December 13th, 2017

This week, aim to practice 30 minutes a day, broken down in the three 10-minute parts indicated below.
Your next trip to the music store, please pick up Jazz Conception by Jim Snidero, as well as a box of size 3.5 medium Rigotti reeds (what I gave you) or size 3 Vandoren blue box reeds.

Longtones/Warmup (10 min)

Throat-opener exercise (on handout). Aim for:

  • Less lip in mouth - think of the lip position of saying 'v'.
  • Open throat, high tongue position
  • Listen for the differences in tone as the exercise goes on. Aim to get your last note sounding fuller and more resonant than your first.
flaming sax.jpg

Technique (10 min)

A harmonic minor exercises with metronome at 80 bpm:

  1. arpeggio exercises
  2. scale exercise.

Repertoire (10 min+)

Equinox (handout below):

  1. Practice playing melody and improvising along to this backing track using only the A harmonic minor scale (and arpeggios).
  2. Listen (and practice improvising along to) this track of a minor blues: Stolen Moments.

Old handouts and files