Student’s question:

Hi David,

I have been playing the saxophone for 20 years. I am mostly self-taught. I did about 2 years of jazz studies but I don’t think I was ready to grasp what I was taught. I have problems remembering songs (especially jazz tunes) and I want to feel more confident improvising. I want to train my ears so I can just pick up a tune instantly and play. How can I learn this?

Cheers,
Vai

David’s response:

Hi Vai,

The reason why it’s hard to learn and remember new songs is because you don’t know the basic building blocks from which all of these songs are made. Just imagine trying to memorize a paragraph in your own language, and now compare that to trying to memorize a paragraph in Chinese. If you understand the individual words, it’s a lot easier to remember the whole story.

What you need is a clear path that gives you a mastery of all the different harmonic situations that you’re going to encounter in the songs you want to play. This is the path we lay out in your IFR Membership, and it changes your experience completely because you’re improvising with confidence right from the start, but you’re also gaining a mastery of the essential chord progressions that all songs are made from.

You’ll have no trouble picking up tunes and improvising confidently if you just take things in the right order. IFR will lead you through this complete path, from improvising over your very first chord progressions all the way up to the jazz tunes that you want to play. And you’ll learn to HEAR the chord progressions in any song, so you can jump right in and start playing even if you’ve never heard the song before.

David