Thanks Johnny and believe me, I won’t cut corners/miss any steps as I would only be hurting & fooling myself. I would rather take my time and learn things the right way v.s. rushing and developing bad habits; regardless of how long it takes to learn. One of my biggest problem areas when I learned the major scales was the Bb major scale. I don’t know what it was (and sometimes still is LOL) but it took a lot more work for me to learn than any of the other major scales.
I think the temptation for someone learning to miss/skip over those important areas they’re having trouble with is because they want to sound so badly like the player who turned them on to the Saxophone without realizing the time & endless hours that very player HIMSELF had to put in to addressing these problem areas you talked about that they themselves had to overcome. And when they don’t sound like the person that turned them on then they’ll just give up and stop playing the saxophone 🙁 An example of this is a video I shared in the blog on the post for Alto Saxophone of three world-famous players on stage together improvising….all of them were on Alto Saxophones. It’s INCREDIBLE to see what they do with 7 notes or less!!! But were talking YEARS to get to that point. The one thing these guys didn’t do was to skip problem areas they themselves had; but rather they addressed those problem areas. In fact, here’s that very video LOL The Improvisation starts at 3:30. Listen to these guys hits those Altissimo notes!!!