Steve
Forum Replies Created
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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 🙂
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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 🙂
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Hey Trinus! This is very beautiful playing! What a marvelous tribute to a masterful craftsman.
What tune is this that you are playing over? I love it!
With regards to the feeling of relying on ‘ready mades’, I think what we have laid out here will force you to start believing in yourself and give you the tools to play from the top of your head rather than always feeling like you’re using something you worked out ahead of time. A big thing that will help if you don’t already do it is learning lines in all 12 and then learning how to apply language to a chord progression in a musical and motivic way.
Can’t wait to hear you improvise – See you around the studio!
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Welcome CAT! Looking forward to hearing you shred some of these exercises. You are correct, we need a trumpeter as I don’t think we have one yet. Anybody reading this is going to want to make sure to check out your posts 👀 Super bad dude right here!
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Hey Carmen – sorry for the late reply here and thanks for sharing all your experience! This is awesome – I love all the name dropping and the references to where you are as a player. You seem to have a pretty high level of natural ability and a great sound if you’re getting these lead alto gigs! This is no easy feat and I’m sure you’re not too bad as a soloist either if you have that list of cats as your contemporaries.
Thanks for sharing this – very cool… looking forward to hearing you play at some point!
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Love this Alain – somehow I have managed to miss your posts I apologize for this! Such a great journey you have chosen for yourself and I can safely say that the more you do it, the more fun it gets because you just start to gain more and more options as a player the more things you work out and get under your fingers. I can already hear you walking down this path and am so thankful to have you here and working on these concepts giving your feedback. Im looking forward to hearing you internalize these things and further define your musical voice – thanks for sharing!
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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 🙂
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Awesome about the different key centers. Thats the idea – theres always things to practice. If we as improvisers can learn to build a positive association with growth and improvement we can be in a blissful state every time we pick up the instrument 🙂 Enjoy!
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Makes sense, I have been there before definitely. Repetition is a big factor in getting out of the ‘fight or flight’ feeling that comes in when the audience is there. When you are practicing also at the end of your sessions you can imagine the audience being there and how you would respond if you were there. A lot of people don’t think to do this, but if you make it a part of your practice session (5 – 10 minutes), you’ll get a lot better at it!
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I have heard of Tim but not familiar with his playing – will check it out!