You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 4 Ways to Keep Motivated

Episode Date: May 21, 2020

In this episode, Peter and Adam list off some ways that you can stay inspired to practice regularly.4 Ways to Keep MotivatedListenSwitch it up - something differentA big challengeMake it obviousLinks From This Episode:Open Studio now has an app! Getting your regular practice in has never been easier thanks to our Guided Practice App - featuring Adam's daily Guided Practice Sessions, lessons from our Piano Finger Independence course, and more practice adviceThere's a new course from Open Studio: Rhythm Section Workout is available now! Play along with Peter Martin on piano, Reuben Rogers on bass, and Gregory Hutchinson on drums as they teach you the tips and tricks to playing with a bandCheck out the book Atomic Habits mentioned in this episodeToday's Open Studio Live Events (All times in EDT):1:00 PM - Adam's Daily Guided Practice Session (for Members Only)3:00 PM - Geoffrey Keezer guest-hosts a Guided Practice Session (also for Members Only)For the rest of this week's calendar, follow this linkIn light of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, we understand that money is tight for a lot of people right now. That's why we've decided that for the duration of this crisis, we'll be running a Choose What You Pay campaign at Open Studio. Choose whichever course you want and then let us know how much you're willing to pay - that's it. For more info, click this link.Interested in more music advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase. And be sure to check out our All Access Pass - every course from Open Studio on every instrument.Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Adam. What's up, Pete? What's your motivation level now from one to 57? 57 being highly motivated. One being comatose. 56.8. All right, good. I got four things for you to get you to 57, buddy.

I'm Adam Anas. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear Podcast. Daily music advice and motivation. Coming at you. Coming at you today, sponsored by AnyTune. go to anytune.us. You'll hear it to check out Anytune.

This is a tool that you can use to transcribe just about anything and everything. You can slow things down without losing pitch. You can set amazing customizable markers. You can even isolate different instruments in the track. How is that possible? I don't know. I'm not a scientist,

but I know that it is, and it's in a beautiful interface on Anytune. Again, Anytune. com.us slash you'll hear it. I'm not a scientist or engineer either, but they figured it out, and it's available for the iPhone, the iPad, and the Mac,

and the Android is coming soon. But I would recommend starting with the iPhone app, but also don't sleep on the Mac app as well because that's kind of where you can go next level. But the beautiful thing about this, the world of any tune is you can just start with certain features, learn them. It's super intuitive.

It's a beautiful piece of software. And whenever you're ready to go next level, they have live tutorials on Facebook. They've got a lot of great information. And it's truly music practice perfected. Yeah, it's awesome. Cool. So today what are we talking about? We are talking about ways to stay motivated in your practice.

And we're going to give you four ways to stay motivated to get you up to level 57. What? Why am I saying 57 today? I don't know. I don't know either. But I mean, why everything's always like one to 10, one to 100? How about one to 57? It's a great scale.

The hind scale is what we'll call it. Exactly. Okay. So four ways to stay motivated in your practice. And look, why do we, why are we, been talking about staying motivated in practice? Why is that important, Mr. Manus? Well, I think it's one of the most important things we can do as musicians. You know, we first of all, if you're identifying yourself as musician, if you don't have

like a routine of habits of working on your music, are you really a musician? It's a good question. So staying motivated to keep up the work that's not always fun, that's not always, you know, laying on the couch and eating chips and watching TV, but is, really going to pay off for future you, for musician you later, I think that's an invaluable skill to develop. And listen, it takes different stages during different stages of your life. But I think there are some really key things that we can always hone in on to get us motivated when we're feeling in a bit of a rut. And these four things definitely are key things that we can do. Absolutely. All right. So let's jump in with number one, which is listen.

we're back on that we had done that in a couple weeks it's been months man since we've done to listen you know what my time my time in this pandemic is all screwed up so yeah so that's a good one to circle back and if we have some new listeners which I know we got a bunch of new listeners you will often hear us say for a variety of lists that we come up with

and reasons to do things listen and it's the reason this is called the you'll hear a podcast and it's so important and I would say like yeah man with uh in terms of staying motivated when you practice, there's a number of ways, but the big one for me would be listening to great recordings, stuff that's inspiring, stuff that you, when you listen to it,

it ignites the passion in you and kind of takes you back to that reason that you wanted to play this music in the first place. You know, I mean, what's more motivating than that? It kind of, it makes you think about the end result that you want to get to, not in terms of like, oh, I'm listening to John Coltrane and I'm going to practice and stay motivated

so I can sound like John Coltrane. You're never going to sound like John Coltrane. But you can tap into that vibe, that spirit, that mindset and that connection with the music with John Coltrane. You can actually get to that. And so that should be your motivation when you listen because it's like, oh, that's right. That's why I'm going through the difficulty and the work of practice. Because work, I mean, we talk about practice and we're like, enjoy the process. It's not always fun, you know.

But there's a whole reason that we do it. And listening, I find. is the, first of all, listening can be a part of practice if it's active listening anyway, but it also can be one of the biggest motivators to get us back on track. For sure. Love it. Number two is to switch it up, to do something completely different. So we all have routines that we usually carry out in our practice routine. That's why it's a routine. And if you don't, you should probably get a routine. I love rituals with practice. And I love kind of keeping a similar structure for long periods of time. And then I also love

to completely stray from that every so often. Usually like, I don't know, once a week, maybe twice a month, I'll just completely ignore whatever I've been working on, whatever maybe I'm feeling like I'm in a rut on, and just do something I would never, ever think, to practice and do it in a way that maybe I'll never, ever think to do, or do ever again. But there's something about, you know, going back to even just like,

initially when we started playing music, right? So much of it when we're children is just pure. curiosity of like I press this and some sound happens and then you press these two things at the same time and that's a sound and but if you change one of them that's a whole different sound and then oh I can press three at once and now there's all these different sounds and I can you know as your technical skills develop you just it's constant discovery and what we don't want to lose along the way is that sense of discovery and so sometimes just sit down sitting down to play and saying to yourself I'm going to play something I've never played before, ever,

in my entire 41 years on this earth, you know, something I've never attempted to play or will ever try again. That could be a game changer. I've never played that. I'm saving it for when I'm like 75. When you're feeling totally unmotivated, you're going to play that next time.

That's right. Yeah. Well, that's what all the hype was about. That's amazing. Exactly. Man, why didn't I fight it about?

Only I played it. So, you know, one thing that came to mind, you mentioned routine, and the importance of the routine, And so it may sound counterintuitive when we say change it up. But think about this. Don't let your routine be routine.

Okay. Hello. Knowledge drop. Bam. Hit the floor. Hello. So and what this means is like we can't approach practicing music like you're working. You know, I always think about the Simpsons.

You know, he's working at the nuclear nuclear. How do you say that? Nuclear. Nuclear. That's very controversial. He's working at the nuclear plan. And, you know, everybody, it's like the whistle at 5 o'clock and everyone picks up their lunch panel and walks out. It's like there's certain types of jobs that can be treated as routine.

And for safety reasons, you know, Homer is not a very good example of that, I should just say. Many safety violations, Mr. Burns. But the thing is that like, you know, where it's just like you check this box, you check this box, you do this and then that's what the job is. That's not what practicing should be. although there's aspects of the routine that should be that, but part of your actual routine should be exploratory and changing it up. Like that can become part of your routine. So don't let your routine be routine.

It's awesome. Number three is a big challenge. You are the king of big challenges. You like to challenge yourself all the time and you like to even do it in public sometimes where you'll give yourself an Instagram challenge that seems kind of ridiculous. You make it sound so dirty, but you do it in public. Like I got a trench coat on as I'm doing these. These are very clean challenges.

Some of those 12 key challenges were fairly filthy. I'm just saying. Right. It was a filthy lick I played on that 12 key challenge. That's right. Yeah, well, no, public shaming, I mean, or what do they call it? It's not shaming. It's accountability.

You know, like having an accountability partner. That's one of the great uses of social media, I think, is using it to kind of have accountability partners, be it with your friends, with your fans, with your students, with your. Well, it's also a bit of like exposure therapy. too, right? Like you're trying something you're not great at in front of a bunch of people. It kind of desensitizes you to experimenting in public, which is what we should be doing on stage. Right, right, exactly. And then two, I think it's like, it's, it really, it makes you more authentic, which is such an important part of this music. Like, you know, this is not, you know, everybody's on Zoom now because of what's happening in the world. And I found a setting in there where it's like, touch up my appearance. There's something you can check in the settings to make your appearance look better. I checked it. I didn't look any better.

I was still ugly. But I mean, maybe my computer is not optimized for it. But the thing about it is, I'm like, no, like, you should be who you are. You know, people want to put like a big, you know, they want to stand in front of a, sit in front of a bookshelf when they're on Zoom with like fancy books. That's great if that's what you read. But, I mean, be authentic. So, you know, the public, you know, public challenges changing it up. All these kind of things are like, you know, that's about tapping into your authentic self.

challenge you yourself and you're going to fall down sometimes, but it's all good. It's all good. And number four, our last one of the four ways to stay motivated to practice. This is one that I picked up from James Clear's book, Atomic Habits, which now this is the second week in a row. I've quoted that book because I've been reading it and it's been very effective at helping me really, you know, get my habit game together, which it was already kind of together, but just really refining it. And so this one was a game changer for me, which is to make small habits, and obvious to execute, right? So if you put your piano away in a closet after you practice every time, you're probably not going to practice as much as if it's right there.

If you, some things you can do is to like tie this to another activity. So if you just give yourself some time and space, maybe just say after breakfast, I'm going to take 30 minutes to practice. That could really motivate. You just get into what is a good routine, which is giving yourself the time to the thing that actually makes you. you happy, which is growing as a musician. So make it obvious and easy for you to practice. Don't try to hide it. Don't try to make it hard. You know, like, oh, I got a, I really have to transcribe, you know, this entire Lee Connitz record in one day. You'll never do it. You'll never get to the piano to transcribe anything because it's too overwhelming. Just say, I'm going to do one easy thing

on the piano today. You know, I'll spend minimum of 15 minutes on it. Chances are you're going to spend 30 minutes to an hour on it and you're going to do other things while you're there because you're going to get inspired when you sit at the piano. So just make it easy and obvious and it'll get you most of the way there. Man, it would be awesome. Some kind of like contraption that listened to what you played and once you knocked out the hard stuff you want to practice, you got some sort of like food thrown into your mouth, like just an instant kind of, you know, like Reese's peanut butter cups, the little ones with the, you know what I mean? Yeah, that would be interesting. That would be interesting. That's good. Ben and Green would be 400 pounds.

I know exactly. Instead of 156. So, you know, I think too, you can think about the work. And I'm trying to think about, well, I was like to take it away from the piano or even music because then sometimes it's easier to kind of pull it back. But back to music. But if you think about like running, no matter how much you get into that, it's still like work and it can be hard to be motivated, especially like if you are tired or you just ate or you. You know, any, you can find so many different excuses just physically, you know, running is tough at whatever level you're doing. But it's like, you know, reward yourself with something while you're going through that tough process. So like run somewhere that's new and that's beautiful. So, yeah, you're still having to do the work and you're getting your heart rate up. But you look over and like, wow, what a beautiful forest or what a beautiful site building, a beautiful neighborhood or whatever. And so I think that goes really well with the change it up and reward yourself at the same time, you know, when you're practicing. That's awesome. Well, thanks everybody for joining us today. We hope you found these four ways to stay motivated to practice beneficial. Hey, but if you want to get more into practice, check out our new guided practice app. We just released this. It actually contains all of our daily guided practice sessions where I'm walking you through exactly what to play and how to play it. And then we have a section on that app of podcast. And those are curated episodes of this podcast where Peter and I talk about various practice strategies. It's kind of going to be the home for the practice.

episodes of the You'll Hear It podcast. You'll still get them here on the podcast, but we're going to just group them all there because we find they're so helpful for people when they want to get into practice. So check that out. And don't forget to check out anytune.us slash you'll hear it. Pete, well, I was just going to say, too, on the app,

on our app, that's actually, you know, people that inquired about some of the older, well, not even that older episodes. We've done so many episodes of the You'll Hear podcast. Some of the practice episodes, some of those gems are only available, in fact, now, because Apple won't let us go back past, I think, 100 episodes or so. That's right.

So there's some exclusive episodes that are not available anywhere else. So that's another kind of side benefit of jumping into our app ecosystem. And yeah, Anytune. US go there for the amazing Anytune app, which is our sponsor. We're so proud to be associated with them. I mean, we're already talking about them anyway. So the fact that they're sponsoring and giving us a chance, too, to kind of delve in deeper on the features. Highly recommend their tutorials on Facebook.

Follow them over there for that. And until tomorrow, you'll hear it.