You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 7 Ways to Practice Scales Creatively - #4

Episode Date: February 3, 2018

Practicing scales is a necessary part of developing as a jazz player. It doesn't have to be boring, just follow Peter & Adam's tips and you'll be well on your way to Creative Scale Practice Heaven! Catch more ideas and inspiration at Open Studio. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Peter Martin, and I'm Adam Anas. Welcome to the You'll Hear It podcast. Today we're going to look at seven ways to practice scales creatively. Now, I love practicing scales, but I only practice them what I call creatively because I get bored otherwise. I've been playing scales for years, but it's such an important part of our playing. So I feel like if you can develop a few creative ways to practice, you can change it up every day, giving you some variety. because at the end of the day, scales are kind of boring and not the most musical thing. I mean, it's about executing and developing your technique, but it's not as fun as actually playing music, learning solos, working on your improv.

Absolutely. And I think every musician at some point, once they've been playing long enough, starts to develop their own sort of way to practice scale so they don't get bored. Because they are, especially for jazz musicians, they're so crucial. We have to have these notes in our hands for the chords and the technique on the piano is very important. but if you're just running scales up and down for years, you know, boring. So we're going to give you seven today, and hopefully these will be new for you, and then you can work them into your practice routine. But I would just say always be talking to other musicians,

other instrumentalists, vocalists, because there's so many creative ways to practice scales. You really should never go at least any week practicing them in the same way, if not every day. If you're really creative, you can practice scales differently every day, and by the time you cycled back to how you started, you would think it was a new way. Absolutely.

So number one is going to seem a little boring, but it's super important, and that is practice slowly. Now, you might say you did that when you first learned scales. Well, good. Then you haven't done it in a while. But it's actually a very creative way to practice because it forces you to really pay attention

to those basic parts of your technique that are so important. So if I'm practicing just a C major scale, see, look, I messed up already. You hear I miffed that note in the left hand? piano's fault. And I mean slowly, I mean really slowly. But I'm listening for evenness of tone, articulation,

you know, really, you know, for whatever your instrument is. In this case, the piano, making sure my technique is perfect, my wrists are perfectly straight. You guys can't see me, but it's amazing, isn't it? It's incredible. It's beautiful. But basically, just practice whatever you're doing slowly. It's going to be way slower than you need to,

but you're going to be able to listen in a way that you just can't. do at that medium or fast temple. Yeah, I love that. Practicing slowly, it exposes so much not only physically of your touch and your sound, but also your concentration, your mental stamina and keeping with that slow, steady, good sound all the way up. I love that. Yeah. One thing I wanted to touch on that I like to do is pivoting as I go linearly, linearly. Is that a, I don't think I said that right. That sounds good to me, linearly. Linerally. Is that any better? No, as I go up and down the keyboard, I like to pivot where I go up and down and not just go straight up and down, but I'll go up two octaves, go down an octave, go up another two octaves, go down an octave. So I'm practicing a chromatic scale.

Up. I'll go back down. Just for an octave, then go back up, two octaves, then back down, then back up two octaves. Now I'm at the top, and I go back down, two octaves. and then back up and so on. So I get there eventually. First of all, it extends, you know, the tempo that you're practicing that at. It's a longer version of it, so it helps for stamina.

But then also it gets you out of a rut of just stopping and starting at the bottom and the top. And you can also practice turning it around at different spots. It doesn't have to be at the octave. You could turn around at the third. You know, practice at different spots to pivot. And you could even do it. randomly and that's fun too but it really wakes you up and gets you out of just playing you know the patterns the shape of your hands no i think that's great too and i mean that definitely leads itself to

a creative approach in that you can use that same technique and pivoted at any place and it could be different every day i think it's also great because it gets you it forces you into playing and pivoting or turning in different registers which is important and different for every instrument i mean certainly you know for brass players and for string players that you know you know, the physical technique is different. But for pianists, too, we start to think about the piano as being the same. But in terms of our weight and our balance and our approach to the instrument, if we're in the upper register versus the, you know, the alto and the tenor,

we have to play differently. And we need to be able to execute these scale techniques in all registers. Well, it's funny. You said that. I actually started doing this because I was playing, you know, I was improvising with two hands, you know, octaves. And I was having trouble in that tenor register with my left hand. And I realized, oh, it's because I've never.

I never play up there with my left hand, so I started trying to work that in. Nice, nice. Okay, number three for creative scale practice ideas. This is contrary motion. So since we were just on the chromatic scale, which I love, and I think it's the king of scales. And his most basic level at the piano, that's contrary motion. You're starting in the same place, and you're going in contrary motion. And one thing I was thinking about is for, even if you don't play piano,

or guitar or maybe bass, I don't know if you could do it on bass, but like an instrument where you can actually execute this, you can simulate it on a horn or vocals or whatever by doing that kind of a thing. A lot of applications for it there. And then on piano in terms of contrary motion, and you know, for every instrument we have different technical challenges for piano. I think one of the big ones is improvised fingerings, coming up with good fingers on the fly. And when we do a lot of things that incorporate the chromatic scale, you know, little fragments of the chromatic scale. I think having some good kind of go-to fingering that's built in can help a lot. So contrary motion, if you get creative, taking some of your pivoting things, and as opposed to just starting together, start on the minor third. Maybe combine that with some pivoting, you know, starting the tritone, and then maybe go together, not contrary, and then go contrary. It's all about kind of forcing yourself out of being able to consciously think about

the fingering. But you're still listening for tone and sound and all those kind of different things. That's great. One of my favorite techniques for practicing scales, and I think something that really helps me hone in on the actual notes of the scale, like helps me really understand what's going on in the structure of the scale, is to practice in broken thirds. I actually don't feel like I'm totally in the scale unless I'm working this angle in broken thirds and triads. You can do both and it's good to combine them. So if we take the half, hold the minute scale starting in C, I mean, that's one sound,

but when you really get in the relationships of skipping a note on this scale, especially, I mean, you're hearing the sound of that, and then there's some uses that happen, and triads too. You know, now you're really understanding the relationships between not just the notes next to each other, but the notes in the scale in general and how they relate and sound together.

And definitely has some real-world applications for jazz improvising as well, right? Absolutely. We don't improvise just by all the time, but you shouldn't. Some people do. You'll hear it. You'll hear it. No, but it is good to combine, you know, skipping tones and playing tones in a row. Nice.

Number five, this is going to be practicing the hard keys. So this one, as opposed to, well, this is going to be creative for a lot of you. It's really more about discipline and execution. And that is when you're working on a scale that you don't know that well, don't just automatically go to the keys that you know and you can execute on. So if that's the majors, if you're just really getting rolling on the majors and you know C, G and D and you're going through, you know, the circle of fifths, let's be a little creative in your practice. Why don't you skip over practicing those? Because you already know them. How about a little D flat?

How about a little G flat? How about a little B major? You know, on every instrument, if you're a violinist, how about a little A-flat major scale instead of just that nice, big, fat, G-scale from the, you know. So every instrument has its more difficult keys. But if we're disciplined and creative at the same time with our scale practice, that can be a real entry point, especially with these real basic scales. You know, your major, your melodic and harmonic minors, and then, you know, kind of your Dorians, your basic jazz scales, dominant scale. if you know these in really get a handle on some equalization between the keys and all 12 keys start to become equal to you, you'll actually be able to play, you'll be a lot closer to being able to play in all keys over any tune than you could have ever imagined.

Don't be that player that's playing have you met Miss Jones and you get to the bridge and you fold because it all of a sudden goes to G flat. That's right, right. You know, you've been playing an F and burning and then you've got to play a 2.5 a G flat and you can't do it. And then, you know, yeah, and some people will be like, well, I didn't have time to get to those scales. Yeah, you have time to get to those scales because start on those. So start backwards. Start with the circle of fifths backwards. Don't sit around practicing a C major scale unless you've mastered them all.

Then you can go back and practice the C major. Or if you have five hours a day to practice scales, by all means, start with the easiest and work your way up to the hardest. But make sure you get to those hard ones. I love it. It's cliche to say, but it is true that there's no hard scales or hard keys. It's just keys that you haven't spent enough time on. That's really all it is. Great Ellis Marcellus, I remember he said,

somebody said, what key do you want to play this tune in? He said, the key of music. There you. That's perfect. Very Ellis Marcellus, things you say. So that brings us to our sixth way to practice scales creatively, and that's to practice with different dynamics. How many times have you sat down at the piano and just everything is mezzo forte?

The old METO forte. That's boring. The arranger special. Oh, man. So, you know, Peter started off by going slowly. A great thing you can do as you're going slowly too is to practice these different dynamics. Practice loud. You know, we think of dynamics as soft, but you need to practice getting some muscle into it.

And then you want to vary it up, really push the edge of where that hammer's going to hit. Used to where that piano is throwing that hammer. Ooh, do that pianissimo slowly. That really exposed some stuff. Nice. How sensitive are our microphones? We're about to find out. Yeah, that's a great way to practice. It's so challenging. Like you said, I think that's the best way to put it. It exposes a lot of weaknesses.

And remember, that is what you're looking for in your practice routine. You're not looking to sound good. You're looking for the weaknesses so that you can expose them, work them, and they then become less weak. Absolutely. I mean, that's the most creative thing we can actually do in our practice. in general is to have the discipline to do things in a different way. And that's really what we're talking about with creativity in the scale practice so that we can extend our technique quicker. So number seven, our final way to practice scales creatively, is to use different articulations.

So Adam just talked about different dynamics. So if we add another variable of different dynamics, that could be staccato, legato fast. And that makes me think of when we talk about dynamics jumping back to six, you know, it's not just loud, soft, metzo forte, how about a little crescendo combined with some sticato? There you go. Is that legal? Well, let's find out. There's some real technical challenges there when you start to practice like this. For all our piano nerds, let's hear Peter Martin do that legato scale one more time. That's a thing of beauty right there.

Which one? Okay. That's pretty good. Yeah, I mean, I can definitely hear some control issues, both in terms of the articulation. and the dynamics, but that's what you want to do is to challenge yourself so that you would go back and repeat that, and I want to really get that crescendo even. It's better, it's not there, but that's what we're practicing creatively for. Sounds good to me. All right. You'll hear it. Peace.

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.