I welcome back to the music coach. This is week 11 of tenor sax lessons. We're getting to the end of the program. So we're going to start adding in our final few pieces to help us get you on your way through really getting going and your musical journey. And hopefully by now, you found some way to play with some other people. And if not, hopefully that's going to happen soon for you.

We're going to add this week is playing around the melodies that are in our songs. Now improvising. Its history comes from embellishing melodies, and embellishing is just a fancy word for putting your own flair and spin and personality on top of a melody. You may have heard a famous song redone by a different artist. And notice that there are subtle changes or maybe even big changes that the Newer artists has put on it. And this history of embellishment and adding new things to existing melodies was really the seed and the beginning of improvising as an art form in jazz and later on in r&b and rock and roll and things like that.

So what you're going to work on in the practice video is playing the melody what we call straight, which is exactly the way it's written. And then the second time through making little changes by approaching one of the notes from below or above or holding a note a little longer than it normally would be or playing it shorter. And really try and think of this as weaving around the melody rather than completely improvising, which is you could be starting in a completely different place. So I know you're going to do a great job at it, and I'll see in the practice video