You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Everyone's Busy. Nobody Cares. Find Time To Practice.

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

No more excuses. Adam and Peter talk about the true nature of developing a good practice ritual. Have a question for us? Leave us a SpeakPipeCheckout courses from Adam, Peter and more at Open StudioLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Instagram

Hey, Peter. Hey, stop with the excuses. Oh, I... I'm busy, too. Stop it. I can see what you're doing. Buddy, my schedule is... A, go practice.

Right now. I'm out of menace. Oh, I should... Oh, yeah, that's rude. And is it... I'm practicing. I don't have time for you. Okay, A, super rude.

B, is that what you really spend your time practicing? No, but that's like the avatar for practice. That's like the meme for practice. It is. It is the meme for practice. You'll hear a podcast. I'm Peter Martin. I'm Adam Manus. Music advice coming at you.

Music advice. And life advice. Today I'm excited because we're going back to life advice. He kept his end of the gentleman's agreement, folks. Hey, hey, don't say that. You didn't get to it quick enough. It takes too long. Yeah, so today we're getting a little dogmatic. I like it when we dabble in the dogma. Would that be something you might be interested?

Peter loves it. It is. We both come from a dogmatic beginning because of our harsh upbrings, our mothers and fathers, beat us into submission. We've never met. Not together. Separately. The manis is not dog-gare. I think when our parents did get a chance to meet, which was fun, they was a glimmer in their eye.

There was a little glimmer. They recognized. Yeah. Because my mom looked at your mom. Game recognized. Exactly. My mom looked at your mom. She was like, you better recognize.

And your mom was like, you better recognize. Debbie Madness in the house. Actually, I think when they first got together, they were like, can you help me? I want to hear our son's podcast. And I can't figure out how to download it. And then your mom was like, I can't either. They're like, oh, well, forget about it. My dad, who still have.

the flip phone was like, what? Exactly. Okay, so today we're talking about practice. Can we talk about practice? I mean, listen, we're talking about practice. Not a game, not a game, not a game. Not a game. We're talking about practice.

That's the great Alan Iverson, who's been in the news a little bit doing some interviews lately, so very top of all. Yeah. He's a little older, a little plumper. It's okay. He's still in shape. Earned it.

He earned it, man. Yeah, no, he is. That was a fun player to watch. It was a great player. Yeah. Do you know about the, but I diverged so that I can take away from my practice time here. Do you know about, I haven't watched, there's actually a Netflix special documentary on this about the NBA officials cheating scandal from the 90s. From the AI.

But I forgot like it all, I think it was Donnelly was the referee who was kind of spearheading it. There was gambling thing. But it all started from him calling Paul. on Alan Iverson when he was playing in Denver, which like, first of all, people, I mean, that was like a Jordan thing that he, you know, that never got called for and then it became an accepted part, you know,

they never called travel. All of a sudden, one game, they started calling it and that was to tip the scales in that game. Oh my God. Against Alan Iverson. I was, what are you talking about?

This is the way I was in there like, no, traveling. And that actually changed the trajectory. I haven't seen that, Doc, I've seen the previews for it. Yeah. And it makes me uncomfortable because, you know, like,

I don't know if you ever like, when you're watching sports or sports, sporting event and you kind of go online and you see what people are saying on Twitter or Reddit or something about it. But every single game, people are on there saying this is fix the refs for any sport. Yeah. And the refs are biased towards usually not my home team. Right.

No one ever says like, wow, the refs are really in favor of my home team today. Right. You know what I mean, it's always when your team is losing, it's the refs fault and they're terrible. And I always am like, that's such bullshit. That's never like refs, I mean, if you've ever even met like a Little League ref, like usually most of them. Like take it super seriously.

They really want to be impartial. You know what I mean? And this doc is like, oh, well, no, that's not, this happened. Well, the money's right. They will diverge from what's right occasionally. But this takes us to our subject today, what we're talking about, because think about the people that are on their, like, who has the time

to sit there and watch a sporting event and be on Reddit and Twitter at the same time? They're not practicing. You know what I mean? Yeah, I just admitted that I do that. Believe me, Alan Irishman wasn't doing that when he was growing up. He was out there practicing in spite of our little audio that we pull up from him, he was spending the time practicing, and that's what we're really

going to talk about today. It's like, how do you practice, in this case, the craft of playing music, playing the piano, playing your instrument, playing jazz, playing what other kind of music. Yeah. But in jazz, you know, we play all the notes. Right, we play all the notes, so that takes practice. Practice makes perfect, right? But the idea is

like, everybody's busy. We got a little dog. What is the official title of this episode? Can you refresh me on that? It says, Everyone's busy. Everybody's busy. Nobody cares. Find time to practice. Right. So the idea that being busy is an excuse for practicing, it can become an excuse if you let that happen. But I mean, think about how many times even with the very process of getting ready to practice that we busy ourselves in order to avoid practicing. So it becomes its own sort of avoidance mechanism. So like practicing, we have to at a certain level, boil it down to its simplest, most essential element, and that is time at your instrument. That's the most important thing. Because there's so many other things that we can associate with it.

We have to have the right place. The piano has to be tuned. We have to be at the right mindset. We have to have had a banana, blackberry protein smoothie before we... I mean, there's so many different things that we can do to complicate it that we can say, or we're too busy. I've got kids.

You have young kids. Well, they're not as young as they use. to be. Mine aren't either. But that's always a classic excuse. I've got young kids and I have to take care of them or else they're not going to be safe. No, you don't. Lock them in front. Lock them in front of the television. We used to call it the babysitter. Sorry.

You'll hear a podcast nor Open Studio does not endorse the state that's of Peter Martin. Of course, you've got to watch your kids. You got to watch your kids. Actually, and I was going to say, so let's just start here by saying, first of all, that different stages of life allow for just different amounts of big blocks of free time.

That's just legit. Where the world don't turn. And it did do bad. Okay. I'm with you. Yeah, yeah. No, but you know what I'm saying. Like, so, okay, so we'll put just that on everything. And one of, I think, probably the most difficult times, and maybe we can talk about this because we've both been through it. One of the most difficult times to find big blocks of times is when you do have kids, I would say, under school age, right? So who aren't in school yet. And I mean, even...

But you're talking about real little kids. I'm talking about toddlers, kindergartners. Well, kindergartners are in school. I guess they're in school. But that time... Big shout out to all the kindergarten teachers you just insulted by saying they're not really in school.

That time... I guess we'll say kids who are 10 and under, right? That is a tough time because you gotta... They can't do anything without you. But those little kids sleep a lot. Notice that?

Well, the babies sleep a lot. Yeah. The other little kids don't. But you're right. So I hear what you're saying. But I just want to say that could be a very difficult time. Yeah.

Especially when compared to the time not too long before that for most people, which is when you are a young adult. Yeah. Right. And so I would say, first of all, like, acknowledge where you are in your life and what obstacle.

I mean, it's going to be obvious for most of you. But if you are a young adult, if you're 19 years old, 18 years old. Ooh, that's prime development time. You don't have anything else going on. You're going to have to make some sacrifices. If you want to be a great musician, like, if you really want to put in what it takes, this is your time. I just want to say that out front. And I know a lot of you probably hear this, but you've got to know.

this is your time to put long hours in in the instrument and if you can't find joy in that this is not for you. I have a great response to that. Okay. Okay, boomer. I'm saying, I'm trying to be, I understand it can be tough

because there's a lot of distractions and also you want to have a life. And I get that, but you need to like, if you really want to do this especially if you want to be like a professional, right? Because that's not for everybody.

It's not for everybody. It's not for everybody. And maybe you don't want to be. Maybe, and I understand because it's like the professional sacrifice to being a professional musician is rough. But if this is your dream, find the way to, to, I mean, for me, even when I was younger, and I, believe me, I love going out, man. I love, I love a party. You can't, I'm, I have a party. Sometimes I am a party, especially when I was younger. But, like, I would make time every morning. I'd be in the practice room by 8, which was seemed very early 8 a.m. back in the day. So I'd be in there by 8 every day trying to get at least 3, 4, 5 hours in. You know what I mean? And that's the time to do it. Can I do that now?

as the creative director for Open Studio and a father of two kids. I can't do that every day where I wake up at eight and practice for four hours. There's no way I could do that, right? I have too many responsibilities. So, you know, we have to shift our focus. But we'll start with that first group. If you don't have responsibilities, if you're young and you're not, you don't have a family or a house or a mortgage or a job or any obligations like that,

use this time wisely and use it to work on your craft. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And look, at really at every stage, you know, in an individual's life, there's going to be the opportunity to have an excuse, you know. And so we don't want to be like, like there's really people down on their luck in hard times, dealing with illness, caring for, you know, family members, you know, doing things that in the grand scheme of things is way more important in practice. So we're kind of excluding that. We don't want to, you know, make light of any of those kinds of situations. But I think we do want to always think about our own trajectory of our life and the different seasons that that goes through and how that affects our practice because you don't want to get stuck in kind of a thinking of like once I get to this point or once my kids hit this age or once I don't have to go to work every day or once. Like there's always this sort of time.

And I think that our society fosters that in sometimes an unhealthy way in terms of how it applies to really not even I wouldn't say becoming a professional musician or an artist or anything, just engaging with. something that's deeply, you know, human like playing an instrument, playing music, appreciating art, all these kinds of things. But that is that there's always like, there's a time when you get to retirement. That's when the golden years start and everything. I mean, you're just going to spend all your time getting there and then you're going to get there and be like, well, what now? Like, what am I going to do? Exactly. And so it's the same thing like with practicing. So yeah, there may be something on, you know, in the future where it's either a certain month, like you can take time off from work or, you know, your kids go off to college or

whatever it is that you'll have more time to engage. But if you're not already in the habit of engaging. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. In the words of Mr. Bobby Nike, just do it. Bobby Nike. Bob Knight.

No, I totally agree. Actually, we talked about this last summer. I was, you know, I had this whole mental thing going on because I was, we were taking this big vacation. It was our first big vacation since COVID. Yeah. We went up to northern Minnesota. Didn't you guys catch COVID on that vacation?

We caught COVID on the vacation for the first time. Sorry. Excellent. Thanks for bringing that up. But no, no. So I was fighting this idea of like, okay, well, I'll just get to vacation. I'm super busy now, but I'm going to relax when I get to vacation. And I remember going through the process of like, wait, if I'm just yearning for vacation, when I get up there, I'm not going to be in shape to enjoy the moment that I'm in.

Like, I want to enjoy the anticipation of we're going to have this big trip. I want to enjoy the work that I'm doing to get done before that. I want to enjoy every moment of where I am. that way and get up there, I'm not just looking for the next thing. I'm enjoying the moment that I'm in. And it's the same thing with practice, too. There's no finish line to this. There's not a time where, like, now I'm one of the greatest pianists in the world,

or now I'm a real deal musician, or now I'm established. It's just a day after day. You live a musical lifestyle. You get to your instrument, and you just keep working at it. And then if you're lucky, great things happen. Well, and I think it's such a great, you know, kind of this metaphor to retirement. where it's like, yeah, if you're just waiting for this day, it's like you can have the elements that people associate with retirement or the elements that people associate with a vacation in a beautiful secluded cabin or something. You can have that every day.

Yeah, don't wait until you're retired. Yeah. And then you can, exactly. And then you can also appreciate looking forward to that very concentrated special time. So, yes, today you might not have time to practice, to get up in the morning. Like, I mean, think about what would be the ideal. I'll describe mine. and then you could describe yours,

and everyone can kind of imagine. But it's like, what would be the ideal practice day? So for me, it would be like, I'm waking up just as the birds are chirping, and I'm outdoors, but somehow I'm protected from the elements, both at the same time. Interesting. So I'm amongst the birds, but no birds are crapping on me. Are you nude? There's bugs going on.

Hopefully not, but I feel nude. Okay, all right. I'm out there. So, I mean, in other words, it's the most natural awakening. There's no alarm clock. There's no phone or anything. the sun just, you know, shines upon me. And then a unicorn prances along with a Steinway piano

and delivers it unts to me in the woods. Unst? Come on, man. I'm trying to be fancy here. It's my fantasy, you know. Okay. No, but the idea is that I'm waking up on fully refreshed, feeling great, not hungover, quite the opposite.

Just, you know, in love with life. I don't know. I'm trying to paint a picture. You know what I'm saying? Also, I mean, you know, yeah, okay. I need you to finish this part. I'm waking up and I'm thinking like, I can't wait to get to the instrument today. Okay, great.

But it's in the most natural way. Like, there's nothing in between. There's no like, oh, I got to check my email first. Or I got to do this. Okay. I'm getting up. I'm going over to a babbling brook of organic vegan smoothie. I get it.

This is a fantasy. It's like Willy Wonka. It's like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, except there's piano. Except there's Steinway's everywhere. Okay, so this is never going to happen. Exactly. That's what I'm trying to say. Thank you.

I was trying to get to the point. But sometimes people, like, they're waiting for that. Like, that's retirement for them. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's never going to be perfect. No, but you can have it today. Like, you can get to your instrument. You might get to your instrument for three minutes.

Totally. You know what I'm saying? Like, your kids, if you know your youngest kid or your least sleeping kid wakes up at six, get up at $6.45. Like, you've got 15 minutes then before your day starts. Yeah. Because you don't know what's going to happen in the evening. You know what I mean?

So you might have to say no to a little bit of Netflix the next night. I can't tell you. how many people like, they're like, I don't have time to practice. I'm like, really? What did you do today? I was working all day. I was like, come on, what else were you doing? Did you eat?

Yes, I ate. Okay, well, you got to do that. Did you, but I had to take care of my kids that I had to do this? And I'm like, okay, did you watch TV? No. Did you watch TikTok if they're younger? Well, I mean, I scroll through some things. Think about how much time you spend all these different things.

And that's okay. If you're intentional, if you're like, I spend 45 minutes on TikTok, if you say that, you probably said three hours. If you said I watched Netflix for 20 minutes, you watch YouTube for 20 minutes. It was probably two hours. A B plus is an F. We know that. Everything is like, is bigger than it seems, right? What if you, yeah, and but what if you spend some of that time?

You go on Instagram and maybe you see a little challenge from Peter Martin taking this little piece of language through 12 keys. You do that for 10 minutes. Yeah, yeah. The intentionality of it. But it's also like getting to that place where, like, when this becomes easy and you start finding time for stuff is when something that you refer to at the beginning really, like enjoying the journey, love into practice, where it's not a chore. Where it's like an escape from the rest of your life, then you'll make sure it happens. Something that goes, whether you're 17 and have eight hours to practice or you're 40 and you have 15 minutes here and there to practice, is if you focus on the things that light you up, right? What is, like I said this last week, too, what is like the number one thing you've been listening to on Spotify or Apple Music or in your record collection?

Do you know that song? Go learn that song that you love, man. and like you will, like 30 minutes of fly by, you're not even think, but you just got the greatest practice routine you can get in, which is you are learning something, music that moves you, that is going to enrich you as a person and a musician,

and help your musicianship. Yep. And if you do that, I mean, that's what I'm saying. Like, you don't have to think about practices just this. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, that's fine.

No, it can also be. Totally. If you want to work on finger independence and you are, I mean, there have been moments in my playing, several moments where this lit me up. I was like, holy smokes, what is that and why can't I do it? And I, you know, like, that's great.

But if that doesn't light you up today, don't worry about it. And on days when you're like, oh, nothing can like, this is a tough day, like find those things, especially what you're saying, like maybe something that you've already learned where you're just playing, those things that give you that great satisfaction. Don't just be like, I can't practice today. My mind's not right. You know what I mean? the unicorn didn't deliver my Steinway.

No, on those days, go to the easy, like make it easy on yourself. It's kind of like if you're trying to work out every day and it's just a tough day, don't go trying to like do more sets and heavier weights than ever. Just do something easy. Keep in the gym. Keep in front of the instrument every day. And then on those days when you've got the energy, when you've got the inspiration, maybe you even have the time, challenge yourself a little bit more,

but always have those things that are nice too. But I mean, it's like, you do have to get out of that mentality of like practices supposed to only be entertaining to you. Because it's very different than like, like if you want to be a creator of art and I firmly believe that we all have that. I mean, every single human has some artistic inclination. Some, and we have varying degrees of talent and access and luck and privilege and all these things. But I think it's just, I just believe deeply that's part of the human. totally um the human side uh just humanity right so if you're lucky enough to live somewhere where you've got any time to be able to be like oh i'm going to go sit in air conditioning in front of a piano whatever

you better make sure you you make use of that and it's not the same as being a consumer of art there's nothing wrong with that we love consumers of art it's very important for those of us that make art for a profession but the idea is that you're not you have to go into a creator mentality and everything about our society, if you don't listen to geniuses like us, and you just listen to the general public, you know, society's going to tell you like, no, you're a consumer, you're not a creator,

you're a watcher, you're not a maker. But as soon as you make that commitment to like, I want to play an instrument, you know, it's just like saying, I want to be a runner. You're not saying you want to be the world record holder in something. You're just saying you want to run. A runner runs. A pianist plays, and part of that is practicing.

You know, it's not just, so once you start to get into that and be like, wow, this is fun to suck sometimes. It's fun for it to be hard sometimes, but it's also fun to be able to learn to play something that you love listening to. It's a stoic framing, isn't it? It's very stoic. It's a stoic framing in that you, and this is actually backed up by some science, like, if you reframe the situation as this is going to be hard and I don't want to do it, if that's your frame of the situation, yeah, you're not going to do it. But if you frame it like, this is hard and it's good that it's hard, like good things should be hard. Yeah. And it's the difficulty of getting there and doing this thing that makes it worth it.

Yeah. Then you're going to win the situation. Because then you are going to do it. You're going to recognize that the difficult thing is part of the process and a valuable part of the process. Yeah. And you're going to have much more success than if you just frame it as like, this is a chore I have to do. And we can control that, I think. It's just that we get forced because of societal norms out of this sometimes.

Because think about it's around the edges that this really. works. I mean, maybe even younger, but like what you said, like, if you're 18 years old and you got eight hours to practice and you don't have a mortgage and, you know, you're either music school or maybe you're like summer after high school, what am I going to do in my life? So that individual, and then also somebody who's like 65 and is retired and is like, I can kind of do whatever I want, but I don't want to just sit around on the sofa. I want to practice. And like, so both their motivation, they've got time. They've got motivation. They've got inclination. They've got, you know, maybe some skills and kind of maybe more knowledge, the older person has more knowledge that

life doesn't go on forever. But you both kind of got that. But then in between that, we get forcing this. Like, you got to be a parent. You got to, you can't mess around and be dealing with art and stuff. Work. You got to do this. And so like get a little bit more of that childlike mentality and that older folks mentality where you're investing in yourself daily by really practicing. Absolutely. Love it. Peter Martin, 23. Well, Peter, another great episode, man. awesome. So let's just say we want to get gentlemen's agreement and that means that we provide a great episode

and they give us a rating review. Was that fast enough, Caleb? So we had a little bit of constructive criticism. Did you know that? Yeah. Caleb said that gentleman's agreement bits are going on too long and I couldn't agree more. It's two versus one. But this is the thing. Think about folks that make it all the way to that. Big shout out to the YouTube folks and the podcast folks. Anyone who's still listening now,

they drank the Kool-Aid. Nobody's listening to. They are on, they're in the cult. Caleb's not even They're like David Koresh I feel your brother Whoa They're like

What was the guy In French Guiana Just take a step back Just take a step Jones Jim Jones They're like Jim Jones

Give me your liquids man I'm down with this Sorry Am I going too far That's a wow Anyway Trying to find that line I think we crossed it

It's just to say That we do have A gentleman's agreement situation here And that means That we will provide You The dear listeners

With an amazing podcast For free Libre And all you have to do is go give us a rating review on Apple or a subscribe on YouTube or maybe both.

That's all we ask for in return. You don't have to pay. If you want to do that, go to Open Studio. Do they have to be a gentleman? No, no, it's a gentleman because we're, you're correct. Gentlemen and ladies agreement.

Oh, so it has to be a gentleman or a gentle woman. Yes. Okay, so you're really... No, the gentleman is us. It's a gentleman is a great. It's a one-way agreement because we're offering,

we're proffering this information. Caleb looks bored. I think you're going to have to rethink this one, bud. You have great ideas, but this one, not so much. That's why we put it to end. Yeah, because you'll hear it. I'm in Steamboat Springs, Colorado currently. I'm in Indianapolis. Hey, how's it going, guys? Andrew. Hi. Because I feel inspired to play something else from your play. Okay, okay, that's right. I think using the metronome is a great tool, but it's not the only tool. All of the answers

are really in the music. What does it mean to live in a groove, be in a group? Until next time.