You’ll learn the whole thing much faster I promise. Save yourself a ton of time, and go as slow as necessary so as not to make any mistakes. If you repeatedly play the wrong note in your F# major scale, you are actually training yourself to play it incorrectly. Do not, I repeat do not allow yourself any mistakes. We are training our muscle memory here. Your muscles will remember to do the movement that you repeat. Practice the hard ones.ĭb, F# Ab and B will be the most challenging. Some of the keys are going to be much more difficult than others, You should be practicing those at least 80% of the time. Then we immediately transition to one of the hardest keys, Db. Second, it gets a step away from the very square way of playing your major scale that just goes from the root up to the root and back down again. First it gives us the right number of notes to make the exercise very neat rhythmically. Here’s the exercise, we play the major scale from the root up to the 9th. If you follow the steps in this video you should be able to have this down within a week and then have a quick way to run through all the keys. Very simply, if you are at all serious about playing the saxophone, knowing your major scales in all keys should be at the top of your list of things to get together quickly. I want to share that with you and give you some tips on how to tackle this challenge. I learned it pretty quickly and it had an immediate positive impact on my playing at the time. Steve Perillo gave me this exercise in our very first lesson. Shoutout to my saxophone teacher when I was about 14 years old.

This major scales challenge got me thinking of how I learned my scales for the first time. I recently challenged you to learn all 12 major scales on your saxophone… and then play them in one breath. How I Learned My Major Scales in all 12 Keys

A flat major scale alto sax