Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Huge Practice day

Today I started off with the usual 1 hour of long tones. I have been playing a Selmer Mark VI which unfortunately needs a good service which it is getting on Monday. So until then I'm going to be using my old faithful Yamaha AS-100. Which is interesting because on the Selmer I was having a little trouble with the 1st Altissimo G, but could comfortably reach high D, and had been working on going further and I had been hitting G and G# on occasion. However with the Yamaha I struggle to hit G, G#, A, A#, but I can then play from B up a whole octave, leaving less than an octave on most piano's. The finger all needed to be changed and its quite funny how changing the saxophone has flipped my altissimo range upside down.

I have been asked by my teacher to try practicing incorporating more breaks. I was practicing for an hour to 3 hours straight without a break. However its been brought to my attention that my brain is probably fried after half an hour let alone 3 hours. So I have been taking a 5-10 minute break every half hour, which I think has helped. Probably a little too early to tell though.

My second and third hour of practice (including 3 5 minute breaks) I played scales again. I have again neglected pentatonics, blues, diminished, whole tone, Augmented and so on, so tomorrow I am going to work on all of these scales. Today I practiced the Major Modes, Harmonic Minor Modes and Melodic Minor Modes; over the entire range (excluding altissimo as I can't hit from F#-A#), then in 3rds, then alternating the 3rds, then in scale tone 7ths, then Joseph Viola's Pentads and Hexads exersises, all of this was practiced at 100bpm, and was very accurate, I was actually proud of the effort (Does not mean that I'm awesome at these exercises, I just happened to not make many mistakes today).

I then spent an hour on some licks and Bebop ii-7 V7, Imaj7 licks in 12 keys, paying close attention to the keys that are utilised in the bridge of Have You Met Miss Jones. I tried to memorise and bring the speed of these licks up.

I then spent 2 hours playing some solos that I had written out on both Confirmation and Have You Met Miss Jones. I then spent about 40 minutes improvising with the Aebersold play alongs. I recorded this part again, but have not yet listened to it. I felt harmonically secure again, how ever on Confirmation I felt that I was getting really repetitive, on Confirmation I felt I was flowing a lot more through the bridge. I had in mind to use a lot more leaps and rhythmical variations.

I finished todays practice by transcribing some songs for my recital that is on the 13th of November, and will be spending the rest of the evening typing parts up for my band in Sibelius.

Thanks for reading, Happy Practice

1 comment:

  1. First comment to get the ball rolling :-) Love the name of the the blog!

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