I am practicing the IFR exercise ‘Sing the Map’ and I can move up and down the scale but I cannot yet make interval jumps and “wander freely”. Should I just keep practicing moving through the scale? Will this bring about the ability to sing the notes freely one day?
In Exercise 1 you describe "...looking down on this musical terrain from above..." Does this mean visualizing fingerings on your horn, notes on a staff, letters on a page or something else?
For IFR students practicing Exercise 1: Landscape, this is a demonstration of the Exercise 1 Daily Meditation. Miguel 'Pintxo' Villar demonstrates the exercise on the tenor saxophone using the interval of a half step.
An interesting variation on the Staircase exercise is to alternate between half steps and whole steps. This produces what jazz improvisers call the diminished scale.
For IFR students practicing Exercise 2: Melody, this is a demonstration of Seven Worlds on the cello. Leticia Aparicio builds the 6th harmonic environment note by note, visualizing each step along the way using the IFR Tonal Map.
In this lesson, I show you how just a small alteration to the Mobility technique allows you to move all over the neck of your bass by whole steps. Once you've mastered both half steps and whole steps, you're ready to jump into IFR Exercise 2: Melody.
In this free sample lesson from Deep Foundations for Guitar, you will learn to move freely all over the neck of your guitar by half steps.
In this lesson you'll learn to control the tonal center in your music, allowing you to create the seven harmonic environments of the major scale.
Grab your instrument and practice improvising over chords 1 and 4 with me!
In this video we will train our ear with the beautiful chords of the minor blues.
