I'm Pro saxophonist Jamie Anderson, you're watching Get Your Sax Together
and in this week's video I'm gonna bring you part two of the most effective way
to practice scales.
Linked on the card up there you will find a link to go to the
first video I did on practicing scales where we learnt to start on the note, go
right to the top of range, down to the bottom and then finish on the note. Now
this video, which is part 2 of my best way to practice scale series, we're going
to take it to the next level. I'm going to give you some great tools to improve
your technique, be a much better saxophonist and give you some tools to use
when you're learning to improvise on jazz or pop or any genre. In the meantime
if you're enjoying the Get Your Sax Together channel please do help me out...
you can subscribe, ring the bell to be notified when I upload new stuff, check out my
Instagram feed, some pretty cool stuff on there, and down in the description you
will find a free pdf which has got this exercise written out. So go down there,
print it off and we'll get stuck into the lesson now.
Right let's get
started - we're gonna choose the key of C - why not? lol
Now you can play this of course on tenor, alto, soprano, bari, any sax,
because you're not gonna be playing along with the backing track or anybody
else so whatever I teach you now, whatever notes come up, is the same for
alto, tenor and all the different instruments. It's a solo study. So the
first thing we're gonna do is play the scale from the note to the top, to the
bottom, and back to the note, as I showed you on the first video.
Next thing to do is to play the major scale in thirds. Now remember for all
these exercises, practice with a metronome, even if you have to play
slower than usual, practice with a metronome to really get your technique
dialed in. Here's that second phase which is playing the major scale in thirds...
So far so good. The next phase is to play the major scale in triads,
so for each scale note you go up a triad within the notes of the scale, so it's
gonna sound like this...
Now what we do is we go up the first triad and then down the next one, so it's
going to be C, E, G which is the first triad, then we go A, F, D which is going
down the second one, and then E, G, B going up the third one and C...I forgot
what it was [lol], A, F going down the fourth one, and so on.
So the pattern sounds like this...
Okay, continuing the theme, you might see where this is all going any minute soon,
we're now going to do seventh chords built on each note of the major scale. So
C E G B, D F A C and we go up, so on and so forth, all the way up the scale. Sounds
like this..
Now, just like we did with the Triads, we go up one, down the next one, up one, down
the next one...
And that, of course, is just the major scale, so we need to do it for our
ascending melodic minor scale and our harmonic minor scale. Now we don't need
to worry about the descending melodic minor scale like you see in classical
music, because that's actually just a major scale a major third beneath the
minor key that you're in, but we won't worry about that too much!
Suffice to say, we're gonna do exactly the same patterns on C ascending melodic
minor scale and C harmonic minor, so here's what those... I'm gonna skip the
first ones and go straight to the sevenths... here's what the sevenths sound
like on the C melodic minor scale...
Now here's the pattern with sevens on the harmonic minor, so C harmonic minor,
this is what it sounds like...
That is all fantastic if you're a beginner or intermediate player. Now if you
want to take it to the next level what we would do is extend that pattern. Go
back to the major scale and extend the pattern going up to the ninth, the
eleventh and the thirteenth on the major scale, so just doing the ninth quickly it
would sound like this...
Doing the elevenths would sound like this...
And going up to the 13th, which is just stacking thirds all the time, all the
time we're just adding another third for each scale note, for each scale step
we're going up in thirds further and further up the 13s pattern, on the major
scale sounds like this...
Now what you would do is repeat those 9th, 11th and 13ths on the melodic minor
and the harmonic minor. I'm not going to do it on this video to save time but
that will take you quite a while and I would just take one key a day, maybe one
key a week to get even better at it. In that way, gradually those keys and those
notes and those shapes are really going to come under your fingers.
When it comes
to improvising, especially in jazz, the chords are always built up in thirds so
by the time you come to playing jazz and transcribing jazz solos, now if you want
to learn how to transcribe stuff go and check out my series linked on the card
up there, they'll teach you how to transcribe, so when you start
transcribing jazz stuff you'll see that so many of the patterns are made
up of stacks of thirds and you've already got them under your fingers from
practicing this scale. So work away at it, take your time, practice with a metronome
and you will be amazed how much better you get doing this. So be disciplined,
work away at it, and hope you enjoy it.
That's it for this week,
quick video on how you can really take practicing scales to the next level, get
you technique together, get your soloing skills together at the same time and
just be a better musician and saxophonist. So if you're enjoying the
channel subscribe, ring the bell, check out my Instagram, and most importantly of all go
into the PDF [in the description] and get that free sheet which has got this entire exercise
written out in all keys* [*not in all keys, sorry!] That's a wicked resource, you're gonna love that, hope you
enjoy it and I'll see you next week on Get Your Sax Together.
...linked up on the
card now, up there, you will find the video, my first part...ergh! that's rubbish...