Welcome/Learning Tunes

Hi and welcome to my blog!  My name is Jonathan McNutt and I'm a music student at Texas State University.  I play saxophone, flute and clarinet as well as compose.  Over the past few months as I have discovered a cool new pattern or transcribed a cool solo, I've thought to myself, "I should write this stuff down and share it with other musicians".  I think this desire largely stems from my feeling that I owe about 99% of my musical knowledge to other musicians.  Anyway, this blog will be my attempt to share some of my discoveries and thoughts about music with those interested.  We'll see how this goes!  


Anyway, I though I'd start with sharing a video I recently found on Youtube by Saxophonist Bob Reynolds.  In the video, Bob talks about his approach to learning new tunes.  Here it is:    

I think the approach Bob describes is a great one for a few reason:

1) The nature of this method is restrictive, by which I mean that you are restricting your harmonic choices to, say, just the roots of the chords.  This allows you to really familiarize yourself with the root movement of the tune and make sure you know it while not having to worry about upper extensions or playing every hip lick you can.  Bob talks about doing a sort of step-method, where you gradually add more of the notes of the chord.  I think this is good because you can focus on each partial at a time.  Do you know all the thirds of the chords?  7ths?  11ths?  By restricting your choices you have less to think about while you practice so you can you can focus on other factors like sound of rhythmic content.  

2)  This method really lets you know how well you know a tune.  Whether or not you know all the changes to a tune becomes very apparent when you stop trying to play a killin' solo and just try to accurately convey the harmony.  I think it's a good way to find out what parts of tunes you may still need to work on.  

3)  It's fun!  Playing rhythmic motifs around a tune using specific harmonic choices sure beats playing half-notes and whole-notes through the tune over and over.  I'm always trying to practice in ways that I enjoy and that I'll look forward to, and this seems like a good way to have fun while learning a new tune.  

One thing I would add to Bob's method is something I've started doing as an exercise recently.  Through both transcribing Chris Potter playing tunes unaccompanied and from working on the Bach Cello Suites, I became interested in spread triads.  By spread triad, I mean a triad voiced with the color notes higher than the root and fifth (F major triad voiced F-C-A-E instead of F-A-C-E).  I think it's helpful to do what I call the "Bach Cello Exercise", which is simply playing through a standard using spread triads (I usually have to do this out of time at first).  The next step in the exercise is to try to play contrapuntal melodies.  These melodies can be based on half-notes and quarter notes-it's OK to simple-I think the value in the exercise is just to be able to visualize all the notes in the given triad in all inversion in all the octaves of your instrument. Easier said than done.  

Well, that ended up being pretty long-I hope some of it is helpful.  Anyway, Stay tuned-I will be posting some transcriptions I've done as soon as I figure out how to convert to the proper format.  Thanks for checking out the blog!