Approaching The Standards Volume 1 Bb

Getting Started With Approaching The Standards Volume 1 Bb

I've been working with this material on and off for years, mostly with trumpet players and occasionally with tenor saxophonists who need the Bb transposition. The book itself is straightforward — it's a jazz theory method that builds from basic chord-tone targeting up through more advanced approach patterns — but the way people actually use it in practice is where things get tricky. I'll walk through the workflow I find myself coming back to most often, and point out the places where students usually get stuck. It's a method book by Barrie Cadogan designed for Bb-transposing instruments. Volume 1 focuses on the foundational concept of approaching chord tones from above and below, using both chromatic and diatonic movements. You learn to target specific notes within a progression rather than just running scales. The book assumes you can already read music and have a handle on your instrument's basic technique. If you're starting from zero on reading, this isn't the first book you should pick up. The Bb version transposes everything so that when you play a C in the book, it sounds like a Bb on your instrument. That matters more than people realize when you start drilling these exercises at tempo. I've seen players lose their place because they were reading the piano version instead of the Bb version without noticing.

The Core Workflow

Start slow. Really slow. I mean metronome-at-60-bpm slow. The point of Volume 1 is to build muscle memory around targeting the third and the fifth of each chord as it moves, not to play fast. Here's the process I tell people to follow: Step one: Pick a standard. The book uses common ones like "All the Things You Are," "Autumn Leaves," and "I Got Rhythm" changes. Don't skip ahead to the harder tunes. Work through the exercises in order for at least two weeks before touching the application sections at the back of the book. Most people blow past the drills because they seem too simple. That's exactly why they need them. Step two: For each exercise, identify the chord tone you're supposed to be targeting on every beat. Write it down if you have to. I used to skip this step myself when I was younger and it took me months to unlearn the habit of guessing. Write the chord, write the target note, then play it. Do this for one measure at a time until it feels automatic before moving to the next measure.

Step three: Apply the pattern to a full chorus of your chosen tune. Start with one choruses at quarter-note or half-note values. Once that's clean, add eighth notes. The book has a section for this but it's easy to rush. If you can't play it cleanly at slow tempo, you can't play it at fast tempo — this isn't motivational speaking, it's just how motor learning works. Step four: Record yourself. Not for critique. Just so you can hear what you're actually playing versus what you think you're playing. There's a gap between those two things that closes only through listening.

A Problem I Ran Into (And How I Fixed It)

Here's a specific issue that comes up constantly with the Bb transposition. When you're playing along with a lead sheet or a fake book in C, your brain has to convert on the fly. I hit a wall with "All the Things You Are" in the second movement — Ab major to F minor — where the approach patterns in the book use C and B natural as upper and lower neighbors to the target note Bb. But when I played it against a C melody, my fingers kept wanting to play the C-natural approach because that's what my eyes saw, not what my ears needed. It messed up the whole phrase. The workaround was simple and stupid: I wrote the sounding pitches above the staff in pencil right next to the transposed notation. Not a long-term solution, obviously. But for about two weeks while I was drilling that tune, it bridged the gap between what I was reading and what I was actually hearing. After that, the transposition became automatic and I stopped needing the written cues.

Common Mistakes People Make

Skipping the chromatic approaches. The book spends a solid chunk of time on chromatic neighbor tones — playing a half-step above and below your target. Players love the diatonic stuff because it feels more "jazzy" and musical right away. The chromatic work is less glamorous but it's what actually makes your lines sound deliberate rather than accidental. Don't bail on it. Using the wrong octave. Volume 1 has exercises that sit in a comfortable middle register for most Bb instruments. But when you apply them to tunes, some players drop the patterns an octave too low or shift them up too high without realizing it. This changes the character of the line completely. Keep the patterns in the same range where you practiced them until you've internalized them. Playing the patterns without hearing the harmony. This is the big one. You can run the exercises perfectly and still not sound like you're playing over the changes. The fix is to sing the target note before you play it. Even one second of singing it locks your ear in and makes your fingers follow. I still do this with new tunes even after years of playing.

What This Book Won't Do For You

Approaching The Standards Volume 1 Bb is a narrow tool. It teaches you approach patterns and chord-tone targeting. It does not teach you improvisation broadly. You won't learn voice leading, rhythm, phrasing, or how to develop a solo narrative from this book alone. It's a component, not a curriculum. If you try to use it as your only practice material, you'll develop clean but robotic lines that sound like exercises in a real musical context. The book also doesn't cover advanced harmonic substitution or reharmonization. Once you finish Volume 1 and move on, you'll want something that deals with tritone substitutions, side-slipping, and more complex tension-release structures. Volume 2 of the series goes further but even that has limits. For harmonic depth, you'd be better off pairing this with Mark Levine's "The Jazz Theory Book" or similar reference material. If you're a complete beginner to jazz improvisation, this might feel abstract at first. You need some baseline fluency with your instrument and familiarity with how jazz standards are structured before the material clicks. I'd recommend spending at least a few months getting comfortable with basic ii-V-I progressions in all twelve keys before opening this book. It'll save you weeks of frustration.

For the download question — I don't have a direct link to share. The book is published and available through standard music retailers and-sheet music distributors. Searching for "Approaching The Standards Volume 1 Bb Barrie Cadogan" will get you to the right place. There's no free PDF circulating that I'm aware of that's legitimate, and anything offering it for free is probably a scanning of outdated material that's missing recent errata corrections the publisher has issued. Work through it patiently. The method is sound. The results come from repetition, not from rushing to the advanced sections.