You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Don't Overthink Sh** - #119

Episode Date: May 28, 2018

Today, Adam and Peter discuss some ways to simplify your thinking as you improvise. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Menace and I'm Peter Martin and you're listening to the You'll Hear at Podcast. Today we're going to teach you how to not overthink. Very good. We rehearsed that couple times. Yeah, that was good. That was good. Okay, so we're going to teach you this. You know, just getting back to the beep really quick, we do also edit this podcast. So I could have just added a normal beat, but I like how you have me.

It's fun and minimalist. We're still minimalist from yesterday, you know. It's good. Yeah, that's good. Okay, so why do we not want to overthink stuff? Because I feel like day after day we're telling them how to think, how to practice, how to think. So maybe this is a little bit of a warning to go along with how to sort of stay in that organic flow that you need to be in to really be able to successfully play this music. It's true.

And I think any performing of anything, whether that's music or baseball or slam poetry, overthinking is really the death nail. I always talked about the time I went to that slam poetry, midnight jam, and I'd been totally overthinking it all day, man. Disaster. I wish I'd heard this podcast. I would have seen that. Yeah, I froze up, froze up. Well, this is, but this is the thing, right?

Like, our brains get going. Our brains get going in there. They're giving us all this information, and then we usually don't perform our best. So, you know, the idea with, I think, with this episode is to really, hopefully, learn some tools and techniques that we're not overthinking what we're doing, you know. Yes. And, you know, I think primarily we're talking about when you're in a performance situation. That's the time to really, it sounds counterintuitive, but to not think and just feel.

You know, if you're doing your practice correctly, you're doing a lot of thinking, you know, rationalization, very conscious practice during your practice time, you know, methodical, all the things where you're very engaged. But I really think that when you perform and in order to be able to get into that, space where you can successfully improvise, you have to not only not overthink stuff, but not think at all. And, you know, when you're not a real accomplished player, if it's your student or whatever, I'm sort of careful in saying this because this can lead to some very bad improvises. Oh, good, I don't have to think about the changes. I don't have to think about the form. And the thing is, until you know those things so well that you don't, that you can get away with not thinking about them,

but because you're feeling them and you're so, they're so ingrained in you that you know you're going to be nailing them no matter what, then you, yeah, you are going to have to overthink some, but you don't have to overthink them. Yeah, it's not that you're not thinking about the changes or not thinking about the form. You're still performing the changes.

Yeah. You're still performing the form, but you should be at a point with your practice that you're actually not thinking about them. Really? Yeah. That they're just happening. Absolutely.

And, I mean, you have such a command that it seems like you're executing on all those things you're always executing on the time on the form on intonation all the technical things for your instrument you know playing things that are interesting all that but most of them you're doing automatically so what happens is the only thing you're thinking about and it's not even real conscious kind of thinking is creativity that's right you know and listening we forgot number one no one no but it is true you know we I was in here in our studio with our intern Royce Martin, who's a very fine pianist in his own right, and he's very young. He's a senior in high school. He's about to go to music school, and he was asking about communication between players, right? And he's still kind of at a stage where he's learning the changes to things, learning all the scales. So he's still thinking about what scale goes over what chord. But he was asking about communication. I was like, well, see, what you want to do is listen to the other people, you know, leave some space, have a conversation, use what they throw at you.

you know, as inspiration and answer them and all this stuff. And he's, I could see it in his eyes. I'm just thinking about the diminished scale and what notes are in that scale. And I told him, I was like, first, before this happens, you have to get this stuff so ingrained. Because when I do it, I'm not thinking about what scale I'm playing. I'm just communicating with you like I am talking with you. I'm not thinking about, you know, how the words are spelled that I'm saying. I'm just communicating.

Right. And, but I do think that you have to, even when you're going through that period, of being able to gain the confidence of knowing that the form and all these other elements are so inside of you that you don't have to think about it. I think you have to kind of go across, jump across the ledge a little bit and try to play without fear, even though you may get lost or you may mess up the time or whatever, because you're never going to get there otherwise. If you always play it safe and overthink those basic things, you're never going to really be able to get to the point. Or you'll get there, but it'll take you so much longer by doing it like that. So you have to accept, I mean, just like anything in life, like in order to progress, you have to accept that you're going to have a certain amount of failure.

In fact, I don't even think you can ever progress until you have that failure. You've got to be on a gig where you get lost on the rhythm changes because you can't remember if you're on the last A or the second A. But you at least took the chance to say, I'm going to try to sound good on this and just listen to what the drummer's doing and interact. And I might get lost, but at least I'll be sounding as opposed to counting out every measure and just playing it safe and trying to think too much, you know. Yeah, because you will, with that failure, you'll teach yourself techniques to mark that form next time. Well, you get fired off the gig.

That'll teach you. The fear of failure is the best motivator. No, but I think, I do think a lot of this is motivation for practice, right? This is, if you have a good, focused practice routine, you know, a lot of this should take care of itself. You should get it so ingrained if you're practicing the right way that you don't have to think that much on the gig. Yeah, I see the way, you know, if you're a basketball fan and you think about LeBron James, I was just watching him play the other day, not in the game yesterday because he didn't play very well. But his normal thing, you know, when he's dribbling the ball down, you can see there's something in his eyes.

Like, even if he's being guarded or if he's having to go around someone, like the basic mechanics of playing basketball, like dribbling and the space on the court and all these things, like not only is he not thinking about them, it's just like so it's just like he's walking. You know, and so, but he's got this look in his eyewear, it's the equivalent of what we talk about, listen, listen to the other players. Like, he's looking to see what patterns, you know, develop where players are cutting. Maybe he's directing or something. But the actual playing of basketball, he's, I mean, there's just nothing, no thought about that at all. It's the creativity of what's going to happen in the next play. And if you can apply that, you know, it's, we're always making the sports analogies because physically you can kind of see the manifestation of these same kind of things that we hear and think about or don't think about. I think on the band's then. Yeah, if you ever go early to any sporting event, you know, when you see the players warming up or you get to go to a practice or something, they're always drilling fundamentals. They're always working on fundamentals, even at a professional level. And it's because of what you just described. It's because he can then go out there and see things from a higher level, and he's not thinking

about fundamentals. So if you ignore the fundamentals of jazz, you know, in your practice routine, you are not going to be able to step above everything on the gig and see things from above and see the higher level of things. And that's where the real, you know, music happens. Absolutely. And plus, I mean, what's the first, what's the first syllable of fundamentals? Fun.

Exactly. Hello. Come on, man. Really? Yeah, it really is. I know. I just had that deep thought. You threw in a nice pun.

Thanks, bro. Well, we put the fun and fundamentals. What can we say? Well, we also put the Yule in. You'll Hear It. Thanks for listening to this episode of the You'll Hear It podcast. You can go to you'll hear it.com to get more information, submit a question, or just say hello.

Wait, you can do that. Absolutely. All right, and if you like what you heard, please leave a review and a rating below. Thanks.