How to play the sax line from Alexandra Stan’s (from Romania) song. First note is G#. There are four sharps in the key.

If your G# is sticking, this will be a bit difficult to play. Clean it with a bill if you need to. There is a little vibrato that you want to use on some of the long notes.

First part of Stanley Turrentine’s solo on ‘The Hustler’.  Played on tenor sax, but if you’re looking at the notes, you can play it on alto sax for a D-7 chord too.  Try playing it in a few keys.  Starts on the fifth and goes to the root for the first interval.  Notice how space is used in the lick.  You can even see that visually in the video.  Filling up all the space doesn’t mean you’re playing something that will sound better!

Erskine asked,

Hi Neal , Would explain the II, V I concept in jazz music

Thanks.

Here is part of the explanation, leave a comment if you have some more ideas on it!

The ii V I progression ‘pulls’ your ear towards the next piece. It moves towards ‘resolution’ as we hear it. You may want to try playing the ii V I progression on a piano or guitar to get a better feel for it. Though, almost invariably, you have heard the ii V I progression in music.

If we break the components down, the roman numerals correspond with numbers, but it gives us another set of numbers to use (more options for notation).

If you take a major scale, you can use a number (roman numeral) for each note. And you can build chords and scales starting from each of the seven notes in the major scale.

The progression of ii V I would have chords built on the second note, fifth note, and first note. In C major, that would be D, G, and C respectively.

Those chords only use the notes from the original major scale.

Because of the intervals between the notes in the chords, the movement seems to flow right from ii to V to I, this has to do with the closeness of the notes.

If we look at seventh chords, notes with four chords, here are the notes for the ii V I in C major.

ii: D, F, A, C
V: G, B, D, F
I: C, E, G, B

The C in the ii chord is a half step away from the B in the V chord. The F in the V chord is a half step away from the E in the I chord and the B in the V chord is also a half step away from the C in the one chord. (the other two notes stay the same).

That’s part of the answer at least!

Mark in the Caribbean asked, “One question, how many scales there are 12 or 15?”

To your ear, there are 12 scales.  They can be written in different ways though.

You could write a C# scale or a Db scale and it would sound the same, but it would be written differently.  Same with F# and Gb.

The are three scales that are somewhat commonly written in different ways which would make it seem like there are 15, but C# sounds the same as Db, F# sounds the same as Gb, and Cb sounds the same as B.

You will see them written in different ways depending on the context.  That can make the relationships between scales and chords more clear.

For example, there is no A# in the F major scale, but there is a Bb.  So if you wanted to show the relationship of a chord to F major, it would be notated as Bb, not A#.  In that way, it is useful to think of there scales in different ways.  And then, visually, there would be 15 (or more) scales.

If you imagined you were playing an A# or Bb, it will still sound the same though.

For me, C# seems more comfortable than Db, so if I see Db major, I might think of C#.

But if you just heard the scales, there would be 12.

Drawing of Sonny Rollins by EvilHairDay.  Saw Sonny Rollins at the Monterey Jazz Festival this last year.  He still puts on a great performance!

Sonny Rollins

Technology man!  This tool is the latest in 8 bit technology!

Combine this software with blue pants, red leather gloves, and some sunglasses……. and you’re pretty much set.

Made possible by Pippen Barr with a tip of his hat to Sergei Stepanov and SunStroke Project.

Five monumental phases.  Practicing, recording, jamming, the Eurovision contest and 10 hours of youtube glory.

Try this out yourself and become an epic sax guy with 8 bits!

 http://www.pippinbarr.com/games/epicsaxgame/EpicSaxGame.html

(And notice today’s date on the calendar)

To learn how to play this on alto – epic sax guy lesson.

I emailed a bit with Barr about the game. He lives in Denmark, and while he said he doesn’t know if he’d call himself a Eurovision “fan,” he’s definitely more aware of it than he was when he lived in Canada or New Zealand.

Initially it was just going to be a straight up version of the loop and I was thinking about the style of something like the BIT.TRIP games, where the aesthetics improve/degrade as you perform.

But after a while I became really enamoured of this idea that you could follow the life of the Sax Guy, mostly because when I put in the Practice Mode and I needed a background I ended up drawing him playing at home, and it seemed so nice to recontextualise the music that I wanted to add more contexts.

As for the YouTube page, Barr says that that section certainly goes on for 10 hours, though he hasn’t played it nearly that long. The comments are taken from the page itself. Might this be the first game ever to incorporate real-world YouTube comments?

Full size
Any way you slice it, Epic Sax Game is a great deal of fun, and a surprisingly potent bit of playable history. Barr says he’s bummed that he missed seeing SunStroke Project live in 2010, which he missed by a year. “I wonder whether Epic Sax Guy would have been so striking seen pre-meme?” he writes. “Probably.”

How to play the first notes on saxophone. B through F chromatically. Seven notes.

The mid range is easier to play on saxophone than the highest and lowest notes. These notes are taught chromatically. Adding a ‘#’ (sharp) to a note raises it by a half step. Adding a ‘b’ (flat) to a note lowers it by a whole step. The chromatic scale is what you would hear if you play the notes on a piano in order with both the white keys and black keys.

Lesson dedicated to Bess in New Zealand.

A while back I mentioned a ‘digital lick’ that you could play on saxophone. You basically equate the notes with numbers. If the scale is C major, 1 would be C, 2 would be D, 3 would be E, 4 would be F, 5 would be G, etc.

This lick uses 1, 2, 3, 5. In C major, that’s C, D, E, G. Here it’s recorded on tenor, and I show how to play it in C, but you can hear it in all keys moving around the circle of fourths. You can play it on alto sax too, it will just be in a different key.

Line comes from Charlie Parker’s solo on Celerity.

You can play it over a G major chord.  If you transpose the lick, it will work over any major chord.

Hadn’t done any tenor sax video lessons for a little while, so I figured I would do a few.

First note is G.  Try it out, let me know how it goes!

Four notes, first three notes are slurred, last is tongued

Receive a question related to tonguing the notes for the song Careless Whisper for the alto sax video lesson I made.

I’ve started to follow your Careless Whisper instructions. it gets a little harder on the 3rd page where it goes into a high D, (which I’ve forgotten the fingering) so I give up there, but it is my current goal.

I may need to take my sax in for servicing as it`s been in storage a while. Plus I think I will need to get some new reeds, they are number 2 and have also been in storage.  It’s hard to make time to play. But, already  between yesterday and today I’ve improved.

However, I can’t remember if I am supposed to tongue every note. Maybe you can answer that for me. Maybe I am supposed to slur only where there is a slur notice.

Thanks again

My response:

The D uses a palm key and the octave key.  Check out the fingering chart if you need to look up the notes.

Slurring and tonguing depends on the music, sometimes you actually don’t play exactly as it seems to be notated with everything tongue and you definitely don’t want all the notes short in a lot of situations.

If you would like more personal help, check out Saxophone Tribe.

http://SaxophoneTribe.com

For something like Careless Whisper, you could play it with your own style in which case you would tongue where it seemed to make sense.  Or if you’re trying to play it similar to another sax player, you can learn some things about phrasing and articulation from how they approached it.  For Careless Whisper, I would check out either the original or Sergio Flores.  Or you could listen how I played it and you could see exactly what I did within Saxophone Tribe if you’re interested.  From there you can change it a bit into your own style.

The image above in the post shows one piece from my recording of Careless Whisper from the video.  You can see that there are four notes, the first three notes are slurred  the fourth is tongued.  To make things smoother, I would recommend not tonguing all the notes for a tune like this.

Could show you more things like that in how I approach music within Saxophone Tribe.

To sign up for Saxophone Tribe, go to this page

http://saxophonetribe.com/so-you-really-want-to-learn-how-to-play-saxophone/