WE LEARN TO PLAY MUSIC BY LISTENING TO MUSIC, NOT BY MEMORIZING SCALES

We listen to someone play, and then, we try as best we can to mimic what we just heard on our own horn. We repeat that process over and over until we get it right. Along the way, we learn such valuable tools as phrasing, note choice, dynamics, and so on.

That's been the proven best way to learn how to play an instrument. But instead of doing that, we more often than not get caught up in theory and rote memorization and tests and so on -- especially when we are just starting out.

And this is especially the time that we need to listen and imitate -- when we are in the beginning of the learning process.

Why?

This is much the same way we learned to speak, right? We heard the people around us talking and making sounds and over time and trial and error, we learned to repeat the language. We made mistakes. But our parents encouraged us and we got better. Later, we learned the alphabet, and how to write words.

Now, imagine not being able to talk, but having to learn the alphabet anyway. It would be a meaningless experience, right? Language facility first, then the building blocks and tools.

We do music pretty much in reverse of this. Music education quite often involves learning the equivalent of the alphabet long before we can play music.

And in the end, so many of our students simply never 'get' music. They have no idea how to play, how to develop a sound, because they never listen and imitate. That's not part of a traditional music education.

As s student of the art, you've simply got to listen to music, and you've got to study the history of it. I play R&B style sax, and I know that I likewise replay the roots of that music when I perform, as learned by transcribing the solos of top R&B founding sax players like Jr. Walker and King Curtis and Rusty Bryant.

R&B is a language with a history, and incorporating those elements of the language, meaning all of those particular sounds and articulations and phrasing and riffs passed down through the ages into the dialogue, makes for a successful solo.

We're not re-inventing the wheel here.

Playing music is all about knowing  the history of the music, and how to use it as a soloist. And understanding the context of that history is where a student of music can focus her/his efforts.

The good news is that just about every single note in the archives of R&B is on record and as such made accessible by YouTube.

So go listen, and learn by repeating what you hear. Put on a track by your favorite artist, listen over and over until you have the piece in your memory and can sing the notes, and then pick up your horn and see what comes out.