One thing i forgot to add is he keeps stressing over and over, is to practice playing the G basic blues scale “G Bb C C# D F” up and down the sax as FAST as possible smoothly – emphasis on MAXIMUM speed. (don’t ask me why)

Then to repeat starting at different notes of the scale – so start on C etc…

@Jake – i don’t know why Jake, but i keep mixing you up with Jeff! Could have some valid points there Jeff!
I had another lesson today in place of my daughters clarinet lesson as she was unwell and off school.
The scary thing was he would play 3 or 4 notes on his sax, and i would play them back without thinking.

I got him to demonstrate some of his riffs on the 3 different chords in each of the bars. Blew me brains out.

Another interesting point which he raised was the importance of spending 10 mins just jamming to the backing track
and totally ignore every rule and just play what comes out of your head. And what he said was do not under any
circumstances be critical of what you are playing when you do this exercise ie if it sounds bad, don’t under any
circumstances be judgemental and think of it as bad because if you do that, you’ll start mentally putting in rules and
eventually narrowing down your range of creativity, and stopping your brain from going different places.
The idea is to carry on regardless, and eventually what will happen is your mind will then have free reign of your
playing – and thats when the good stuff starts coming out.

He was going to take me onto another level and give me more stuff to do, but i had to hold him back as i’m still
struggling with the stuff i’ve already got.
at the moment

Hi William, i’ve got both Johnny’s Killer blues course and his major scale improvisation course – both of his courses are excellent courses,
and i’m making full use of them. They are great if you don’t have a
teacher, or if you have a teacher, to complement them with. Either
way its a win win situation.

Its only recently that i got the opportunity to learn to play the blues
from my teacher – he’s quite proficient at improvising in the blues and
jazz. He doesn’t tend to give out sheets and isn’t teaching from any
specific books, he writes down a few ideas and asked me to put them in
dropbox – for him to check if he’s got time. I think he might be saving
some of the sheets for other students.

So i’ve tried to document everything from day one from his notes and from memory in terms of what he asked me to start practicing, including any
comments etc. Just thought it may be of interest to anyone else in the
forums that are doing the blues.

Due to my snail pace at learning, it won’t be at great speed, and there’s
lots more areas to cover later on, he’s trying his best not to overload
me as that could just put me off the whole complexity of it. like he says
you spend the rest of your life learning the blues.

Hope you find them useful, unfortunately they’re all for the Alto sax.
The sheets are in order of learning – i put a index in drop box with
additional comments,