You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Best of: Ultimate Tips

Episode Date: July 23, 2019

On this episode, it's an assortment of the best Ultimate Tips from season 3. Tune in tomorrow for the premiere of You'll Hear It season 4!Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐��⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.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, what's up? You'll hear at listeners. Welcome back to day two of our little break before season four starts. Again, seasons are arbitrary for us. It's literally whenever Andrew decides that we're done with the season. And so we're done with season three. Thanks for the ride. It was really fun. We're going to do another best of episode here today. This one is purely to feed Peter's ego, which I don't know why we need to do that, Andrew, but that's what we're doing. This is the best of the ultimate tips. Most of these are Peter's final. tips that to be honest he just kind of thinks of a few

seconds before he says them but they're all gold that's what's so annoying about it. All right anyway, hope you enjoy it and we'll see you tomorrow for season four. Okay, so this brings us to our ultimate tip, which is?

The ultimate advice. I mean, this is a lot, like, you know, to put on it because this is our life's advice. But this one is one that actually came to me, what was reminded to me, from the Bill Murray documentary that I just saw, which is brilliant. Check that out on Netflix.

Big shout out to Netflix. Keep on documenting. But they, you know, Bill Murray, I won't go through the whole thing with the movie, but basically, he's this amazing, you know, actor, of course, renowned, Academy Award winning and all that. But he,

the whole movie is about how he engages with people. And so the advice I just want to take from this is for jazz is engage with the jazz community. So what this means is like, go sit in, go meet other musicians, put yourself out there. If you're a young person or any age and you want to do this as your profession, you're like, I want to be a jazz musician. Put yourself out there.

Don't like wait and sit in the practice room and just send emails to people and texting, whatever. Go out and actually talk to people. Go out and play with people. Put yourself out there on the line. And it's hard because, you know, it's scary because you're like, I suck and I don't want anyone to hear me. But this is really good advice, I think, for everybody. First of all, you're never as bad as you. you think you are and nobody else is ever as good as you think that they are totally so without

engaging with other musicians in the community and and i can say that this jazz community is very open and very open to engagement and it's a very loving place but you have to really put yourself out there so whenever you're thinking like should i do this or not or let me let me think about would this be a good opportunity yeah do it i mean unless you're doing so many different gigs and look we always talk about this to be like oh you're going to go check out such and such i don't really yeah let's do it Like we're always default to like, let's try to do it. Let's try to be a part of that because that's how things happen. I mean, this stuff is not made in isolation.

And that's what you're going to learn. It's so true. You know, I always talk about these three most important things for learning anything. And especially music is good private instruction or mentorship. The first two are obvious. Like that's the first one. Private practice, like being able to practice yourself. Obviously, you need that to learn anything.

But the third one that I think people sleep on is this one. Yeah. Is to find a community of people to become a part of. You know, those relationships you make, the things you can learn from peers, you know, are so important. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so here's our bonus tip on gig marketing, how to put butts into seats. And that is, you know, we talked about different channels in different ways, you know, websites and all these different things, word of mouth. But the important thing with this is to find the channel that you.

your audience is. Don't worry so much. I mean, yeah, it has to be something that you're comfortable with too, but keep like, do some experiments in different things. And this could be anything from a standing outside with a sandwich board, if that's where your people are, you know, to posting online, to sending emails, if you keep an email list or Instagram, but wherever your people are or people, and how do you know who your people are? You start with one and then two, the people that are there, how did you hear about us? So you put some little experiments out there. How did you hear, oh, I saw you're posting on Instagram. I saw your live feet, you know, maybe you become a live stream. guy and that's how you always promote your next gig but find that channel and then hit that one

hard and and and and because you can't be everywhere at all the time and if yeah no know your audience if you're 17 year old synth pop artist the email list is probably not the way to go no no get people's phone numbers and text them directly so the ultimate tip about these things I was focusing in on routine right number three and I think if you think about routine I mean we all know what a routine is but it's not always as easy as like what you said, you're like, you go over here, you practice, then you come over. The reason that that's a routine for you is you've developed a habit. That's really what a routine is.

And, you know, we've talked before. I think we had some things about habits on here. We can go deep on another episode. But the idea that you need to repeat, you know, a routine, we're talking about a positive behavior. So we all have habits, good, bad, or indifferent. We're talking about some positive routines that we get in that are really habitual. You know, so once you develop a routine, don't just think, oh, I've got the routine.

Now it's magically happened. You need to repeat that. You need to turn it into a habit. So you need to do all the things that you would do for a good or a bad habit and kind of rewards and all the different structures that are associated with those habits. I love it. Yeah. I love it too, man.

All right. All right. What's our, I mean, this is so unbelievable. Well, yeah. And you push this one down because you're like, this is truly ultimate bonus. Well, just, I mean, you've played concerts. Yeah. As a jazz musician.

More as a jazz musician, I think. Okay, so this is that the fact, this number eight, our bonus of our unbelievable facts about jazz. Miles Davis played for 600,000 people in 1970, the year of my birth, the summer of my birth, the same month. You know what we're going to say on my birthday. I'm not sure about that. Can you look that up, Andrew? I love white concert in 1970. See what date that was.

So Miles Davis played for 600,000 people at Isle of White Festival in the UK. Now, I'm not talking about he did seven sets. He played seven nights, two sets a night, and they added all the people up, and it came to $600,000. One setting. I'm talking about at one concert. There's a wonderful, there's a bunch of pictures from it. There's some video. Actually, I think they did a documentary that he's part of.

But it was this big kind of rock festival, and Miles Davis, new jazz musician, a pretty good one. They legit played for 600,000 people. And he was not booed or asked to leave. That's the most unbelievable part of it. This whole thing seems preposterous. I know. I mean, did he make a Facebook event for it? How did you market that?

Yeah, that's how he did. He did, exactly. So our ultimate tip on comping. Our ultimate tip on comping is this. Do not mimic what the soloist is doing all the time. Stop with that. Thank you. You're there to add to what they're doing, to support them, not to constantly being a mirror.

A mirror of what they're doing. Nobody likes that. But not only a mirror, like a mirror. We're like, ah, ugh. Yeah. You're shoving it in their face. It's like the most basic version of listening. Right.

And it's not cool. Although, don't you love it when the drummer, when you go, the drummer looks here and the drummer looks here, goes, yeah, yeah, cack, cag, yeah. No, you don't love that. I don't love it. What I love is when I go, dun, d'ant, dana, and the drummer goes,

Shugon, shangon, shang, answers me in some interesting way. That's cool. That's right. That's right. Have a conversation. Don't make, don't just say back what the person's saying. Yeah, don't just say back what the person's saying. Don't just say back with the, we could do this all day.

See how annoying this is? Exactly. What's our ultimate tip? So this is the thing on individuality. I think the ultimate tip is that, you know, you actually can practice this, at least how it manifests into your playing. I know we said you are an individual and that's already there. But how do we manifest that?

And that is this practicing performing that we've talked about before. And I like to do this at the end of the practice period, but you really could do it at any time. What's even better is if you come back later and do it. a little practice and you could just come in for like 15 minutes and just play. But the idea for this is going to be you're going to take a song or whatever it is you're working on and you're going to be telling you're performing. But the joy of it is going to be that there's no audience there. So there's no reason to get nervous because nobody cares. But your only goal there is to play as much as possible you. So you've got the framework, which is the tune or the blues

or whatever you're playing. Or you could even do a free improvisation if you if you've got that in your wheelhouse, but you're going to actually practice playing as an individual. You're only going to play ideas that are like something that you've heard. If that's stebidoo-d-d-da, stebidoo-d-da, stebid-do, that's who you are. That's fine. Like, whatever kind of comes to mind first. You're not going to judge yourself when you copy, which invariably you will, things that you're working on. But it's going to be like a mindfulness exercise in that other thoughts are going to come in, just relax, don't judge, push them out, and forge your head. Remember that that chick worksheet from Berkeley that Elias shared with us, right?

Chick-Korea. Only play what, sorry. That's okay. Only play what you hear. Yes. And if you're not hearing anything, don't play it. That exercise, when you practice performance like that, only being yourself and not playing anything that's not you, that gets you in that zone very quickly.

That's right. There it is. Well, until tomorrow. You'll hear it.