Effsharpminor Syllabub
I found this, while looking through some old photographs.
I must have thought it worth keeping or I wouldn’t have written it down, or taken the photo. I’ve not seen the actual bit of paper since that day.
It’s an arpeggiated exercise for learning chordal patterns within F# Melodic Minor. It may seem a bit abstruse but all those patterns are very useful.
I’ve just tried to play it – and it’s very difficult. That’s over four years now (going by the date stamp of the photo) and I still haven’t learned it. I think I’d better get on with it…
Playing just the thirds
Here’s another useful exercise I just arrived at after some work on Aebersold, Volume 42 – “Blues in all keys”.
Having learned what the the chord notes and scale notes are (track 11, Blues in Ab -for trumpet) because Aebersold writes them all in for you, I found it hard to ignore them and that I couldn’t avoid playing simply chords and scales. So I wrote just the chord symbols on a post-it and stuck it in the page – effectively taking away one of the crutches. Then I found that because I still kept drifting away from knowing what notes I was playing I needed a way of making me focus this in relation to the given chords, so I went through the sequence playing just the thirds of every chord.
This is a great exercise for me. I must go through the entire book(s) doing this. It will be a great help.