You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Hiatus

Episode Date: August 12, 2021

Peter and Adam break some YHI news about a short break for the showHAPPY BIRTHDAY Peter Martin!To celebrate Open Studio's founder, we're offering ANY of Peter's courses for only $50 each. OR get access to ALL our piano courses with our Piano Access Pass at 50% off ($180/year). Just click this link* Have a question for us? Leave us a SpeakPipe at https://link.youllhearit.com/speakpipe* Support the pod by spreading the word with the link openstudiojazz.link/yhi* Learn more about Open Studio Pro: openstudiojazz.com/proInterested in more music advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase. And be sure to check out our All Access Pass - every course from Open Studio on every instrument.Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

Hey, Peter. Wait, what is that, man? Is that something that might interest you? Would that be something you might be interested? Yes, sir. Indeed, it is. That's our new keyscape set up. We are in the pod suite, folks.

It is Wednesday, not Monday when we usually record. It's noodling Wednesday. Here we go. We are talking about practice. It is something I would be interested in. What happened to, hey, I'm Adam Maness. I'm Adam Maness. Oh, sorry.

You can't give me a little room, man? Oh, you're doing a vacation style. My bad, my bet. I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin. You're listening to You'll hear it podcast. This is becoming occasional

music advice and inspiration coming at you, right? Because... Well, it is the summer. It's August. We're taking a little time. You had your first vacation in, I don't know how long.

A very long time. This is my vacation music. My nudity vacation. You're now back, but we're doing a bunch of things. Right now we have a dude in our Pond Suite setting up lights and cameras.

It's a smiling dude. What's up, dude? It's actually... Don't taste. me dude. It's actually, it's Andrew Stephen who's a great Don't say his whole name. You're going to give us what's your social security? Everybody knows. Everybody knows, Andrew.

Great Keys player in his own right, but also a great is a noodler? He's been known to noodle. Yeah, yeah. But we're setting up to record a brand new course. Like we're recording this course in like 30 minutes. I don't know if you practiced at all. I was about to, but then you were like, let's record a podcast episode. Well, we just wanted to check in with our, you'll hear it. That's right. It's been a minute.

Yeah, so we're taking a little hiatus, as folks may have noticed. I mean, it's August. If we were doing this podcast from one of our European partner countries. Yeah. We know we have a lot of friends in Europe. We do. This podcast is huge in Latvia. Estonia.

It actually is pretty big in Estonia. Kazakhstan. We were like number two music podcasts for a while in Estonia. But you know what? I called my mom. I called my mom and told her. Is she Estonian? No.

Oh, I was just so proud. Yeah. Well, I mean, Estonia is a great music city. I mean, music country, I should say. I was like I was going to say, man. It's a whole nation. Or is that Latvia. Both of them are. I've been to both of them and there. No, Latvia. Somehow trying to compliment has become pretty disrespectful. Well, no, because I went like one day and then one day to the other. They're both that part. A lot of great composers. Yeah, for sure. And good players too. Good players. Good musicians. Right. So we, yeah, if we were living in Europe, we'd be taking the whole summer off. That's how they roll over there. As it is, we're just going to take a couple weeks here. Because we're American.

We have a bunch of, so we're making a bunch of new courses right now. Yes. We both have vacations that we're trying to deal with. Just some family time. I like how we're doing vacations by making courses. That's good. Well, yeah, yeah. We're, of course, workaholics through and through.

And then, you know, we're dealing with some production issues that we're going to iron out permanently here in the next couple months. So I'm not going to say anything. I'm not going to say it. But I'm just, you know, we might have all new digs pretty soon. So we're just, I'm moving. We might be moving. There's a whole thing going on. We thought instead of trying to just force this upon you, our dear listeners, we thought we would just take a couple weeks and, you know, have a little break.

Yeah, so we're forcing this episode upon you instead. Well, that's just because we're here. We just happen to be in the same building at the same time. Exactly. And we might drop in a little something next week. So keep the feed going. Plus, you know, you know, an interesting thing. And look, the speak pipe is back happening again.

I don't know if you knew that. Yes, it is. And... Why do people get that? Well, you know what? Now you're putting pressure on me. Here's where we get some... Hold on it.

I'm trying to talk. No, that's Elf. How blend do you? That's Miles. There's some crickets. No, I lost it. I had it and I lost it. There was crickets on here, buddy.

I'm going to tell you, hold on. Okay. But, well, no, they'll be like, that's your cue to say something witty or pithy. Would that be something you might be interested in? Yes, it is. So for those who don't know, SpeakPipe is a way that you can actually leave us

a voicemail and ask us a question. It was a very popular feature for a while. Yes. And let's get it back going. If you have a question for us, you can leave us a voice message, and we'll play your voice message here on air. We'll do our damnedest to answer it

in a way that's thoughtful. Yes. But Peter, if they wanted to, leave us a speakpipe. Go to you'll hear it.com. Go to you'll hear it.com. And it's right there. You can find a link to speak pipe

and you can leave us a voicemail. And we'll answer your questions. I think we should actually do, we used to do all speak pipe episodes. I think we should do, we should go back to that. Yeah, Q&A's. A little Q&A's.

You can also hit us up on Twitter. I'm at I am Peter Martin. That's I-A-M-P-E-R-M-A-R-T-I-N, or at Hey, Hey, Open Studio. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Please do. Hit us however you want to hit us. That's right.

Yeah. So we're about to record this course. And should we drop a little, you know what? Why don't we drop a little bit of info on it? Yeah. And then next week we could drop a little bit more. A little teaser. Absolutely.

So this course is called Language of the Masters. Language of the Masters. That's what I said. Yes. And I'm like Ed McMahon, you know, just restating. Restated. What I thought we could do, man, is take five. iconic solos from our five iconic

iconic solos. Let me ask you a question. If we were to, and this is a question, not to you, Peter, I don't really care what you think about this, but if we were to, our dear listener, if we were to break down like, I don't know, this solo. Hold on, Pete, hold on. Now that's Herbie Hancock and I of the Hurricane.

We have his entire solo transcribed, and if we were to break this down, analyze it, react to it, and then do some guided practice sessions on it where we're practicing the language with you, the voicing's with you, and we come up with some exercises, some A-tunes that we can do to get this language in our hands, would that be something that you would be? I'm portraying the title here. Would that be something you might be interested in? I think it would be. Yes, and you know what? All that stuff is, I'm so excited about it, especially the guided practice sessions, because

that's the big unknown. I mean, it's not unknown that it's going to deliver some incredible value, you know, and development. But I just, I'm so interested. interested to see, I know some of your ideas we've been working on these, but to see how this works out, because for a lot of folks, that's really the missing link. It's like, you know, there's an endless, most folks have an endless stream of great solos that they know or that they feel like they should know or that they want to hear or maybe somebody recommends. It's like, it's like nobody goes to the library and it's like, where are your books? You know, everybody knows where the books are, and then you start learning where are the books that you like and that you're interested in.

And maybe the librarian says, you know what? Have you checked this out? Is this something you know, you know, what, are you looking for fiction, nonfiction, whatever? So, you know, a lot of times we have a kind of overload of solos that we like, but it's like, what do we want to do with them? Of course, we want to learn them. We want to get the licks from them. We want to learn how to play like the masters. Ideally.

But what do you actually practice to do that? Like, it has to be more than just follow along blindly to some transcription while you're listening to it. That's just like step one. But it's like, where do you find the little jewels? Like what we talk about the aha moments? Yeah. And it's not to say that the whole solo isn't wonderful.

Of course. I mean, we picked out some bangers as the, as the young ins are saying. I don't know what that means. But it's all good. Yeah, yeah.

But I mean, it's like where do you find the little gems that they're, they might be your favorite moments. Maybe there's somebody else's favorite moments, but those little areas where you can extract the most amount of potential game changing value for your own playing on anything. It doesn't have to be a minor blues like Herbie Hancock, whatever,

but you can take something that can translate conceptually into a number of different areas in your playing. And so that's, I don't want to oversell it, but I feel like that's what you're going to be delivering with the GPSes. You know how nerdy I like to get on this stuff. Can I just bring, can we do a little sneak preview here? Nerd alert! Of something from Herbie Solo here to kind of sneak preview

what we might be talking about on this. We don't have to get too deep on it. So we're playing Eye of the Hurricane here, right? And I of the Hurricane. He is Ed McMahon. So a lot of, we get asked a lot, what, what, you know, what scale should I use on a, on a F minor blues or on a minor blues? Stop making fun of the way I talk, man, come on. So one thing that I'm noticing here as we break down what, what Herbie Hancock is playing here,

did you know that Herbie is using, like, the classical melodic minor on a lot of this tonic on an F minor blues? So in other words, he's playing an F minor blues, right? And F said, oh, check that out. Right, F minor 7. He's doing a lot of like strict F minor 7 voicings. Yes. Right? With a dominant 7.

But he's really doing, in his right hand, there's a lot of this. And then this. There's E naturals. There's E flats. There's D naturals. Depending on which way he's moving. I mean, he's like a classical composer with this scale, the way he's using it. You can tell that he's steeped in all sorts of musical traditions when he's going through this minor.

It's amazing. Yeah. Well, that, and that's, that's going to be great to, you know, kind of highlight these things that, you know, a lot of times, there's nothing wrong with knowing them just as kind of from a conceptual standpoint of how they sound and how they transition to actually outline the drama of a great solo like this. Like that's almost kind of on that macro level. Yeah. Stepping back and like, how do you get from here to here? But then to look at these very specific techniques that he revisits. And, you know, look, both of us knew that. all these solos, we've known these well. These are favorites of ours.

Absolutely. But there are also things that we've studied and revisited, visited, revisited, looked at with different lenses over the years and really diving and even deeper in preparation for this course. How many more things did we find like that? I mean, it's almost like an endless well. It's crazy. I mean, it would be to do like a full harmonic or melodic analysis on this would on every single track of these five. I mean, it would be like a two years cement, like two years of college course work. So these are such geniuses, all five people that we're discovering. So it's fun to pick out our favorite moments here. And we hope our audience that checks out the chorus enjoys it.

I'm just blown away. And he even does some Dorian stuff in here too. So he's using this melodic minor both ways. So for those of you... Wait, wait, don't get rid of course. Don't get rid of course. I'm just saying, so if you're confused about what I'm talking about the melodic minor, so in jazz, a lot of times when people say melodic minor, they just mean this.

Yeah. Ascending, what I would say. Just, yeah, the ascending. Classical nerd in me says ascending classical. But classical musicians learn the melodic minor like this. Ascending that way, descending this way. Yeah. Because this leads weight to the fifth.

Yeah. This leads weight to the tonic. Yeah. That's a good exercise there, actually. Well, and chocolate chip cookies lead to, vegan chocolate chip cookies, lead to weight of the tummy instead of the tonic. They lead weight right in the middle.

I've been discovering that the last few days. But anyway, I just think it's fascinating to see what, how Herbie is such a master. There's no just like, I just use this F minor scale. He used all of them. Exactly. Yeah.

Exactly. Well, good. Well, I'm looking forward to that. And folks, I hope that you guys are enjoying yourself, that you're staying safe, staying healthy. If you are, you know,

kind of summertime in the northern hemisphere, hopefully you're getting a little bit of time to, to relax, take a vacation, which doesn't have to mean travel all the time. And it doesn't mean to be stopped thinking about music, but just like trying to think about things maybe in a little different way. We'll talk about that when we come back full time. As always,

but just try to use this time as a little bit of a different lens to look at your own development, your own playing and how you feel about music. Absolutely. Because this is not, look, as we know, this is something that we're passionate about. I know you guys are dear listeners are as well. So this is not something we take a vacate. It's not like, oh, finally, get to get away from music. You know, it's like, no, this is everything.

This is work. This is play. Yeah, yeah. This is entertainment. It's endless. I mean, it's incredible. And I'm thankful. So true, man.

Well, I'm thankful to be doing this podcast with you, Peter. Yep. Can't wait to get back to it. All right. Until then, you'll hear it.