You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How Much Should I Practice One Thing? - #69

Episode Date: November 29, 2018

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Hey, Pete. Yeah. How polished are your five-note voicings? Oh, well, I was just at the manicurist a few minutes ago, and I'm all polished up. Dude. I'm Adam Mennis. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to You'll Hear a podcast.

Daily Jazz Advice, coming at you. Coming at you from beautiful St. Louis, Missouri on a Thursday. That's right. Yeah. Happy Thursday. Happy Thursday, everyone. And today we are taking a user question. Do we need headphones?

We don't need headphones. No, should we take them off? I would like to. Oh, that sounds good. Yeah. Big shout out to YouTube, by the way. Yeah, shout out to our listeners who didn't need to hear any of that. Yeah, we could have done all that earlier.

No, big shout out to YouTube. Big shout out to podcast. Big shout out to Stitcher, as always. Okay. But YouTube, we've been getting some folks getting up early watching us on the YouTube, which I think is great. And I actually have some ideas for YouTube, but I haven't fully vetted them with you, so we're not going to announce them yet, okay?

Okay, I love surprises. Note to self. Let's talk about that later. Gotcha. I didn't need to hear about that either. Our YouTube channel is kind of blowing up. It's a thing now. It's great.

But today we're dealing with a question from an email, not from YouTube or from You'll Hearot.com. We're going old school. We've going old school. We got an AOL account. You've got mail. No, we usually get questions at you'll hear it.com. You can leave us a question. You can leave us a voicemail.

You can also leave us now a question in YouTube, but you can also email us. And this email is from Steve. Steve says, hi, I'll really enjoy the podcast. and everything else. This might be a good subject for a podcast. I'm wondering how polished I want to get with learning Peter's sample demos and other specific pieces.

For example, you've pointed me towards studying the Witten Kelly solo on Freddie Freeloader. That's always what we point you towards if you've listened to this podcast for any amount of time. Is my time better spent getting the whole solo at performance level at full tempo or getting a good sense

of the lessons to be learned from the piece? The answer is yes. Yeah. And this goes, especially for the demos and the elements, that's a course he's referring to. Right. And moving on. Part of me wants to spend as much time as necessary to get it close to perfect, which in my case could be many weeks. But I also feel like it's keeping me away from all the incredible material you offer. And if I'm woodshedding, Freddie for over a month. Either way, I know it's all good as I'm improving my technique, ear training, style, reading, et cetera. But just looking for your input. Thanks for everything you offer. And happy Thanksgiving. This came in just before. Thanksgiving. So I hope you had a great Thanksgiving, Steve. It's a good question. And your initial reaction, I think, is the correct one, which is yes. All the above. To all of it. Yeah. Well, I think it's, what were we saying the other day? We were talking about good. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. This is probably one of these quotes that's totally screwed up.

So I'm sure I'm butchering it. I don't even know who said it. But, you know, like how do we, and I think this is kind of what his question, like how do we find that place close to us to where we've gotten the most out of the activity, learning the solo, learning the working on the exercise and learning the particular piece, practicing on the scale, whatever it is, where we're getting into diminished returns territory, right? Is that what he's asking? I believe so. Or just if he focuses on one thing, is it keeping him from learning, you know, many other

things that he needs to be doing? My answer to that is, what's your hurry, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's that. But I think that, yeah, like if you can start to get into a thing, and this comes from experience in terms of practice, but where you can identify where you're like, cool, I got what I need out of this.

It's time to move on. Yeah. What you can do is until you are able to identify that better, one thing is to kind of have a little bit of overlap. Like, especially for the talking about learning Freddie Freedler or Sola. And you said like a month, that's not a long time to work on that. I almost anybody, I mean, unless you're doing 10 hours a day just on that, which, you know.

So you're already going to have overlap within your practice routine in terms of doing, you know, technical exercises, working on a solo, learning a tune, you know, practicing voicing, all the different activities we talk about. But like you could you you might say, well, I got so much out of this, but am I done? I don't. I can't play it exactly like Winston Kelly. Okay, maybe not. But you might be thinking about the next solo you're going to do. So like what I used to do a lot was as I was working getting towards the end of learning a solo. I'm already listening to the next one, focusing maybe even starting a little bit where I'm kind of more. working on just playing along with the record, you know, and getting closer with that and have a little bit of overlap so that you don't have to, it doesn't have to be like, well, when am I done and when do I move on? You can do both. Yeah, you can do both.

You're never really done with it. You're never going to be able to play it exactly like when Kelly. But if you imagine if you took a month, which isn't like you said a long time. Yeah. But Steve, imagine if you did take a month and just tried to get that solo as close to Winton's playing as possible. Can you imagine all the things he would learn in that process? I mean, you would get really, really good.

But you don't have to go all in on that. think the episode we did on Monday, was it Monday, yeah, about patience. Yeah. That can come into this a little bit too. You know, there's no hurry. If this is a part of your life, if you're going to be, you know, a musician and really keep at it, then, you know, where you're going so fast? You can keep working on Freddie Freeloader. I think the answer is like as long as you're engaged with it.

Engage, yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? And I think that's kind of like, you know, when you're feeling passionate about practicing something. Like there's always those things where like, oh, I have to practice them. And then there's the things that are like, I'm passionate. and I want to practice them. It's still hard work, but I'm so engaged in it. And I think it's okay to even let go of some things that maybe some teachers are telling

you you have to do this. And at least like maybe you have that. It's just part of your practice. And then you have that passionate area that maybe you're kind of overdoing, but you're still getting stuff out of it and you're engaged. You're at the instrument. You're developing. So it needs to be a little bit of give and take with these kind of things.

But I think, you know, going to the side of passionate. Now, I would recommend people do not. confuse what you're passionate about with what you're good at. Yeah. Because I do see a lot of people practicing, sitting down at the piano or at their instrument and spending a fair amount of time on things they already know how to do. Don't do that. Don't do that.

You know, well, you can do that, but don't expect to have great results in terms of improving. So I think that, you know, and this is also not to get in the way, not to get confused with maintenance work, which we need a certain amount of. And that's why kind of the first thing we were talking about in terms of having several things going on, a little bit of overlap. can take care of a little bit of sloppiness in terms of when you're starting and stopping things. One thing I would recommend, Steve,

is that you actually start maybe a Freddie Freeloader journal while you're learning this. Take a month and write down some goals that you want to have by the end and maybe some mid goals through the weeks that you want to reach. And that'll help you kind of stay on course. It'll help you keep engaged with it.

And then, you know, as you're going along, pull out in your journal, like write down the things that you're, you're getting out of it because you're going to learn new stuff that could apply to the you know you're talking about the other material that you're working on you're going to learn so much that could apply to that stuff yeah voicings and lines and time and phrases that you're going to want to practice once you're past this or even you know in the midst of this if you keep a journal you know where you're going and you know where you've been right you don't have to feel maybe that you have to just do this all or nothing you can do this in conjunction with other things and then also you get to see uh you're you get to track your you're you're you get to track your you're your results, like your growth, and you get to like keep track of the ideas that are coming out of learning the solo. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think also, you know, this brings to mind too is just kind of getting feedback. And like what, what Steve I think is asking is for feedback on kind of these things of when to do them, which is great. But we want to try to find ways to get feedback on our, our playing, be it how we're playing a Freddie Freelotor solo solo, how we're playing a tune, how we're just playing, period, something we're working on. And you can do a certain amount of that yourself, I think, by recording yourself. so easy now because, you know, everybody, most people have a phone or some kind of device where you can just record it. So that's good to get feedback from other musicians. I want to, you know,

something that we can do here. I've been interested in doing. And maybe I'll just kind of throw an idea out and see if anybody bites. And that is like, you know, maybe, maybe post a little little, Steve could do that maybe, playing a little Freddie Fleeler, or maybe playing along with the recording, do a little video, maybe one of the courses, put it on Instagram or something. And if you're on the IG, as we say, and maybe tag. Hey, Open Studio, and we could check it out. But better than that, the community could kind of check it out and give you some feedback, maybe some ideas.

I mean, we're always talking about all the horrible things that social media is doing in the world, which is true. But we can kind of use it to connect with other people that are interested in and give each other positive. And it's not even about positive feedback. It's helpful. Don't worry about positive feedback. I want to know about helpful feedback. Yeah.

Don't post anything just expecting everybody to be like, this is amazing. Yeah. You know, you should be wanting to get the things that you need to work on. Yeah. try to do it with as much love as possible. Yeah, yeah. If you're criticizing. But we're all out here to help each other.

I mean, look, everything that we do here is about helping people, but a lot of times it's with the one-way video lesson, but we'd love to kind of hear some stuff. And that's a great idea. So if you're the brave type, yeah. At Hey Open Studio? Yeah.

On Instagram or Twitter. And hit us up with your practice video. Maybe even if we get enough of these and we get some courageous folks who are willing to let us, we could even do a feedback episode. Yeah. Feedback Friday. Yeah. Tag us in there.

and we love to hear it, and then maybe we'll put up some of our own stuff. I need to get back into Witton Kelly Solo. I love that solo. Love that solo, man. Love that bad boy. All right. Well, thank you, Steve. That's a great question. Hope this helps. Where's Steve from? Did he say? He does not say. Oh, he doesn't say. Okay.

No, I can't get super specific. Preferers. Preferers to stay geographically anonymous. He says happy Thanksgiving, so I'm assuming America. Right. But I could be wrong about that. They have, they have Thanksgiving around the world, but it's all different times of years. Yeah, but it's, it only matters to me. Ours is bad enough. I'm just selfish, so it's just whatever is in front of my face.

Cool. Thanks, Steve. You'll hear it.