Simple Practice Tricks That BOOST Your Technique

[Music] ah works every time hello this video is sponsored by my messy room perhaps me living on my own was a mistake that means i go untamed i'm joking i'm joking i'm going to clean this room eventually just give me like a few years okay so i've been right back on it with the lessons i've been giving lesson after lesson after lesson after lesson after lesson after listening people generally don't realize you can literally play anything literally anything well how is that possible okay well i'm gonna show you the key is setting a goal but it's attainable it's realistic so basically every practice session i tried to accomplish something that i wasn't able to at the beginning of the practice session like i said the goal has to be attainable you can't make a goal that's just ridiculous for example a crazy 16th note line that you can only play cleanly at like 20 beats per minute and you're hoping by the end of the practice session you can play it at 200 beats per minute that's not going to happen in one practice session but here's the thing we tend to overestimate how much we can do in a day but we tend to underestimate how much we can do in a month so with every practice session if you can accomplish something little even if it's a practice routine say you can accomplish something within each part of your routine then by the end of the month you will have accumulated so much growth now i know what you're thinking ah setting a small quality again everyone says this i understand that it can be different hearing someone tell you something and watching what someone tells you so that's exactly what i'm going to be doing in this video i'm going to try to play something that i can't play quite yet but it's attainable and then i'm going to show you the methods that i do in order to attain it now here's another thing you must realize the stronger you are in your fundamentals and scales the faster you learn anything which means the faster that you can sight read it the faster that it makes sense to you the faster you can go up in tempo and the faster that it becomes ingrained into your plane so in order to practice these fundamentals there's a lot of books out there but the problem with these books is that they're often not in the full range of the horn nor are they in all 12 keys but i wrote a book and it took me a whole summer to write this book it's about 140 pages where i put all the fundamental scale patterns and exercises that you should know within a major scale and i put them in all 12 keys and the full range of the horn that way you don't practice an exercise on one key that only includes part of the horn's register and then you're like well i can play it here but i sure hope if i ever see this in a real piece of music it doesn't go anywhere beyond this part of the register because i haven't practiced it okay so a key that i hate right now on my saxophone is f sharp major who doesn't hate f major okay so what i'm going to do now is pull up the book on my laptop when you download the book it gives you an interactive pdf so you can actually click a tab and here it is f sharp major you click on it and what do you know you're on f sharp major so i'm going to find a workout that just seems like it sucks to me okay broken fourths forwards this will be a great example alright so first what i'm gonna do is play it at a comfortable tempo without a metronome it's getting pretty late at night so i'm sub toning all these low notes i don't want to make my neighbors more mad than they need to be they did say i can practice at any time of the day but i don't think they realize how loud the saxophone can get so i'm gonna practice all the low register notes in the sub tone hope that's okay [Music] oh [Music] boom okay that didn't feel too bad so here's exactly what i do to make the most of this practice session i find that tempo that i just did it i try to find a rough estimate so i pull up a metronome [Music] okay so i did it at about 63 beats per minute now the first thing is set a goal so remember i said it needs to be attainable so if i were to try to go up to 208 do again i genuinely don't think i could do that today i have to be very honest with myself listen to my body listen to where i'm ready right now let me try to find a tempo that i know i couldn't do it right now but if i put in a bit of work i can do it today by the end of this practice session and it also depends how much am i willing to put into this right now am i willing to put in an hour in this workout or do i just want to spend like 15 minutes right now i'm feeling more about 15 minutes so i'm not gonna shoot super high there's no rush to get to a crazy fast tempo 126. let's see if i can do this i know i can't okay so just like i thought i can't do it but i know if i just put in 15 minutes with this method i'm going to show you i can do it so 126 is the goal so the first part of the method is what i call the doubt clearing phase this is where you practice really slow slower than you know you can play it as if everything is a long tone but as i'm doing this i'm thinking of but as i'm doing this i'm thinking about everything i'm thinking about the note i'm on i'm thinking about the note after i'm thinking about the note i just played what i'm doing is getting rid of all doubts i am being concrete of what note is what i'm deciding okay after this note this note comes after this note this this this is sharp this is sharp this is a natural everything so i'm going to do 50 beats per minute but i'm going to hold each note for four of these counts now this is going to be very boring to watch so i'm going to show as part of it and then i'm just going to speed it up but also understand there are some other things in mind i'm also trying to play very relaxed making sure my fingers aren't tits and make sure every interval that i finger through is very clean i don't want any off i want straight up [Music] boom boom point a point b all right here we go [Laughter] wow powering on welcome to all tech lansing ah now that step is initially not the most exciting step but it's a necessary step now i have a stronger sense of exactly what notes are what maybe i should use the biz a sharp here and then the side a shop here etc so that's the doubt clearing phase now here's part two part two i don't really use a metronome i call this the long short long short long short long so essentially i'm going to play the first note long and i'm going to play the next note really short and i'm going to play the next note really long and now the longs can be as long as i want and the short has to be as short as i can get it what this does is allows you to see two notes at a time as one movement so now we're starting to work on compressing all this information into smaller bite-sized comprehensible bits of information so this is also a pretty hybrid approach this allows you to practice 50 of the passage fast and the other 50 slow so let's go ahead and do that [Laughter] [Music] ah messed up there so here is a problem area i need to fix right now okay feeling better on that [Music] hmm okay so i finished that now i'm going to invert it i'm going to practice the other percent fast and the other fifty percent slow now how we're going to do that is instead of long short long foot long short long short long so long short long we're going to do short long trip long foot long short long short long okay here we go ah ugly one so it looks like the b to the e sharp is going to be a little problem area there so let's go ahead and address it now before it screws us up later [Music] step three is now i'm going to put this on a metronome but here's the thing i'm going to put the metronome slightly faster than my gold tempo and i'll explain to you in a second so the goal tempo was 126. yeah so i'm gonna put on 132. now this isn't too much different than step two so i'm gonna go [Music] so it's essentially the same thing but now the longs have to follow the metronome those longs are now pretty short now they're just dotted eighth notes [Music] so i'm messing up here okay there's another area good and as you can see this is a pretty ugly process i don't sound that good right now but someone told me if you're in a practice room and you sound great then you're probably not practicing what you should be practicing so i'm being pretty vulnerable and showing you guys all my ugly saxophone playing but i will take the sacrifice if it means you feel less lonely when you're messing up in the practice room as well now with this exercise the goal isn't necessarily to play the whole thing perfectly i mean this is faster than where we can take it right but what we're doing is we're those 16th notes are faster much faster than where our goal tempo that we set in the very beginning is so as you can kind of see what's coming up here i'm setting myself to making that goal tempo i had set to feel really easy so let's go ahead and finish the step three now i'm going to do short long short long short long i'm gonna do the sixteenth note first and then the dotted eighth note [Music] [Music] okay so the b to the e sharp is really giving me some problem here so i'm just gonna spend a bit of time on that cool let's keep going [Music] [Music] awesome so what we did is we accomplished some stuff in a tempo that is just not my territory right now i don't belong in 132 quite yet on this workout but i went in there and i grabbed some things anyway okay so step four i'm gonna stick to 132 beats per minute and what i'm gonna do i'm gonna play these as eighth notes and i'm gonna group these eighth notes in three notes at a time so this will be a little confusing but we're just gonna play one two three make that three as long as you need to and then whenever you're ready go ahead and play the next three notes one two three one two three one two three but make sure you have this metronome on just to keep you on the eighth note rhythm one two three one two three so this is helping us compress the information even more so now we're seeing three notes at a time as one movement [Music] [Music] [Music] hey [Music] do okay so i connected all these in three notes at a time but there are other groups of notes that i haven't played in three groups because i did one two three one but what about those three and the one that i just stopped at we need to combine those together so let's go ahead and do that the way that you do that is you do this one two three pattern again but you start on the second note this time and this way you're gonna have a new mix of one two three one two threes so here we go [Music] okay and there's actually one more set that we haven't practiced of the three notes set and that's when we start on the third note and do this so so it's going to be one two and then one two three [Music] [Music] okay awesome very very good stuff wow okay and remember like i said this is not a very beautiful process i'm sounding pretty bad that's just part of it that's part of what it is to practice okay and now the last method here is doing the same thing but instead of three note patterns you're gonna do four note patterns so exact same thing same tempo but just one two three four oh one two three four oh one two three four oh one two three four oh okay but that being said that means we have to do all the one two three fours for each four groups so you're gonna have a one two three four one two four and then after you finish that you're gonna have to go one and then one two three four one two three four one two four and then after you finish that you're gonna go one two and then one two three four one two three four one two four and then after that you're gonna go one two three and then one two three four one two three four one two three four one two three four so i'm starting to run out of time here so i'm just going to go ahead and do this part and fast forward foreign so i finally did it i finished all the steps now watch this this happens to all my students and it happens to me even to this day i'm going to go back to the goal tempo because i've been practicing in a faster territory so when we're asking ourselves to go even slower we're asking ourselves to make this even easier when this goal tempo was actually hard it's like we just tricked ourselves okay so that's exactly what i'm going to do i'm going to go to 126 and i'm just going to play it all across and i bet you i can do it i betcha i can do it on the first try okay here i go among the truth [Music] ah and there you have it folks works every time so you set a small attainable goal and then you reach it and then you keep doing this every day and then your progress will accumulate and then pretty soon you'll be the ultimate master of all so you can see how i'm breathing through that i'm not out of air now once you get that down give yourself about 10 years to learn that part okay well i hope this video helped and i hope yeah i hope for a lot of things and by the way thank you for 53 000 subscribers oh my god oh wow wow okay well have a good day

Channel: Saxologic

Views: 90,612

Rating: 4.9572701 out of 5

Keywords: saxophone, sax, clarinet, mario kart lick, flute, charlie parker, jazz articulation, dood'n tonguing, zackgrooves, davie504, bob reynolds, insaneintherainmusic

Id: voy7qCH_J_M

Length: 20min 0sec (1200 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 19 2020