Cant smile

[jake]

My mom ask me to cover this song for her as she is a HUGE Barry Manilow fan. I know I just uploaded but I wanted to do another one as this is the new Copper reed I just got. I put away my Theo HR MP and got out my metal Fatboy I ordered years ago. OMG what a match these 2 are. Loving the upgrade in my sound. Now focusing on my intonation!!!!!!!

[Mel]

Good job for mom!

[jake]

Thank u Mel.

[john]

yup your sound is cutting thru nicely.
You can probably do a comparison with something you uploaded years ago when we had the uploads on the blog section.
I notice a slight improvement in your intonation as well….but that is something we all can work on!

[Anonymous]

definitely an improvement, sounds more balanced.

one way of further improving, is to take any backing track, and slow it down to between 40 & 60 bpm, working at those really slow speeds, improves the tone, as you can concentrate more on the sound of each note, instead of the notes whizzing by.

My Pro, deliberately makes me practice the same backing track at several different speeds, which is more likely to occur when playing in a band.

very fast backing track speeds are great for developing quick tongue movements, very slow backing track speeds are more akin to doing long tones

[jake]

Thanks James. That’s great advice. Never thought of that before. Will definitely add that to the practice mix.

[jake]

Just practiced Can’t smile as James suggested. I used VLC media player which allows me to slow and increase the song speed. I slowed it to about 0.6% and WOW is my mouth tired. Great exercise to utilize. Similar to long tones. I used my TE tuner and focused on keeping the notes in tune. What I noticed is my lower notes were in tune but when I got up an octave they were consistently sharp. That definitely explains why my lowers sound good but once I get to the uppers they aren’t as appealing. Gives me something to really focus and work on. Thanks again James for this valuable tool for us to utilize.

[Anonymous]

Good to hear things are working out Jake.

I don’t want to overload you with too much information, another great benefit of slow speeds is, when it comes to articulation, if you listen to trills, bends, scoops, glissandos in a backing track, it’s a lot easier to pick out each note, and how much time is spent on each note.

you get to hear if a group of note starts slow, fast, if they increase or decrease in speed, and if they end slow or fast, if they get louder or softer etc.. it’s impossible to pick out all the details when the track is played faster.

But i agree with you, you need a lot more wind control at slower speeds, as you tend to run out of air a lot faster.

[Mike Potter]

Sounding great!!! Keep it up!

[Author]

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