You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How Much Should You Practice Every Day? - #37

Episode Date: March 8, 2018

Peter and Adam talk about practice techniques designed to get you the most out of your practice time. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Manus and I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear It Podcast. Today we're going to talk about how much you should practice every day. I mean minimum nine and a half hours, right? Maximum nine and a half, minimum nine and a half. So right at nine and a half. But notice I said every day because I think that's the most important thing about practicing. This is maybe a little controversial.

Maybe everybody doesn't agree. So you can take it with a grain of salt. But I really believe in this is like get to the instrument every day. That's better than practicing nine and a half hours on Monday and then taking the week off. I don't think you can bank those hours that easily because we want to be participating in the development of our musicality specifically as it relates to our instruments. So we need to be there with that instrument. It's just like a relationship with another person.

You can't really develop it if you aren't putting in the time, yeah, but you've got to be there together every day. Yeah, I think there's some things that you can get from daily contact with your instrument that are sort of intangible unless you're doing it daily right there are these you know the way that your brain works and the connection that you have with the instrument can be very powerful if you if you build up sort of a daily practice routine you have the spatial awareness you have the muscle memory you know it's it kind of makes it that there's that many less things to think about you don't have to worry about timing as much because you're so connected to the instrument so i like

that one to start daily daily practice is very important you know think about all the things that we have to do every day or that we're kind of programmed into doing, you know, sleeping, waking up, taking a shower, hopefully, every day, eating. You know, I mean, these are things most humans are pretty good at. They're in the habit of doing them. They're part of our routine. And so if you want to be a musician and want to really develop and hit that high level, you really got to have that kind of everyday relationship with the instrument.

That's so true. So the next thing is to think of the percentage of time you have available for each of the things that you want to work on. So in other words, you have maybe five things you want to work on. Break those up into things that are most important and a percentage that you can hit if you only have 40 minutes, 30 minutes, 20 minutes, and you have a gig in two days where you have to learn a bunch of music, maybe don't spend 80% of your time working on something that doesn't go, you know, that's not important for that gig.

Work on the material that's important for that gig, or work on something that you've been progressing at, that you're trying to progress at, maybe spend a little more percentage of the time than that. But it's good to go into it before you practice. And even sometimes I'll write down what I want to do and put a percentage or, you know, a order of how I want to hit it even is very helpful to make sure that I'm as efficient as possible

and then I hit the things that I need to hit. Yeah, and I definitely second that write down what you're going to do. This extends certainly beyond music, and there's a lot of science behind this, and anecdotal evidence that when you write something down in terms of a plan, it can really start to take off. And I would just say that, you know, I know we're talking about, you know,

how much you should practice, and it's really the most amount of time as you can do without kind of getting to that degraded type of practice where you're just not able to focus. You're better off go take a walk and then come back to it, but you want to be putting in as many hours as you have the energy and the capability to do. But what's very important within that time,

and I always tell young musicians this, especially because, you know, when you're young, you're like, I'm going to practice 26 hours a day, and then some adults, like, there's only 24 hours in the day. Okay, fine, I'm going to do 24 because you're excited and you want to do all that, and that's great, and it's better for us as we get older to try to keep some of that same energy.

But what you start to learn, and what I think is so important is practice not only the right things, but practice the hard things first. So if you've got, like, what you were just saying, say two hours, maybe a little bit more limited time, and you just don't have any more time and you've got a gig or whatever, you need to be very efficient in your practice. So the tendency is we sit down at our instrument or pick up our instrument and we play things that we already know how to do. Yeah. You know, even in warm up and technical work, it's like you go to the stuff that feels good, that sounds good,

And that's fine. I mean, that's human nature. But if you don't want to be practicing for nine hours, but you want to get that kind of power of a really good practice, get right to the stuff that you can't do. Because the fact of the matter is the things that you can already do, be it the tunes that you already know, the forms that you can play over,

the repertoire that you've already learned, the technical exercise, the ones that you know, you're not going to get a lot out of practicing them. You'll get a little bit of maintenance maybe and a little bit of here. there, but I mean, get to the part that you don't know. And so even with a tune, like if you're learning a complicated bebop tune or a classical tune or anything, you know, a jazz standard

or something, and you know half the tune, but you don't know the second half of the tune or you don't know it as well, when you sit down, skip right to that part. But what are most people to do? They go play the part because it feels good. You're just kind of, you know, wasting time at that point. Yeah, I mean, I think this is a continuing theme of this podcast is to work on what you're not good at. And I always like to think about it like you would think about, you know, physical exercise. Like, Peter, you love to run, I know. You know, if you were to run just two miles every day at the same speed, are you going to become a better runner? You're going to get faster? No. No, of course not. You're going to be able to do that. You're probably going to

actually start to get worse at that over time, you know, you got to keep pushing yourself, keep trying to get a little bit faster, keep trying to go a little bit farther, you know, keep trying to confuse the muscles is what, you know, they say in athletics. But it's the same kind of thing with music in our brains, like you want to find the things you're bad at. You want to identify those things and then make them comfortable. That's as simple as it is. And that's what is, it's comfort, the non-comfortable, becoming comfortable, or even sometimes it's always uncomfortable. And there's certain technical aspects of playing the piano, just like there are every instrument. Well, actually, I mean, like the violin, I would say, because I started on that

instrument, that probably has more potential physical uncomfortableness about it that never really changes. I mean, you adapt your body as much as you can. I mean, the trumpet, the voice, everything has its challenges. But I mean, a lot of the battle is just getting as comfortable as you can out of the uncomfortable parts of it. And, you know, for me, you bring up the running, I actually, what I really like to do is walk. You know, like, go to a beautiful park. I'd much rather walk than run. But what I have found so like the running is kind of going right to the part that's not as comfortable. I mean, I enjoy the end of the run. Like when you're finished and then being in better shape so that when I go walk, that's easy, you know? And I try to apply that to the practice as much as I can. And look,

no one's going to be perfect at this because sometimes you just, you need that relationship with the instrument and your, not even your ego. You just, your, your, your psyche needs to be able to do something that's musically edifying that you know you've mastered. So by all means, do that sometimes. But try to focus. And I think for me, it's always the beginning of the practices that's better to go to the more challenging things. So this next one that we're going to talk about, I mean, this is very relevant to me as someone with, you know, a young family and a lot of time put upon me to do things. It's hard to find time to practice sometimes, but you can find the time. I mean, I always tell myself that there's really no great excuse not to find time to practice other than, you can find the time. then you just really don't want to practice.

Right, right, right. I mean, yeah, I mean, I mean, you know, people, it's always funny with people's like, man, I don't have time to practice. I would do that, but I'm, you know, and then they're like, man, did you see the new house of cars season? Man, I binge watch it the other day. It's awesome. I'm like, I wish I did.

I mean, of course, I love that too, but like, do you want to become a professional Netflix watcher or do you want to become a professional musician? That really comes down to the question sometimes. I mean, the time is there. we're probably living in an age where there's more potential, I mean, not only demands on your time, I mean, that's a professional thing, but I mean, possible ways for your attention to be taken. And everybody wants, like, attention is so divided. There's so many different media channels.

Everybody's a media outlet themselves. They're personal branding. And then there's so many things to watch and listen to and everything is so accessible. So you have to be even more disciplined if you want to find the time to practice. Because it's definitely not a matter of, like, I don't have to. time to practice. I mean, two hours a day, I would say one hour a day if you really get disciplined and focused, you can make extreme progress on any instrument. That's right. And you know, my thing for this, and what I always tell my students and people who ask about this, is to try if you

can to start your practice early in the day, as early as possible. My very first semester at college, they used to open up the practice rooms would be the first thing that opened up. You know, I think it was like 730. It was before the school was even open. and they would unlock the practice rooms. And the first few weeks, I never, I would try to practice in the afternoon. And then I would, I set my alarm, I got there as soon as it opened, and I noticed that all the best piano players were there as soon as the practice rooms were open. Because they knew they could get it in.

Then you don't have to worry about it. Then it's done. You get an hour in before you start your day. It's like anything else. You know, if you want to be a great runner, whatever, a lot of people start their day off with their run, and then they have it in and it's done. Same thing with music. You know, if you want to progress at this, try start.

starting your day off by setting your alarm an hour earlier. I know it kind of sucks, but you'll get used to it. And then, you know, practice for that hour. And then no matter what you do that day, you have an hour of practice. If you could do more later, hey, that's awesome. That's gravy. Right, right.

Yeah, and I think it just speaks to the thing that a lot of people have figured out. I think I figured it out. I wish I would have figured out when I was way younger. But, you know, every day there's things that are going to be pulling at you and there's a way for the day to start to take you over kind of slowly as it goes. Yep. So, you know, put those big blocks and the things that you value the most earlier in

the day before the day slips away from you, I guess. That's right. So do we have anything else? How much, did we answer the question? How much should you practice every day? Yeah, nine and a half hours minimum. Nine and a half hours maximum. I mean, I think it's as much as possible, right?

Yeah, the answer is as much as you can, really, if you, you know, obviously if you want to, if you want to progress. But I think more importantly, it's the way you approach it. Yeah. that is going to get you real results, whether you have 30 minutes or three hours. Yeah, I think you look at it qualitatively and quantitatively, because, I mean, they're both important. Those are two big words. Fancy words, man.

Don't worry, you'll hear it. That's it for today's episode of You'll Hear It. We'll be back tomorrow, but if you need more information, you can go to you'll hear it.com.