. Many of the students I have worked with in the past end up realizing that improvisation is not exactly what you think it is. We aren’t just over here ‘making things up’ but rather learning the key elements of music composition so that we can create musical stories using that information.
By all means reach out if you have any questions and I look forward to hearing how your journey is unfolding! 🎷🚀

[Steve]

Hey Chrissy!

Thanks for dropping a line here. While this area is a bit of a ghost town at the moment I see that changing in the near future when I create some things designed for users to participate in this section more.

There’s not enough jazz flute players in the world – you are very welcome here! I think you’ll find that playing through the exercises in each unit will provide you with some different perspectives on improvisation. One of the common misconceptions about improvisation is that it is completely made up. A lot of what people are doing when improvising is preconceived!

If I could make one suggestion: Start with the most recent unit (in this case the ‘Stella By Starlight’ Unit) as that will be the one emphasized throughout the month. From there, go back and have a look at other tunes that might interest you. If Confirmation is calling you, by all means have at it!

I’m going to have to check out that Jethro Tull/Ian Anderson Solo. I love hearing about things that inspire and I’m sure others will too when they learn about it. Linking the songs below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvt6lyiDwQc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2RNe2jwHE0

Thanks for sharing – See you around the studio!

[Steve]

Hey Becky! You came to the right place 🙂 I pride myself on creating exercises that people who are great at reading music can easily memorize and begin to IMPROVISE with. Some things of course will be more challenging than others, but as long as you consistently return to the same material and commit ideas and knowledge of music theory to memory you will always be improving.
Looking forward to hearing more from you!

[Steve]

Hey Guillaume!
Great to meet you and thanks for letting us know your background. Bari is truly for the lovers of the saxophone, it definitely takes patience as does any instrument I guess haha.

It would seem that we have a lot of similar influences – I’m really looking forward to hearing you play 🙂 Really nice set up on your alto as well. I am thinking of going back to a more closed tip opening and playing harder reeds these days in order to fatten up my tone.

Thanks so much for the kind words about the studio, much appreciated as always and thats what this is all about: saving time in the practice room, more focused practice sessions and overall… more fun!

See you around the studio ✌️

[Steve]

Hey Jeff! Great to get the opportunity to work with you again. Looking forward to hearing what you’re working on and can’t wait to hear what you’ve been up to 🙂

[Steve]

Super glad you’re here Becky! Talk to you soon I’m sure 🙂

[Steve]

Love to hear this Robert- welcome back! I will agree that there is some technical work involved but once you can get a nice workflow going where you understand what to practice, I’ve found it can be such a rewarding experience regardless of what level you’re at. It sounds like you have a good trajectory going on – super happy to hear this! Thanks for sharing 🎶

[Steve]

Woohoo!! Awesome so glad to have you here 🙂

I promise, being a nice guy is not just an act. I feel I am genuinely a happy person and I have music as a career to thank for this sunny disposition haha… Thanks for the kind words about the live stream I have really enjoyed getting to produce them

I just have 2 basic rules that I always apply to anybody studying jazz and improvisation:

1. Don’t compare yourself to anybody but yourself. It will take the joy out of the process and cause you to practice things that you don’t need to be working on.
2. Always be working on a song and use the song and its chord progression to improve your toolkit as an improviser.

As a classical player myself I can totally relate with you on the feeling of being ‘stuck’. It definitely will take some work and repetitions of ideas but the main thing that we all need to do is improvisers is relocate the visual element (reading music) of playing music to the ear. This is where the exercises over chord changes come into play.

When you are able to take musical ideas, shapes and melodies and apply them to any chord you see… BOOM! You are improvising! People a lot of times don’t realize that it is that simple I don’t think. The difficult part is training your brain to think this way. We’ll get there!

Thanks for joining the studio and just one more rule: Ask me any questions that may come up as you are looking through material. I’m here to help! A lot of time you will not be the only person that has a question and this helps me understand how to be a better teacher.

Looking forward to hearing you play and working on some tunes! Have a great weekend 🙂

[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 🙂

[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 🙂