A Kind of Hush

{-1 -9* +5 +4 -2 -3 -3 +6 -2 -8* +5 +3 -2 -3 -3 +6} x 12

This is an exercise that is easy to hear in you head, as it comes from the hook of a pop song. It goes through all major, minor and diminished triads, so it is bound to help you on your instrument on a purely technical level. It is also an extremely powerful tool for developing your ear-playing chops, on one condition: that you play it by ear! Everything hinges on whether you write it out into all 12 keys and play it from the score or whether you hold the melody of the first two bars in your head and then keep chaining it by ear. I have written the MOVES above the dots so the classically chained can get started. The linksum is -7 which means it descends by a perfect fifth at each iteration. So to avoid falling off the bottom of your horn, you will need to slip up an octave now and again, by replacing the starred moves -9 with a +3 or the -8 with a +4 (i.e. adding +12).

Check out the MOVES page if there is anything you don’t understand.

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