You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Practice (AM Solo Edition)

Episode Date: April 27, 2020

Adam fires back with his own solo YHI episode today as he discusses his thoughts on what it takes to be a good practicer.To get more practice instruction with Adam, Open Studio members can tune in to his live Guided Practice Session today at 1:00 EDT (12:00 CDT). For more info and this week's full live event schedule, follow this link.In light of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, we understand that money is tight for a lot of people right now. That's why we've decided that for the duration of this crisis, we'll be running a Choose What You Pay campaign at Open Studio. Choose whichever course you want and then let us know how much you're willing to pay - that's it. For more info, click this link.Interested 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 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Pete, I know you can hear me right now. I know you listen to your own podcast. And I know that you can record a solo episode of your own podcast, but are you really recording a solo episode of your own podcast if you're not doing it from a comfortable hammock? Think about it. I'm Adam Manus, and you're listening to The You'll Hear at Podcast Daily Music Advice coming at you. Coming at to today, sponsored by Open Studio, go to open studio, go to open studio jazz.com to check out all of of our amazing piano courses, including courses by Peter Martin, Jeffrey Keiser, Aalves, and myself. Thanks for tuning in today. We have been trying some different things with the podcast. You know, Peter and I have been recording these remotely for the last couple of months as we've been sheltering at home in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. And so we thought we could try some solo ones too, just because, you know, sometimes like getting on a Zoom meeting can be a little

bit challenging with all that we have to do from our houses. So I wanted to try one today. And today, I really wanted to talk about practice, not the game, but practice. And I really wanted to talk about how to practice. This is something that I've been thinking a lot about recently as we've been sheltering from home and as we've been growing our time at our instrument, hopefully, with easy access to it. I've been practicing so much more. I've been doing a lot of guided practice sessions, some on Open Studio, some on our YouTube channel and our Facebook groups. And I've been getting a lot of questions about practice. And I'm surprised sometimes at some of the questions about practice, like how to practice and how much should I practice. And there's

always the what should I practice, which is actually the easiest question to answer. We'll get to that later. But I thought I would do my first solo episode here with just answering the question, how to practice and just discussing my experience in practice over the years from a child to a professional musician and how it's evolves as I've gotten older and how life has hit me as I've got a family and more responsibilities as we all do as we age and I thought it would be kind of an interesting thing to talk about and I'm challenging Peter to do his version so we'll do how to practice A.M. Me. And then we'll do how to practice P.M. Pete. If he's down. So how to practice. So where do we start here with this? I think we start with just some general ideas of what do we want to get out

of our practice? What is the goal of our practice? What's the ultimate high-end goal? I think about this. So do I want to become a player that has a lot of chops that can play fast. Do I want to become a player who knows a lot of language and tunes? Do I want to become a player that can play, you know, all this outside stuff and unexpected things, right? More avant-garde, a more niche player. So those are all legit questions that you can kind of ask yourself. But really, I've learned over the years. I've always, I've had all of those have been on my radar at point of like what do I want to get out of my practice routine and all of those have been goals at some point. But as I've gotten more experienced at this and aged into a period in my life where I kind of

can see a little bit more from above what's important, I realize that I want to be the kind of player that is at ease with making music and it's really just the most direct route from me to you as I'm playing. That's what I'm thinking about. And so one of the things that I'm going to stress a lot as we talk about this in this episode is ease, that what we're doing needs to be effortless and easy. And it needs to seem easy. You know, we talk about the power of the confident player. How many times have you gone to the club and you've seen the musician who seems like a complete master and has complete confidence? Well, what is that confidence? It's ease, right? It's they make. make hard things seem easy.

And even when they make a mistake, it seems easy. Like they take it in stride and it's easy and it's still part of the show and you still feel like you're in good hands because it's easy. There doesn't seem to be with really great players, even when they're playing challenging things and obviously putting in great amounts of effort, there doesn't seem to be a struggle with that and with them. And that has become, in my later years here, the goal of my practice is to be the kind of player where things are easily coming out from me to you, no matter what that means.

That could mean more technique and that could mean more language and knowing more tunes, repertoire and arranging techniques and all this information. But I really think more than that, it's a philosophical approach. and this can actually, it's not as like, it doesn't have to be as ethereal as it may sound. It can be very practical. So one of the things that you might think about with this is even if you're doing like very technical exercises, which I still do a lot of because I think they're insanely

valuable for being able to get ourselves to our audience as clearly as possible. But even in those things where I would, in my youth, really, you know, grit might teeth, bear down, you know, all these adjectives that imply, you know, a tense attitude towards it and trying really hard. You know, that works up into a point, but then you're, you never learn it in an easy way. It doesn't project what you're, what you're working on easily. It projects to someone who's trying. And that's not, you know, as I've, I've come to realize, that's not the kind of projection I want when I'm when I'm playing for an audience. So so that's kind of like the first big rule for practice sessions for me now. Everything has to be effortless and easy and or, you know,

if I'm going for perfection, then I can really try, but that's not really, I haven't found much value in it. By the way, you might recognize some of this if you've ever read Kenny Warner's book, effortless mastery. And there is, as I've got, I've read that book when I was a teenager, but as I've gotten older, some of those things become like very true. You start to realize like, oh man, Kenny Moore had it right this whole time. Like, it's all about this effortless attitude as we practice. And so, so what are some practical things that we can maybe apply to this, not just like the big picture, you know, ethereal stuff? So like if I'm, if I'm playing technical exercises, as I was starting to say, if I'm, if I'm really, uh, going for,

it, that might mean it's, I'm more feeling it. I'm more, it's more about the feeling of what I'm doing, that it's an easy feeling than it is about the absolute perfect execution with the idea and the knowledge at this point that my body and my brain, my ear and my, my hands, will make those changes for me. That if I'm effortless as I throw out a difficult technical passage, that my body and my brain will adjust, right? And so, and that's no matter how my attitude is towards it. So if my attitude towards it is very, I'm trying really hard and I'm tense in my shoulders on my face and I'm bearing down.

I'm trying to get this thing out. It's going to happen eventually. I'm going to get it, but it's going to be tense and seems stressed either way, right? So because I'm stressed coming into it. Now, if I go into it as this is easy, this is easy and I can do this. I just can't do it yet. It's just, but it is easy. There's no tension here.

Now, I'm not going to get it. Just like I wasn't getting it first with the tension, right, with the trying really hard. And then eventually I do get it. I adjust. But when I come out on that other end, it's just a much different vibe. There's no tension. And I still have it just as much as I have it when I'm trying really hard. But now it seems easier on that other end, right?

I haven't trained myself to have to try really. hard to get something technical. That's a straight up practical thing from what could be kind of a wishy-washy attitude about this stuff. But that is a true sentiment that if you are, however you're training yourself to approach your practice is how it's going to end up when you perform it. So be that confident, easy player in the practice room. Realize that that's part of what you're training here. You're training yourself to make things easy and to project a confident that you can't get by straining and putting tension everywhere in your body and just trying so, so hard, you have to relax into it and you have to let it happen the way it's going to happen.

So that's like, that was like, that's a huge lesson for me. And that has been an ongoing lesson that, you know, I'm not perfect every practice session or every exercise I'm practicing with that. But always with that in mind, right, trying to be mindful about that. So that's kind of a big picture look at a practice routine that you can think about is what are my goals and am I living in the values of those goals as I practice? That should be like if we're making a list of things that are important, that should be number one. What are my goals? Am I living in my overall values in this practice session with those goals?

If not, you're probably not doing it right or you need new goals. Okay. So from a practical standpoint, a couple of other sort of big picture questions, how much did I practice? I mean, that really depends. I don't know anybody who's very good or, you know, a professional musician or world-class musician that hasn't had some time, some amount of, you know, period, whether that's a year or so, where they're not, where they don't have like a lot of time under their belt. It's the, you know, it's the old 10,000 hours thing that you've heard a million times,

but it's true. There's no getting around just putting time in at the instrument. Part of this is just an ability to be, fluent on your instrument. And you can't think your way to that. You can't learn your way to that. You literally just have to put in repetition on the instrument. Now, the more efficient you get at putting in repetitions, at being with the instrument, of course, the better player you're going to be. But you can't cheat your way out of that. So if you don't have that drive to want to practice, if you have the time, then like if you have a bunch of free time and you spend

most of it playing video games and not practicing and then you're like, oh, I should practice more. Why can't I get this together? You need to figure that out. And that's actually more of a human psychology thing than I'm qualified to talk about right now. But there needs to be some kind of drive. You have to reevaluate your priorities at some point and say, why is there this dissonance? Why do I really want to practice? But I obviously don't want to practice.

I want to do other things instead of that. That is what you might call cognitive dissidents. And that is a true thing that can really. screw you up. So you have to get some consonants in your personality together to want to spend time to realize that, you know, playing music at a high level makes me happy. And I need to have that time at the instrument to play music at a high level and therefore practice makes me happy. There's a bit of a bit of a distance there if that's not the case for you. And yeah, do your best to try to work through that. You can't, you can't force yourself to practice if you really don't want

of practice. You have to want to practice. You have to get that desire first. If you don't have the desire to want to get better and want to practice and understand how those things coincide with each other, you're not going to do it. It's always going to be a chore. It's always going to be dissonant. It's always going to be a strain. You're always going to be like, ah, I don't want to be doing this. I shouldn't be doing this. If you understand that practicing makes you, you know, it gives more than it takes, right? It's better for you than not. If that's how your attitude is going into it on your subconscious, you're going to be fine. So that's that. And that's not, maybe not very helpful, but it is, I think it is true. And it's something to think about that if

you have this constant, I don't want to practice, you might think about bigger personality things first besides like, what can I do to motivate myself to practice? You have to get rid of that dissonance first. You have to want to. You have to find that desire. And if anybody actually has any questions about that, I can go a little bit deeper to send me an email, Adam, OpenStudioNetwork.com. I've worked on this myself. So if you need help with that, send me an email. Okay. So what does a practice session look like? How long should we practice when we practice? For me, when I was younger, it was literally as much time as I had so much I wanted to learn. I could hear all this stuff and I didn't know any of it. And I wanted to learn it. I wanted to

absorb it. I was transcribing and listening to all these musicians that really gave me chills and moved me. and I wanted to understand what they were doing. So there were many years in my late teens, early 20s, where I just was around the piano all the time because I was trying to figure out what my heroes were doing and why they were doing it. And then I had peers, and we would play, you know, through the night, every, almost every day, you know, always playing and gigging and all this stuff.

And so I was just for many years on that track of playing as much as possible. Now, as I've gotten older and I've gotten married and I have children, and, you know, doing work for Open Studio, which takes a lot of my time. How do I get that same, how do I keep my drive going? How do I get to the piano enough to satisfy that part of me, which is still not extinguished, but I just don't have as much time to divide. I can't stay up till 4 a.m. every night with my friends. You know, I'm playing music when I have small children, right?

So what do I do? So for me, it's about finding a routine. And this is not just for my practice routine. This is like for every part of my life now. If it's important to me, I will find a regular place for it in my daily routine. So with my practice routine, luckily with Open Studio, I've been doing all these guided practice sessions. And I've kind of used those as a little excuse for just recording my own practice so that I can have an excuse to get to the piano. But before I was doing those starting this year, I would wake up just to,

an hour early and go into my piano studio, which was conveniently right across the street from open studio headquarters. And I would practice for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour every day, just enough to get me, keep me on the piano, to keep ideas flowing and for me to get the basic work that I needed to get done, done. There's a lot of writing and arranging gigs that I have to. I would use that time as well to do that thing. And then by, you know, 30 a.m. I'm done with my day. That's it. That's my musical day. I've gotten, if nothing else happens, I've gotten some good piano practice in, and I've gotten some writing done, and that's it. I'm gravy for the rest of the day. I can do my open studio work knowing that I'm artistically

fulfilled and then I'm going to be good on the piano. And that's my time, right? And it's also a bit of just my time. It's like some alone time that I have without kids and without work and just, you know, that peaceful time that I've had since I was a child at the instrument. Very important. I think just for, you know, our psychological health to have that if that's something that we love to do. So for me, that's the morning. And it might be something different from you. Whatever your life circumstances dictate can be an opportunity for you to find that niche. But I do recommend if you haven't tried finding a regular time of day, this is just my time to practice this time, whether it's every afternoon between three and four or every night between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. or every

morning between 7.30 and 8.30 a.m. like me, whatever that time is, having that regular time five days a week, six days a week, seven days a week, however many days you can do it, I recommend trying that if you haven't tried that before. It was a real game changer for me because I just knew I had that sacred time and space where I can have my time at the piano. So that's that. That's how to get that practice. Now, if you have loads of free time, there's actually another issue, which is how do I stay focused? You could do the same thing. And in fact, if you have eight hours free and you're really young and you want to get better, maybe you say, okay, I'm blocking off three hours every day because this is my time to grow.

I'm 19 years old and I'm a big sponge for music and I just love it. And between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. every day I'm just practicing, practicing. That's how it's been done for generations. Feel free to go with that if that's how your life circumstances are working out right now. So how do you structure your practice schedule once you start practicing? What do I do? I like to have chunks and I'd like to divvy it up into three or four different sections. I'll usually start off with some kind of the same warm up. Those of you who do the daily guide of practice sessions with me know that I love a chromatic scale. I love doing those. I love scales on arpeggios as technical exercises to warm up. And then I like to go sometimes from there I'll start just improvising over something or maybe free improvising. and finding a concept that strikes me, right? Like, oh, here's this shape, right?

Here's this like pentatonic shape, but there's this little chromatic thing. And I have it here in C minor, but I don't have it anywhere else. And I really love this. Like every time I play it, I'm like, oh, that's cool. Well, now the rest of my practice routine is kind of taken care of

because I'm going to take that through some different, you know, iterations and different keys and try different rhythmic displacements and just really try messing up. with it, to get inside and outside of it, to see what it is and how it works best for me. Then I might start taking that through tunes, and then I start practicing tunes. Now, I always do like to mix it up. If I'm not feeling anything like is a big project for like something like that,

like a big lick that I want to really get inside and out of, but I have just a couple little ideas I can work through for maybe 30 minutes. I'll also do some kind of harmony exercise, not exercises, but really some kind of harmony concept, whether that's a voicing structure that maybe I have in some good keys, but I don't have in every key, and maybe I can run it through some tunes that I'm learning or learning new tunes and then working on five-note chorale style voicing or four-note corral style voicing over them, or just working on a voicing or harmony structure that is not super comfortable or coming out. And then I'll end every practice session by recording myself,

perform something that had something to do with what I was doing that day. And I'll try not to think about it that much. I really will try to think that like maybe I'm at the Village Vanguard, I'm going to perform a solo piano concert and here's my first tune, right? That's a great exercise. And then record yourself. The key to that is, is I don't really listen to it until the next day or maybe later and the day before I go to bed. And I listen to that performance and I, with my practice journal out, and I take notes of things that were good, that I could make maybe hit tomorrow. Maybe it's, maybe I discover that lick with the penitonic lick with the half note in between, right? And then I discover things that I'm like, oh, that sounds not how I thought

it sounded when I played it. Or that's really not clean at all and is not conveying that kind of ease that I want to convey, right, that we talked about. So, uh, I'll make a note of that. And now I have things to practice tomorrow. And I don't have to think too much about it. It's all fairly intuitive at this point. But again, all of that is happening with a sense of ease and a sense of effortlessness and not with a sense of strain or trying to like crush something. It's really letting my hands in my brain find themselves and then throwing myself out there. Like one of the goals is to do it easy. And that's it. So that's how I do it. And I want to hear very much how Peter Martin and structures his practice routine. I kind of know, but I would like to hear him go solo and do that.

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