You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - All About Habits

Episode Date: May 29, 2019

Peter and Adam talk all about several aspects of habits:Bad vs. good habitsAtomic HabitsDecisionsEnvironmentCommunityDisciplineAlso, have a look at one of Peter's recommended books - Atomic Habits by James Clear, available here: https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habitsThe ending theme song for today's episode is "Scrat's Revenge" by Kash Wright Trio (sent in by listener Mike Montgomery). To get your music featured on You'll Hear It, send an MP3 recording of your music to [e-mail] 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, Pete. Hey, man. You ever picked up a habit? I'm in the habit of sitting across this table with you five days a week. I know that. It's a bad habit. I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin.

And you're listening to the You'll Hear podcast. Daily jazz advice coming at you. Every day, well, five days a week. Close to every day. Yeah, we'll say every day. We're on such a business schedule here. I like this. We're business people.

We are business people. Monday through Friday. Saturday, Sunday, we're gigging. It's business time. It's business time. And speaking of business. Don't sleep on this week's offer for an all-access pass from Open Studio for $77. Go to OpenStio Network.com, get that.

And you will membership the All-access pass at the offer code field put in, you'll hear it. That's a $77 savings for our you'll hear it listeners. Nice. And that's this week only. That's this week only. Thank you, Open Studio. Thank you, Open Studio. Like it's somewhere else.

Well, it is. It's bigger than us. Yeah, only this week. But it lasts, it's the gift that for yourself that lasts all year. You can get it for somebody else, too. but you can't gift it's just this week but you will be able to derive the benefits of it it's like it's like a gym membership it's like prepaying for your gym membership um it it'll get you through those times when you know as we're going to talk about today in terms of

good habits give you that inspiration to keep those good habits going and it'll also be a little bit on your shoulder hey come on now let's let's keep practicing but it'll hopefully make it easier for you to practice more fun give you more ideas get you more organized get you more inspired, get you more connected. You know, our community functions, especially on the new platform, are going to be beautiful, but we've already got some great stuff with the community built

in to kind of help inspire you all through the year. Community is the best part, actually. That's right. It's the most important for keeping this stuff going. Yep. So today we're talking about habits, speaking of keeping stuff going. That's right. I love this. We started to get into it yesterday and we wanted to kind of break it off into its own

thing. We were talking about fingering, but it's such a bigger issue, I think, for all of music and developing as a good jazz musician, I believe, it's just, it's such a, I've been reading about this a lot lately, too, so it's more kind of on my mind, but it's such a paramount kind of concept and mindset to get into developing good habits to be a jazz musician. And it can kind of seem counterintuitive in that, well, I can't get in the habit of it until I'm good, but we can do the things that will start to, like, you know, ensure that we get good. I really believe a big part of being a great musician is developing a number of good habits.

And the biggest one being sort of in the habit of playing stuff that sounds good. And that goes back to our number one, listen, you know, always. And if you're in the habit of listening to yourself, listening to others, whatever, you're really going to put yourself a step ahead of others and just put yourself in the best position to be able to get to that promised land of being a great player. Yeah. You know, for me, I always think about habits. They're sort of sister ideas of decisions.

Right, they go off each other. So the starting point for me is making the decisions every day that lead me to where I want to be at the end of the day and at the end of the week and at the end of the year. So developing a system of decisions that form the habits that are going to form who you are is one of the most important things we can do as artists, as musicians. So I think this episode is super important. And we were talking about it yesterday in the context of, fingerings and it can get that granular, can get just like getting in habits of like literally how you put your fingers on your instrument

to getting in the habits of like saying no to gigs that aren't good for you. Wow, I like that. To getting into the habits of like practicing every day. To getting the habits of networking or whatever it is that you think you need to up your gain that. Yeah. Develop that habit. Make the decision in the morning when you wake up

or the afternoon, depending on your lifestyle, that you're going to make those... Lifestyle habits. You're going to make those decisions that day to help you develop habits that get you to where you need to go. Absolutely. And I think that, you know,

the thing that applies so much to... And it's tough not to say pianists, but any of the instruments, they all have their own challenges. But let's just say a jazz musician, being habitual about the good things is going to really help you to get to that promise land. So let's first just,

talk about that. There's good habits versus bad habits. Just like for anything, somebody can say, oh, I have no problem developing habits. But if they're mostly bad habits, say, with fingering or with not listening enough or whatever, then you're better off just sort of having no habits in that regard.

Yeah, been going into the negative. So we're like constantly try to develop good ones, but we're also having to unlearn bad ones, I think. Even habits that aren't, like, actively holding you, like, or bringing you down or whatever, aren't good habits because they're wasting your time. Right, right.

If they're not putting it on a positive path, then it's a waste of time. It's a bad habit. Yeah. And so for the good ones, what's so important, be it fingering, being able to listen to several different things, or really just being a good listener as you play. Like that's a habit I think you have to get into and you have to practice and you have to develop. These things will help because ultimately it's going to put you into that ultimate position of being able to clear your mind and just sort of habitually on instinct do good things as you're playing in a situation with other people.

and then it's going to really start to snowball because people are like, wow, I love playing with Adam because he's always playing the right thing, but he's always listening, but then he's always fun to hang out with that. It's like all your little habits started to add up, actually. And people are going to think, well, he's just born a genius, but you're going to know it's because you developed all those little habits. But can we talk before we get too deep in here about some psychological aspects of this?

I just want to clarify, because we're talking about good habits and bad, we're putting these kind of values on the habits or whatever. Don't sweat about having bad habits. No. You're always going to have bad habits. I have bad habits. They're fun. They're great.

They're really fun. They're very enjoyable. But the goal is to always try to make the best decisions to focus on the good habits and limit the amount of bad habits. But don't freak out about like, oh, I have all these bad habits. Yeah, we all do. Another important thing about bad habits, like say you're really working on, you know, particular scale or whatever.

And you feel like you've gotten in the habit of like doing the right thing in your development of that every day. And then there's a day where you mess and you don't practice or you forget to practice that or whatever. Don't let that throw you off. Totally. You know what I mean? The key is, and I remember, I'm trying to remember who I learned this from,

but it was like, just don't let two days go. And this is like about practice in general, because I grew up in a house where it was like you practice every day. It wasn't like five days a week like the slack or podcast we're doing now or whatever. It was like seven days a week because I hear some people like, man, I'm trying to practice three days a week. I was like, no, try to practice seven days a week, you know. But look, if you do fall, because that was like the Suzuki up bringing it.

And Suzuki himself was like his thing was you practice every day you eat. You don't have to practice every day. But any day you eat, you practice your instrument. You connect to the instrument. And that's the goal. But the whole thing of that, don't make that as self-fulfilling prophecy of failure in that if you miss a day, just don't let two days go. That's true. You know what I mean?

So if you fall off, you know, get back on and don't be looking back. We're always looking forward. So with habits, that's how you can turn a, you know, you can help a bad habit from developing out of what was about to be a good habit. Because eventually, when you get to the point of like really being a habit like eating, for instance, now we have some biological and life reasons that we want to do. do that, but or like breathing. You know, once you get in the habit of that as a baby when you, when you come into the world and you're not inside your mother anymore, like those are pretty good to just maintain. You don't have to think about them anymore.

So we want to get all of our habits in that same way. You know, thinking about some strategies that we could work on to help develop our good habits and something we've been talking a lot about the last couple days around here at Open Studio is to really engage what you, your goals for the day, write them down. Yeah. You know, we both keep written journals for, you know, bullet journals for what we want to do. Bujos, we could call them. And yeah, and however you want to do it on a computer, on a phone, if you want to just write it out.

But I think for me, the clarity of writing down things that I want to accomplish in my good habits list that day. Yeah. It's hugely helpful to have something to check off. Yeah. And even if I don't get everything to it, like, to your point of like, you miss one day or whatever. or like I'll still want to get in that habit of waking up every morning, writing down, you know, not that much, three to five things maybe that I really want to accomplish or habits that I want to hit that day. Absolutely. And now there's some, there's some easy things you can do to manifest this.

So like, let's say for practicing, if you're a trumpet player and you always sit in a certain chair, like prepare your environment to develop good habits. So that would be a matter of as simple as just having a journey. journal like if you want to get in the habit of like developing these two to three things for your practice every day that you want to get accomplished make it easier on yourself so have a little chair and I'm not saying this has to be the perfect brand journal don't get in all that have a piece of paper whatever it is and a legal pad sitting have a legal pad and a pen sitting there now when you sit down that's a reminder to you and it's going to help you to get into that because some people like I just can't get in the habit of that you know arrange your physical space around you so that you have that and it's still not going to insure it but it's going to make it a lot easier so much like if you if you if you if you if you're you if you you want to get in the habit of playing in better time and really just the habit of practicing with the metronome, the easiest thing, get a metronome and sit it there. Because sometimes people are like, well, I've got a metronome app on my phone. Yeah, but aren't you also trying to be in the habit of concentrating when you practice? So you're not going to want to have your phone there. You get that phone out. You start getting that Instagram out, you know. Exactly. So, I mean,

like, do the things that kind of, some, that they're going to set you up, not just for today, but for coming days to be able to, you know, to do that. And I think that, you know, these things, we kind of gloss over because it's like, no, I want that silver bullet. I want to know how to practice with the metronom. Am I going to beat on two, three? No, the best thing is just have the damn thing sitting right there and turn it on, you know. You just keep whatever, do it on every beat. Eventually you're going to get bored and you're going to figure out crazy ways to practice with it.

That's how all of this happens. Exactly. That's how all innovation happens is we all just do what we were told to do and then we get bored with it and start doing something new. Yeah. I love what people are just like, should I practice with the metronome on this other beat or whatever? And I mean, my thing now is I guess I'm getting crotchety is. I get older. It's like practice 30 days in a row without missing a day on a C major scale with the metrum. Then we'll talk about next level. Okay. I take it to the next level. I say, no,

you have to practice on the E of three every fourth bar. Right. That's great. That's great. But the other thing is, you know, we talk about like discipline of practice because like it's so important to have a real discipline approach to practice. I mean, we're we're preaching that all the time. But if you develop some good habits within just your practice routine in general, That makes having the discipline so much easier because you don't have to think about it. Like you have a routine. Yeah. And that's really what discipline is then.

Because some people are like, man, how can you be so disciplined with it? I'm not any more discipline than anybody else. I just have a plan and I stick to it, usually. But sometimes I fall off and I don't let myself fall off two days. Well, that sort of core discipline allows you that freedom then to then have a day where you either don't practice or maybe I just, I'm just going to play. You know, because I know I've had this whole month of discipline practice. And then maybe a little bit of negativity built in, too. So we're talking about positivity as far as having the notebook there, having the metronome there, having some negative ramifications.

But this can be in the form of too many drinks tonight. Yeah, yeah. It could be like just sort of some social things from others to say that where you could post it online or what's the one I heard someone say? I could never get organized enough to do this. And I don't think I would need it. But it's something like if somebody had something where they, oh yeah, they wanted to start waking up at 5 a.m. And like working or doing whatever. And they couldn't figure out how to do that.

They do the alarm, but then they're like snooze or whatever. They tried all these different things. They set up at 505 a.m. A thing where they would auto-tweet out, like, I am a big loser. I'm still sleeping. And then they had it like, I can't remember. It was like in another room. So like they had to get up.

And then that was the first thing. So basically the world, all their followers are going to know that they weren't up. And they'd said they were going to do something. That's great. The shame. That's a shame. You shame. So they had to get up and go on the other.

And by the time they like took the tweet off. and I can't. They're like, oh, I'm already up. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, there's all different ways to do it that aren't that dramatic, you know, just kind of letting people know, look, I'm going to practice that because then you see them. I mean, how's that practicing every day going? I mean, if you're like, well, I did six out of seven days, then it's like, you know what, that's good.

If you didn't hit any, you know, that's going to be a problem. This is great, man. I love talking about this stuff because it's something that you could always tweak. And it really kind of makes the most difference of anything you can do for your playing and for yourself as a person. Yeah. And remember, like the biggest level. And we kind of talked about this, you know, the other day when we're talking about marketing and gigs and stuff. The biggest level for development sometimes is just your own commitment to yourself and then starting there and then going out to the community, to a band, to the bigger community that you're part of musical community is just showing up.

Like that's a habit to get into. That's why I'm here every day. So that's, yeah, I mean, it's just like, yeah, a job is like you show up. But I mean, the job of being a pianist is like, get to the piano every day. Get in the habit of playing. And at first, that's going to be one second because that's the shortest amount of. time. Well, I guess you can get a no. It's true though. To your point, I think is don't be so precious about it. Yeah, don't be so. Just go do the job. How many times we get like, what should

I do in my routine? What should I do? But then I'm like, well, how much you practice? Well, I'm not sure yet because I don't know. Start by just playing one note and then play a couple notes and then play a scale. But the habit part is not what you're playing so much or even the metronom and all these things. Those are individual. The habit level one to being a great musician is to play your instrument every day. Right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's so true. So thanks to Open Studio for this offer

For the All Access Pass annual membership Save $77 when you use the offer code You'll hear it at the offer code field at checkout Yeah, and then the ultimate tip We didn't promo that today But we always like to throw something in I read a book recently that I'll just throw out for you Atomic Habits

This is part of the reason that habits is kind of all my mind By James Clear So big recommendation If anyone really wants to get into it But you can also check out James Clear, like on a podcast, wherever you get a little bit of a thing. But the book is really good if you want to go a deep dive on habits and all different ways and how they can apply to your life. Until tomorrow. You don't hear it.

Hey, Adam. What's up? I know we were talking about habits today, but you're getting a bad habit over there. Yeah, I'm not remembering to talk about our listener tunes in the episode. This is Scrats Revenge, sent in by Mike Montgomery, bassist from Cash Right Trio. Cash Money Brothers.