Blog 2: Boring Beginning (First Practice Day)

WOOHOO. It's this first practice day. I'm finally going to get to be like Charlie Parker. It's gonna be so much fun.

2 hours later...

Never Again

Like my most people I was excited to jump right into the cool improvisation and all the amazing things that Charlie Parker did. However, knowing the importance of the basics, it was extremely important that I went back to the basics. During my first practice, I focused on reinforcing my scales, and taking the time to actually learn all the chords. Saxophone players like me never get the chance to really learn chords. No matter how boring it was to just play scales and chords, I forced myself to do it.

Here is a video of my practice (CLICK HERE). This is only contains the major scales (or it would have been ridiculously long). Seriously don't watch the whole thing unless you have nothing better to do (that would be sad).

For this first practice, I focused on just the major scales and major chords as all of the other scales such as the mixolydian mode and the dorian mode are simply the major scale but have one note (for mixolydian) and 2 notes (for dorian) that are flatted in the scale. Here are some examples below:

Chords on the other hand, are completely based off the scales and the different modes. Chords are made up of the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, (and so on) notes of the chord. The major chord corresponds to the major scale, the dominant chord corresponds with the mixolydian mode, and minor chord goes with the dorian mode.

These are the main chords that occur in any song. Of course their are more rare exceptions that may occur in the song.