[Khanthebrit]

I’ll certainly be bringing it up with my music teacher, however, my lesson is not till Wednesday and I can only afford one lesson a week. So I was wondering whether I could do something in the meantime to help me get that sax in tune.

It is usually out of tune when I play long tones to the tuner cleartune (app). However, when I play a few simple melodies by ear to a backing track, it doesn’t sound as flat but I wouldn’t say perfect either. I was wondering whether my current methods of trying to get it in tune (playing long tones to cleartune app, intonation exercises and also playing long tones to different pitches) will help me improve or if their are other exercises I should try to adopt.

I understand where you come from as obviously the internet can’t tell you what is wrong with your embochure which is why you refer to me getting a teacher, but I was wondering if there is any advice I could get in relation to how people usually deal with this issue. I’ve played alto for 5 years or so now and still thought the transition would be easier, but I think I am mistaken now 😄

[Khanthebrit]

Thanks for the feedback, yes, I enjoy listening to a lot of these players too. I’ll note down everything said. I am slowly going through these exercises etc, and just doing a bit of studying outside as well to help me consolidate my pentatonics and blues scales before moving onto how we actually use them to create these awesome solos we hear. Working at a crawling speed to say the least, but doing as much as I can when I’m off work with the sax as much as possible. I only just really got into the kind of music recently, and up until then my sax playing throughout the years has literally just been from music given to me to sight-read/read (quite a classical approach to learning). I really aspire and dream to get to a stage whereby I can chuck the sheet music and play and solo by ear to the songs played on stage. Because, lets be honest, no matter how much music is out there, at some point you’ll end up without the sheets on a stand.

One thing I also wanted to clear up were the minor pentatonics exercises. What confused me a little is that in the technical exercise, say for G minor, we’re playing 1,f3,4,5,f7,5 2 1. Why do we play the second degree if it is meant to be missed in a minor pentatonic? I understand, from statements in the book, that you can actually ‘add’ notes to the scale that would make sense, but is there a specific reason for playing, say, the 2nd, rather than a flattened 3rd when you come down.

I may just be being completely ignorant here, but as I said. Still a beginner in the blues world! So please excuse me if, for whatever reason, I have made some form of rookie mistake here. 🙂

[Khanthebrit]

Thanks for clarifying Michael, I see where you’re coming from.

The ebook seems great so far. I managed to get a couple hours of practice into today and I feel these blues patterns getting ingrained into my fingers already without even having to think about the notes I am playing. I’m looking forward to progressing 🙂

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