You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 7 Great Practice Routine Hacks - #1

Episode Date: January 31, 2018

A podcast brought to you by Open Studio.

I'm Peter Martin and I'm Adam Manus. Welcome to the You'll Hear It podcast. Today we're going to give you seven great practice routine hacks for you to work into your daily practice routine. Okay, so I'm going to start with developing a routine. This is so important. You want to have a routine of how you're going to get into your practice so that when you sit down each day, you already know what you're going to do. That might be just a real simple, real simple way that you like to do. to start out your scales, whatever it is for you. You know, trumpet players like to do those

tonguing exercises, things like that, but you want to have a routine. You don't want to sit there saying, what should I do? And you also don't want to just sit down and play some random stuff, you know, I was out for random. I was kind of random, right? Pretty random. Just some random stuff. You want to practice with purpose. So develop a routine and make sure you're starting somewhere that makes sense. Number two is to don't play until the very end of your practice session. Don't start performing a piece or a tune and just start playing around the tune until you've hit specific things that you need to work on. Why not? Because then you just get caught up in these, you know, rambling, playing of tunes over and over again.

Usually the same tunes you already know. And that brings us to the third point, which is... Separate your conscious from your unconscious practice. So what I mean by that is, I think 70 to 80 percent of the first of... our practice should be very conscious practice, very focused, where we're thinking about specifically what we're doing. So if we're working on improvisation, we're thinking about specific scales, we're thinking about specific patterns, specific solos, we're practicing in a way and thinking in a way that we wouldn't do when we're performing. But then you always want to have that

unconscious kind of practice where we're just playing and letting loose. And to your point of number three, of waiting until the end of your practice routine, that's when you're going to want to do your more unconscious playing. So maybe you're waiting until then to just play through the piece and not think about all the stuff that you worked on. Give yourself a chance to have all that come out unconsciously. Or maybe it's subconsciously. I don't even know the difference.

I don't either. But they're both important, right? And so that brings us to number four. Don't practice stuff you already can do. This is something that our silly human brains trick us into doing all the time. Our egos want us to sound good, even when it's just for us, especially when it's just us sometimes, but don't fall into that trap. You will never improve just playing the same tunes in the same way, doing the same

licks, in the same keys that you can already play great. So make a decision at the start of your practice routine to work on things that you can't do. That's the time to do it. You don't want to be doing it on the gig or at the jam session. You want to be doing it in the privacy of your own home where you can really focus and hone in on the skills that'll bring your entire level of playing up, not just the same. stuff you're already good at. Yeah, because when you're practicing things that you can already do,

you're actually not really practicing. You're just playing. And that might be fun. You can't you can't count that as part of your practice time, can you? We save that to the end. We save that to the end. Number three. Now we're tying it all together. Good. Okay. Number five, have a discipline of practicing every day. Even if it's only for five minutes, it's better to do that every day and to be at your instrument than to take a couple days off and say, I'm going to wait until Saturday when I know I have five hours. At least sit down at the instrument. You know, it's just like becoming a great chef. Be in the kitchen or a great basketball player. Have the basketball in your hands. We don't all have the luxury of being at our instrument for hours a day. But we can all fit five minutes.

Come on. You can get up five minutes earlier. We can all do that. Or stay up five minutes later. Or one less bowl of cereal. I don't know. There's so true. Yeah, no, absolutely. Very, very important. Number six is to switch it up throughout your practice routine. We talked about not playing. things you already know. Well, one trick to helping to retain things and to learn things faster is to actually once you can kind of perform it as you're practicing, a skill, move on to something else and then come back to that later in your routine so that you're kind of forcing your brain to forget it again and it forces you to really absorb it the next time you come around. Sometimes I'll do, if I'm practicing a particular scale, I'll play it once, once I can

kind of get it and then I'll move on to maybe voicings and then maybe some time practice and then I'll come back to that scale and it'll be worse than when I left it and that's good. I want it to be worse because now it makes me reabsorb it again in a shorter amount of time. And, you know, in the same way, you know, hit things up day to day. You know, once you have something one day, don't just ignore it. The next practice session, try it again. Kind of like thoughtful practice. Thoughtful practice.

I like it. I like it. Okay. And number seven, the last one, I think this may be the most important hack that we can give you for your practice routine. So we saved it for the end and that is to listen. What? Listen. Okay. Now it seems so simple and we say we're always listening.

We're at the instrument. No, we're not. Sometimes we're thinking about what we're gonna have for dinner. We're going out on a, thinking about going out on a date, thinking about a gig we're gonna do or whatever. But if you want your practice to be effective, and especially if you only have five or ten minutes to practice, you have to listen to everything that you're playing, just like you're in the audience listening to yourself.

So you want to hear the nuances. of everything that you do. And really listening to yourself has to apply to everything that you practice, not just when you're sounding good, you know, or when you're playing your tune at the end. Especially. Especially, exactly. So when you're practicing scales, you want to really be listening to the evenness. See how that kind of jumped out?

That's the piano's fault, though. It's not my fault. But, I mean, we're listening to everything. You know, all the things that we are not going to want to pay attention to when we're performing and we want to be more unconscious or subconscious. Those are the things that we listen to very closely. And you know what happens when you listen closely? You'll hear it.

Exactly. You'll hear it. All right. See you guys next time on. You'll hear it. That's it for today's episode of the You'll Hear It Podcast. For more information or to hear more of these podcasts, go to openstudio network.com slash podcast.