The Most Fun
Method for Playing Sax By Ear
Enroll in this FREE 6-part video lesson course about how to start playing the saxophone by ear using just 5 notes!
This is the Most Important Page on this Website
Please read this entire page because I'm going to give you the secret right up front.
A Crucial Difference
There is a crucial difference between what I teach and what everyone else does, and it is why my students get faster results and eventually achieve their goals on the saxophone rather than staying stuck in a rut or worse, giving up.
It will work for you too, absolutely guaranteed. I know this because this secret can be found in all of the music you listen to, love and would like to learn to play.
One of my students summed it up best like this:
I have been viewing one by one the videos in your Pentatonic Foundation Course and I am absolutely AMAZED at how the pentatonic scale works! My only problem is that I can’t learn the lessons fast enough. I am dumbfounded that all this music can be produced from 5 notes.
Denver in Chicago
Ok, here's the secret...
Instead of having to learn very complex music theory
how to read sheet music
chord progressions
multiple scales
harmony
and a long list of other things…
We are going to start out by learning a simple group of 5 notes called the pentatonic scale.
I’m going to show you how you can get incredible mileage out of these 5 notes and before we ever even talk about all the other complexities of music, we can learn to play popular song melodies and improvise solos that sound great.
Don't Believe Me?
Just listen to the fantastic Gary Herbig play this world famous solo using only these five notes. (30 second clip below)
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Need More Proof?
Here’s one melody out of literally hundreds of examples you most certainly know already:
Superstition by Stevie Wonder (30 second clip below)
Believe it or not...
every note you just heard was from the pentatonic scale that I’m about to show you.
So maybe you're asking yourself,
“If this secret is so simple and can really be heard in all styles of music, why am I hearing about this for the first time from you?”
The reason has to do with the standard, conventional way music has been taught for centuries.
No One Ever Told Me What I'm About to Tell You
In my own quest to learn how to play the music I love, I went to a 4 year music school studying classical and jazz saxophone performance, then did a 2 year masters degree in jazz performance where I learned all the intricacies of music at a very deep level and no one ever told me the secrets I’m about to reveal to you.
I figured it this out the hard way which required putting aside a lot of what I learned in school and instead focusing on practical, real-world music like the above examples.
Everyone, including myself, learns to play saxophone by one of 2 approaches, which are basically the same thing.
The Classical and Jazz Schools of Music
Both of these schools make what should be simple and direct into a very complex process that, according to them, requires you to take lots of lessons and classes with professors and buy textbooks and method books, and learn a helluva lot of stuff that will leave you scratching your head thinking.
Do I really need to know all of this to play the thing I started out wanting to learn?
In my case, the thing I really wanted to learn was how to play...
The Blues
That was the legendary B.B. King who was one of my personal guitar heros along with the other gentlemen seated next to him. Jimmy Vaughan (SRV’s brother), Robert Cray, and Eric Clapton.
And yes, once again, what you just heard was played using exclusively the 5 notes I’ve been talking about.
When you get a minute watch the full version of that video. They each take a solo and about 98% of the notes they all play in all of their solos are from… you guessed it, the amazing, versatile and not to mention bluesy, pentatonic scale.
Listen to this 25 second clip…
If this all sounds good to you so far, it gets even better.
The best part is that you can and will learn to do all of this…
With NO Sheet Music !
So if you don’t know how to read music, great, it just makes what we’re trying to do more complicated.
If you do already read music, that’s fine too, but I’m going to ask you not to, and for this system to work, you will have to trust me and put the sheet music away for a while.
So, if you’ve been wanting to learn to play music like you heard in the above audio examples, but felt that it was out of your reach, or too complicated, you were wrong.
Many of my students are able to play familiar songs by ear without looking at any sheet music within the first hour of taking my Pentatonic Foundation Course. Playing completely improvised solos follows shortly after.
This system works for saxophone players of all levels.
Even total beginners are able to advance quickly when they follow this method as a recent student explained in his email to me below…
I must say I’m impressed. Less than a week and I was able to play along with Don’t Worry be Happy. I have only been playing sax for a couple months and your tutorials are perfect. Thanks again!
Gene (BetterSax student)
If you are interested,
I’d like to reveal to you my simple system for learning how to play tons of music like the examples you heard on this page and more, entirely by ear.
It’s called the Play Sax By Ear Crash Course…
