Paul Maine

Software Engineer, Musician and Life Long Learner

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Jazz Aids

C Major Scale Exercise

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In order to improve our musicianship it is critical to improve our technique on the saxophone. We begin with a C major scale exercise that you can download.  As you work through the scale exercise be sure to use a metronome. Record your progress as you increase the speed of the metronome. Do not increase the speed of the metronome until until you can play the exercise completely without error. It is also good to practice your jazz articulation ( please see my jazz articulation post ) on this exercise.

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Jazz Articulation

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Master saxophonist and educator Jacob Lampe provides the following comments on proper jazz articulation:

“Tongue the upbeats and slur into the downbeats.   The upbeats whether swing (uneven) or straight can be lightly accented / tongued and you slur into the beats for the jazz style. dat would be more of an ending note, or short note… like  do-da-do-dat!

do being slured/unaccented
da being light tongue accent
dat – strong accent”

In chapter 2 of “Jazz Theory Resources Volume One” by Bert Ligon, Bert has a nice section on “Accents and Articulations”.

In the JAN/FEB 2009 issue of the Saxophone Journal, Greg Fishman has a good jazz articulation article entitled  “The Art OF Jazz Articulation,Part 1”.

Fishman calls the articulation of sluring into downbeats and tonguing the upbeats as “Mainstream Tonguing”. Sonny Stitt is an excellent example of a wonderful player that uses “Mainstream Tonguing”.

There are countless variations of jazz articulation but this should get you started.

What type of articulation do you use?

Practice your musical instrument!

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If you don’t practice for a day you know the difference, two days and your friends know the difference, three days and everyone knows the difference!

While you are sleeping the competition is practicing!

Set aside time each day with clearly defined objectives and protect the time slot.

Make practice fun!

Transcription Software

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An important part of learning the jazz language is transcribing the music of those that have gone before us as well as those that are still with us. It is important to not only figure out the notes and rhythms but to also to figure out the articulations, pitch bends and other nuances.

We happen to be fortunate to live in an age of technology that provides us with wonderful tools to simplify the transcription process. In the past, transcribers would slow down the speed of phonographs in order to determine the notes. Although this would slow down the music – the pitch would also be lowered and in many cases the music would be “muddy” and difficult to “play along with”.

I have evaluated several different transcription software packages and prefer Transcribe!

Transcribe is available from the following URL:

http://www.seventhstring.com/

The software runs on mac, PC and Linux.

Do you use any transcribing software? If yes, what are you using?

What is a contrafact?

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Wikopedia defines a contrafact as follows:

“A contrafact is a new musical composition built out of an already existing one, most of a new melody overlaid on a familiar harmonic structure. As a compositional device, it was of particular importance in the 1930s/1940s development of bop, since it allowed jazz musicians to create new pieces for performance and recording on which they could immediately improvise, without having to seek permission or pay publisher fees for copyrighted materials (while melodies can be copyrighted, the underlying harmonic structure cannot be).”

The song “Donna Lee”  is a contrafact of  “Back Home in Indiana”.

We will be using contrafacts to communicate and illustrate various jazz aids.