Sunday Scales 9: Bits and Bites
Today only: less talk, more scales! More scales than you can shake a stick at! Plenty more after the jump
Sunday Scales 8: A musical riddle
What number comes next in this series: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, ? So far so good… How about this one: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ? At this point you’re either enjoying yourself or having terrifying flashbacks to grade-school math. Are you ready for this week’s scale pattern? It’s a musical riddle: …
Teachers: push or pull?
There are countless approaches to teaching, but in this post I want to share one simple idea that has intrigued me for years. This question has helped me evaluate my own teaching and understand (without judging) the teaching of others. So, here’s the big question:
Sunday Scales 7: Return of the Stamp
Back to Stamp this week for another classic pattern: As we did in part four, let’s break this exercise down:
Sunday Scales 6: Variations galore
This week I’m going to demonstrate an important practice technique: Identify a difficult technical passage Extract the excerpt and practice it on its own Memorize the excerpt Vary and transpose the excerpt as widely as possible As our source, we’ll take a well-known passage from George Enesco’s Légende:
Stop reading! (And start knowing)
One of my pet peeves is shelling out $20-50 for a method book only to discover that over 90% of the book is completely wasted space, taken up by writing out the exact same exercise twenty times in all possible keys/registers. My filing cabinet is full of books that could be summarized in a page …
Sunday Scales 5: Choose your own adventure
In the spirit of variety and creativity, I wanted to show how you can start to invent your own exercises or modify existing ones to keep ideas fresh. So this week we’re going to take one of the previous exercises (#4, the “Chromatic Do-Re-Mi”) and generate new exercises based on it. As you can see, the …
Sunday Scales 4: Mr. Stamp
This week’s pattern is a current favourite of mine. The exercise comes from Warm-ups and Studies by James Stamp. The hieroglyphics, fermatas and repeats in Stamp’s exercises can be intimidating. When I was seventeen and first saw the book it looked like a foreign language. But it made more and more sense as I matured, learned about …
Sunday Scales 3: Practice principles
Before this week’s challenge, I want to talk for a moment about good practice habits and how they apply to these scale patterns. There are a few basic concepts at work, but it’s important to know the appropriate role for each:
Sunday Scales 2: The payoff
Last time, I described my approach to learning and practicing scale patterns. Summary: learn the pattern, memorize it, and transpose it from memory. As my colleague and former teacher Shawn Spicer once said to me, “You don’t memorize scales, you know scales.” I find it fascinating how this approach is standard practice for jazz musicians but completely outside …