You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 7 Ways to Learn Jazz Faster

Episode Date: November 12, 2019

Sayonara Adam! Now Adam's the one on tour, so it's Peter's turn for the solo episodes. Today, he brings you 7 ways you can speed up improving your jazz skills.7 Ways to Learn Jazz FasterListenPracticeBe smart about your practiceStay inspiredGet a teacherOpen Studio coursesCheck out things (outside of jazz) that spur your creativityComing soon to Open Studio: Black Friday specials! We can't give you any details just yet, but stay checked-in to our social media and website for all our deal and discount news beginning November 29.New from Open Studio: Jazz Piano Basics | Vol. 2 - Left Hand Voicings. This is a piano course from You'll Hear It's own Adam Maness all about ways to improve playing with your left hand. You'll be able to improve your solos, build your comping skills, and learn how to come up with your own left hand voicing arrangements. For more info, go to https://www.openstudiojazz.com/jazz-piano-basics-vol-2Like those You'll Hear It shirts Peter shows off on the podcast? Want some YHI swag of your own? Take a visit to our store! Just go to https://teespring.com/stores/open-studioLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel and leave a comment for this episode.Interested in more jazz advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram at:https://www.facebook.com/heyopenstudiohttps://twitter.com/heyopenstudiohttps://www.instagram.com/heyopenstudio See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Adam. Adam, where you at? I don't see you. I'm in the pod cave and I don't see you. You're kind of a big guy. It's hard for you to hide, but I know. What are you? Are you under the Kranican Bach? I don't think so. I'm Peter Martin and you're listening to the You'll Hear at podcast, Daily Jazz Advice, coming at you. Coming at you from the pod cave. I'm excited to be back in the pod cave. I've been gone the last few weeks and been on tour around Europe, had a great time, had a lot of fun doing some remote episodes. with Adam listening to his wonderful solo episodes. And now I'm back. And he's gone. He's on his way to Japan today as we speak, starting a tour of his own. So we're going to roll solo for the next couple of days. Thank you guys so much for being here.

Hope you're doing well. Welcome to November. Here recording in the open studio, you'll hear at Podcave, looking out the window, at some snow. That's a little bit unusual. We're a little bit early here early November for snow, but that's what's happened in this year.

So as always we want to say that we are coming to you sponsored by Open Studio. Go to Open StudioJadz.com and check out. We have a number of new courses. We have some wonderful Black Friday giveaways coming up. So make sure you sign up if you are not already on our email list to be notified first about those. It's going to be a lot of fun things happening next week. And look what was awaiting me when I came back into the Podcave. This limited edition, maybe we'll throw this in as part of the big giveaway.

This would be nice part of the swag. What do you think, Andrew? I think it'll be good. But this is the theme song. So those of you that are watching on YouTube, you can see it. But I'm going to describe it to the folks on the podcast. This is notation of the first two measures in 7-8 of the theme song to the you'll hear podcast that you just heard, which is a song that I wrote called, a tune that I wrote called Emotion in Motion.

But it's on the front of the T-shirt and then we've got the logo for you'll hear it on the back. So that's kind of cool. And this is the first time I'm seeing it. so I'm excited. Is this for me? This is for me? It's for me. Okay, awesome. There you go. All right. What are we talking about today? Today we're going to talk about seven ways to learn jazz faster. Okay. Now, this seems a little counterintuitive because we're always preaching and talking about patience here at the You'll Hear podcast. And so really, this is about still being patient, but I want to kind of maybe go into some issues and some tips and some

strategies of how you can get to that promised land that you want to get to that we all want to get to as far as becoming great jazz improvisers great jazz players you know so it's a thousand mile mile journey it's a 10,000 mile journey it's a 100,000 kilometer journey it's a long journey I can't change that because it's such a wonderful and complete skill to have to be a great jazz improviser and we all want to get there but hopefully I can give you some tips on ways to to speed up that journey. I can't make the journey shorter, but I can hopefully give you some tips

to speed it up a little bit, maybe even to keep you from going on little side journeys that are going to end up making it longer. Okay? So we still want to learn things thoroughly. We don't want to take shortcuts, but we do want to get there faster. Nothing wrong with that.

So let's jump right in with number one. Those of you that have been listening to the podcast over the last couple of years will know this. Number one, listen. All right. Now, what do we mean by listen? We mean listen to recordings. We mean listen to live performances.

We mean listen to yourself. You know, listening is really just, it's a lifestyle. It's a mindset. It's about, you know, keeping your ears opening. And before you speak or before you play in this case, as far as us being jazz musicians, is listen to what's happening around you, listening to what's floating around in the air. Listen to what's happening in your mind. You know, you'll hear it.

That's all about giving yourself. the permission and the chance to hear something though so if we're always speaking if we're always playing first we're not listening so listen really is multifaceted it's a mindset it's something that if you get up in the morning and say you know what i'm going to really listen today i'm going to listen to recordings i'm going to listen attentively i'm going to listen to what i'm playing once you start to get in this mindset this is going to help you to learn jazz faster and more completely and it's going to help every aspect. That's why we put it first. You know, there's a reason, there's a method to our madness as we would say. All right. So that's number one. Listen.

Number two, practice. All right. So this seems obvious, but the whole mindset and really the manifestation of this is about the number of hours you spend in the practice room. Now, we wanted to be practicing the right things, of course. We're going to get into that as we go through this list. But to a certain degree, you got to put the hours in. So some people get obsessed with like, I want to get better. I want to read about music. I want to listen to it. That's all great. But you've got to be at your instrument for hours a day, hopefully. Now, some people only have time for 20 minutes, 30 minutes. That's fine. But if you want to learn how to play jazz faster and you want to get to that promised land in a short amount of time, you've got to spend more time with your

instruments. So what I would recommend you do is look at expanding your practice time, maybe not by a certain number of hours or minutes. But think about it as a percentage. Let's say you're practicing 30 minutes a day now, you know, on average. That's great. You know, you want that consistency, first and foremost, hopefully seven days a week. But if you're doing 30 minutes a day, maybe you challenge yourself next week to increase that just 10%, right? Or maybe even 20%. What is that? Six minutes more. So then you're practicing 36 minutes. You know, really, if you can do six more minutes, how about 10 more minutes? So now you're moving from 30 minutes to 40 minutes. I think you can find 10 minutes somewhere.

If you were to do that, you're really, and you're still practicing the right things that we're going to talk about. You're going to increase, decrease, I should say, the amount of time it takes you to get to that level of mastery by 20%. So now you're already getting there faster. You still want to be practicing the right things, of course, at the right time and all that. but really just thinking about it in a very tactical way in terms of how much time you're practicing. It's really money in the bank. It's like, you know, if you want to retire rich, you have to be putting in a certain amount of money. And if you put a little bit more in, you're going to be accumulating more.

So I've always thought about practicing similar to putting money in the bank. And I would encourage you to as well. So that's number two. Number one, listen, number two, practice. Number three of our seven ways to learn jazz faster is to be smart about. about your practice. Okay, so what do we mean by that? We're talking about the amount of time we're practicing,

doing a little bit of increasing with that, but then you have to be practicing the right thing. But you want to be smart about even what you're practicing. So say you know what to practice, and I think most of you do know what to practice, but you want to be able to be practicing, for instance, at a time of day that you can get a lot of accomplished, especially if you don't have hours and hours to practice.

So like if you have all day, if you have nothing else to do with practice, you can kind of get up, practice a couple of hours. And if it's not going well, say, okay, I'm going to go chill for a little bit and then come back and practice. But if you've only got 40 minutes to practice, you got to make sure that you're getting 40 minutes of value out of your time. You know, it becomes even more important with the last amount of time. So you want to think about when's the best time of day for you to practice. If you're practicing things that require a lot of concentration, you've got to get in tune with yourself and think about when can you concentrate at your instrument. in the most optimal way. And then you've got to schedule it to be able to do that.

When do you focus best? When are you most creative? You know, that's not always the same time as when you can focus and, you know, really concentrate the most. Sometimes the creative mindset is at a different time. So you want to experiment a little bit first with that time of day. Maybe is it right after you eat? Maybe is it before you eat after you have a cup of coffee,

have your tea, exercise, whatever. There's all different things just like any other kind of water. that we're doing that can affect how effective our practice is. So, yes, number two is practicing and just putting in those time, putting in that time, the sets and reps. This number three about being smart about how we practice is about really scheduling it at the right time. And then also, you know, you might want to think about environment and location.

To me, that's never been as important as like time of day. But you can think about that too. Distraction-free zone. That's certainly smart. you know having your instruments sounding good in a good room all that kind of things those things I think are easier to overcome than the sort of time of day and what your mind and how productive you can be though okay so that's number three being smart about your practice number four to learn jazz faster stay inspired okay this is another one of those kind of mindset things

but there's some things that we can do to keep us in that inspired mindset we know that when we're practicing and we're developing as good players, if we're inspired, we're going to be able to develop quicker within that same amount of time. So you're going to want to listen to great recordings. That's always inspirational and so great because you can do that anywhere. You can do that in the car at home while you're cooking while you're walking around. And then go to live gigs. That can be so inspiring. And sometimes it's just like buy a ticket to a gig in a couple of weeks and it can be inspiring just thinking about that gig. And then after you experience that great live performance, reflecting on it, that can continue to inspire you.

So it doesn't have to be like going to gigs every night, just, you know, but you want to have something on the calendar there. Same thing with, you know, jam sessions. Go to jam sessions and be inspired by other players. Be inspired by yourself at a jam session by how successfully you played, you know, become a part of that community through a jam session or through a live concert, something with other people. That can really help you stay inspired and can really quicken your development.

All right, that's number four. Number five, get a teacher. Okay? Now, this is not always possible, or you might think it's not always possible, but if you expand your horizon, it doesn't have to be a jazz teacher. If you can get a great jazz teacher on your instrument, that's wonderful, because they're going to be able to help identify deficiencies in your playing, give you some tactics and strategies to improve your playing in ways that you can't realize.

But you also want to think about, just because you might say, well, I live somewhere, there's no good jazz players or I can't find a good jazz teacher. Get a classical teacher. Get just a general teacher on your instrument. Or maybe, you know, you play saxophone. You're like, there's no good teachers available. What about a piano teacher? What about a guitar teacher?

There's all different ways to develop as a jazz player that are not just on your instrument. Okay? But that's seeking out a professional. It's really like it's a coach. You want to think about it. Like, you know, if you're training for a marathon, you can do it yourself by reading books, by looking at videos, yeah, but you can also get a live person to interact with

that can be very inspirational and can quicken that journey for you. All right, that's number five. Number six, get an online course. I'm partial to open studio courses, as you know, but this is a great one, especially if you can't find a teacher locally or you don't have time. A lot of times we have students from our courses

that are in places that they could get a teacher, but their time to practice is on Sunday nights or Monday nights or early in the morning or the time. They just don't have time to get to a teacher. So what our courses can do is sort of the next best thing as far as giving you ideas and inspiration and getting you to places quicker, you know, through the techniques and ideas of our wonderful faculty on open studio jazz.com. And also it's like if you're a bass player, you know, even if you live right next door to Christian McBride, you're probably not going to be able to get a lesson with him because he's always on the road and stuff.

So you're going to be able to get the information from Christian McBride breaking down what you need to practice and how you need to get better quicker and become a great jazz basis faster with information from Christian McBride. That's the only place you're going to be able to get it anyway. And there's many other great jazz courses and it's not just open studio, of course. Artist works, music gurus. There's a wonderful resource available at YouTube. There's some great inspiring YouTube. videos for free available. I would encourage you to check those out as well. So that's number six,

online education. Now number seven, our final tip or way for you to learn jazz faster is to check out things beyond jazz that will spur your creativity and that will inspire you. We've talked about this before, but I can't mention this enough. Do not become closed into just jazz, jazz, jazz. Do not feel like the jazz police are constantly behind you. Listen to different kinds of music. Think about how that can be incorporated into your playing. Listen to other kinds of music and learn to play them for what it will do for your ear training and general musical training that will help you actually to learn jazz faster when you go to that.

Don't be single-minded. Don't have tunnel vision. And then check out other things. Not only other genres of music, check out different art forms, different aesthetics in general. Check out, you know, think about if you're into athletics or sport. You know, I've really gotten into running. And you think it would have nothing to do with playing jazz, but it does because it can get you into a certain mindset of being able to concentrate in a way

so that you can actually practice better. Thus, you know, going back to number two and number three, smart practice, more sets and reps, learning jazz faster, actually. So have a holistic approach to your life, read, check out different art and stuff. But get outside of just jazz, you know, because jazz music is a reflection of your life once you become a great player, even as you're becoming a great player. So you've got to have another life in order to be represented in the music. All right. So there you go.

Seven ways to learn jazz faster. Quick recap. Number one, listen. Number two, practice. Number three, be smart about your practice. Number four, stay inspired. Number five, get a teacher if you can. Number six, check out an open studio course.

And number seven, check other things out. Other arts, other aesthetics. All right. There you go. Seven ways to learn jazz faster. I got to say, even without Adam, we kind of nailed it today. Go to our sponsor, Open Studio Jazz when you get a chance. Check out our jazz course.

We've got a lot of great new things. We have a new series on jazz piano technique that will actually guarantee. I mean, this is some tactical get better, learn jazz faster for sure. We got volume one. We got volume two out now. Check that out. Coming soon, our black. Friday specials, a lot of cool things happening.

And excited to be here. I made it through solo number one in the pod cave. So until tomorrow, you'll hear it.