You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Practice Away From Your Instrument

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

Peter comes at ya' solo today as he talks about the ways he practices piano even while going for a walk.Links From This Episode:There's a brand new course from Open Studio - Block Chords Made Easy. Join Adam Maness as he teaches you a simple and clear way to understand the basics of locked hands and drop-2 voicings.Today's Open Studio Live Events (All times in EDT):1:00 PM - Adam's Daily Guided Practice Session (for Members Only)6:00 PM - Bob DeBoo's Bass Guided Practice Session on YouTubeFor the rest of this week's calendar, follow this linkInterested 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.

What's up, everybody, Peter Martin here. Coming to you with a solo edition, You'll Hear a podcast today. But first, quick question for you. If I record a podcast and nobody listens to it, did it ever happen? I'm Peter Martin, and you're listening to the You'll Hear Podcast, advice, and inspiration for music and life. Coming at you. Coming at you by myself, outdoors, away from the piano, away from the Hammer 88s, away from Adam. and today we are talking about how do we get better when we are away from our instrument,

when we are away from the things, the apps, the metronome, the music, the transcription, all the things that we think we have to have in order to get better as jazz musicians. And we're going to get into a few areas that I hope will be helpful for you because there's a lot of ways to get better just walking around, just sitting and thinking, meditating on music. and so we're going to talk about all that. But first, we are brought to you today by Open Studio. Go to Open Studiojadjazz.com and check out all of our offerings.

We have a brand new course on BlockCourse from Adam Manus that just dropped. There's a link below for that and just a lot of great things happening over there. We've got live events happening. You can go to OpenStudiojazz.com slash live to see our ever-changing myriad selection of live events every week. There's something happening almost every day. So please join our community there. and yeah so fun to be doing the podcast alone again. Me and Adam will be back in a couple of days as we usually are.

But I thought it would just be good to talk about ways for us during this period, this still kind of unusual period, to get better when we're not at our instruments. I know that we've had a lot of time, a lot of folks have had a lot of time at home, kind of, you know, a little bit of isolation and maybe some extra time to practice on your instrument, which is fantastic. But a lot of times we need to get away from our instruments, away from the recordings, away from all the things that we preach and tell you to do

about listening and transcribing and deep listening. These are all great things. But sometimes we just need to give ourselves a chance to absorb all that in a way that I think is a little bit separated. So that's what we're going to talk about today. So I decided to go walk around as I did this and think about the things that I've done over the years and some of the practices that I've gotten into that I really feel can, you know,

give us a chance to have the things that we're studying and practicing absorbed. You know, it's almost like sometimes you'll have an idea at night. This could be musical or otherwise a problem you're thinking about and then you go to sleep and you wake up in the morning and magically it's solved or you have a solution. And I think that if we go and walk around away from our instrument but think about the things that we're practicing, you can have the same kind of result. So I'll give you an example. If you're working on, say, a scale fingering on piano,

and you're having trouble really kind of locking it in, maybe you know the notes and you feel like you know the fingerings, but it just hasn't become ingrained in you the way that you want to do. Maybe go out, take a little bit of a walk, and then visualize your fingers on those notes, going through all the keys. So you're going to actually go through and practice those scales. You're not at your instrument, but you're going through in your mind, you're hearing, you're maybe even singing the notes if you can, if you feel like you know the pitches, but you're

going through each of the scales, you're visualizing, you can even put your hand in front of you. If you're a pianist, I mean, if you're a trumpet player, you can hold up your hands. You're going to kind of look like an idiot walking around, but who cares? But basically, you're going through the process in real time of playing your instrument. I'm doing it right now. I don't know if you can hear it. You can't, but I can hear it in my mind. So I'm going through the scale.

I'm even using my correct position. I've got my hand out in front of me. And I'm imagining what the notes sound like. I'm imagining what the keys feel like as I press them down and as I go through each key. Now, what you probably will notice as you do this is some of the scales that you think you know you don't really know. Like we'll use the tactile feedback and just,

and just being in the situation at our instrument as kind of a trigger to do the next thing, and that's fine. But when you get away from your instrument, that's when you can really tell if you know what's going on, and if you really know these scales. So start to make note of maybe you go through the first couple of them and you feel good, you go through your left hand, whatever,

but then take a note of the ones that you thought that you knew that you didn't. So that's just a great way to kind of lock in some technical stuff for your practice. Other things that we can do away from the instrument that I think can have a great benefit is as you're working on transcribing or learning a solo, is to take some time once you get to maybe a good stopping point. Maybe that's the first chorus. Maybe that's, you know, three choruses and it's a nine chorus solo. Maybe it's even the first phrase, you know, if it's difficult or if transcribing is kind of new for you and you're still learning it. But basically, the idea is to get from your instrument and to really think about what you've learned from the solo by

just singing it, by just feeling it. Now you can do this by bringing the recording with you, putting some headphones on, maybe walking around and singing along to the solo. But I'm kind of talking about something else. That's better to do maybe as you know a preparation for transcribing the solo. We talk about doing a lot of deep listening, really knowing the solo being able to sing along with it before you even attempt to start to learn it and lock it in at your instrument and really get into that deep ear training and transcription process. So this would be more like, you know, you've learned a couple of phrases. So you go walk around and you basically sing and you can sing in your mind

or if you can sing out loud, it's even better. But you're going through at the actual tempo. Sorry, I'm breathing a little heavy because I'm walking up a hill here. It's not like Mount Everest or anything, but, you know, talking and walking. But basically you're going to be singing that solo, and it's going to be, you know, as much in time as you can, you're going to want to really pay attention to all the things that maybe you're missing when you're at your instrument learning the solo. We get so caught up in, wow, this is such a cool lick that he played, and you're trying to make sure you're playing the right notes and everything. But this time away from the instrument is really about getting a chance to lock in the phrasing, the feel. you know, maybe even the beginning of kind of the architecture of what the solo is. All the things that make the solo great that are just musical, the groove, you know, as you're walking,

really making sure you're at tempo in the groove, just singing that solo. And, you know, as you're doing that, if it's phrases that you've learned, what you can also do is then go back, sing along, and kind of visualize and even play along. So if you're a pianist, like we were talking about before, you're even kind of like with your hands playing along in real time as you're singing it. So then you start to make that connection with your instrument again, but not at the instrument. The whole point of all this is to think about music, to hear music in a different way than we do at the instrument. A lot of times we get so caught up in how we think things sound as we're playing that we don't have that object to. of the listener. If you think about when you go to hear a performance versus when you're part of

a performance and you step away from your instrument and hear how it sounds, that difference between how you're sounding as you're playing, that's what we have an advantage of to try to tap into as we practice. I'm putting air quotes around practice, but I really believe this can be effective practice. But as we're practicing away from our instrument, we're trying to get more in touch with how we sound ultimately and how music sounds and how we interact with music and how the things that we're working on as we practice at our instruments and try to get better, how they actually make their way into the airwaves as music for a listener to hear. So we're putting ourselves in the position of hearing that.

But then we're always trying to do something to kind of connect back to how it actually feels and how we execute that on our instrument. So a lot of times, you know, when I go walk around and I'll do this, like I'll consciously work on music and consider that, not consider it practice, it is practice. It's an opportunity to improve as a musician, to improve as a pianist, to improve as an arranger. But what I'll do is I'll go through, you know, that's an entire solo that I know in this way, where I try to see how much of it I really know. Now, you normally think, oh, you have to be at your instruments you do that because if you play along with the recording after you learned it and you hear some discrepancies, then you'll know you need to lock in those phrases or that part of the solo. But if you know the solo well enough from listening to it, and you can always check yourself by bringing a recording, you know, headphone situation. But if you know it well enough, you generally are going to be able to, as you play it in your mind, in your ears, air playing, air piano, or,

whatever, you're going to kind of know when you get to a phrase that you're not sure of. And again, like the scales, you're going to kind of make no to that and then use that to inform your practice as you go. One final area I want to recommend for you for practicing away from your instrument is arranging. I've had some of my most successful arranging sessions not at a piano, sitting outside of the park with a big notation book, old school, and a pencil, but mostly just trying to think how I want to arrange or even compose as well. I'm going to kind of focus strictly on arranging, but it's always a blurry line between arranging and composing. But if you say, you know, want to do a solo piano arrangement, or you want to do a big band arrangement,

or an arrangement for a specific ensemble. Getting away from your instrument is a great way to practice and to progress at doing that because it forces you to imagine the instruments you're arranging for. And so even if it's just for piano or for whatever your instrument is solo, it's such a different experience to imagine how you would arrange a melody

or an improvisation or some harmonic stuff for a saxophone section. or whatever. It's such a different experience to really go through that imaginative process without actualizing it on, especially a piano, which can do such a great job of duplicating and representing so many different situations, you know, from an orchestra to a big band to a string quartet. But we have a tendency when we're at our instruments to play things that we're comfortable, to think that we're being creative when we're at. actually just kind of going to our regular bag of tricks. Once you get away from your

instrument, you're forced to really hear things. We talk about you'll hear it, number one, listening. This is a great way to force yourself to listen. Now, this is difficult. I mean, to sit down and to write an arrangement, not at any instrument, is definitely advanced stuff. But it's like anything. You've got to jump in, get started doing it at some point. So you can start simple in terms of maybe taking a tune that you like, you know, maybe you take autumn leaves. Bo do, boop, be Tika Bo bo bo bo bo bee

And you know Just sort of sing it And think about a way to arrange Just that single line melody And then maybe you'll write it out You know maybe you'll Kind of figure out what those rhythms are But the whole process

And the idea is that you're being creative Away from your instrument Trying to create an arrangement Of something that already exists Maybe it's one of your tunes Maybe it's a standard tune Maybe you take a monk tune or whatever But to do something creative

and start to try to hear something and create something, you know. That would be a single line type of thing using just a rhythm or whatever. But then you can certainly go to, you know, trying to hear some harmonic things maybe for a couple different voices. You know, be it horns or vocals or piano, whatever. Starting with just one harmony, trying to hear that and then you write that down. And then the great thing about doing this is as you progress and doing it, you'll be able to change. check yourself, whatever it is your range. Let's say you go outside and say, I'm going to do a one-hour arranging session of autumn

leaves for, I don't know, string trio. And so, you know, you kind of give yourself assignment of maybe the first eight bars you're going to come up with something as good as you can, you know, some simple harmonies, some different voices or whatever. And then when you finish whatever it is you're working on, when you come inside and get to the piano, you can play it. It's not so much about how good is your arrangement, at least not in terms of as you're trying to progress with this. It's more about how close does it sound once you get to your instrument to what you imagined it was as you were hearing it away from your instrument.

That's that kind of ear training that's just priceless and you can really take advantage of kind of only when you're away from your instrument. Okay. And this is a hugely important area and a massive opportunity to be able to really make some progress away from your instrument. So, you know, one of the biggest benefits of just being in a situation away from your instrument is that you can isolate specific parts of music without having everything kind of converge. And when we talk about rhythm and groove, it's such a fundamental thing because everything that we play. play as jazz musicians is, needs to be locked into some rhythm and groove. And even if we're playing freely, even if we're playing out of time, that still has a flow and a rhythm and a groove. So as you're walking around, the way I like to do this is to think about your pace of walking.

So if you're doing like a really leisurely walk, try to find, you know, some kind of a, and I'm actually walking now, see if we can hear this. Like my pace is something like this to, So this is not slow, but it's not fast. It's slightly on the medium leisurely side, maybe. So this can be a couple of things that I think about a tune or a groove. Like this can be, bo-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding. That could be the tempo. Oh, I have to change up my pace now because there's a little doggy.

What's up, little doggie? Okay. So once I get that groove locked in, I'm thinking about maybe a baseline starting out. Okay, I'm still snapping just so you can. But what I'm doing is I'm feeling as I'm walking. Okay? So this can have some good exercise implications too because it can keep you all pace.

But what I'm trying to do is now imagine a baseline. And maybe I'm even adding a little symbol. Right? But it's at that temple. And so I'm moving to that groove, to that temple. Because, you know, in essence, dance and body movement can never be totally separated from what a groove is. So you might look a little funny walking that, you know, that much in sync. But this kind of thing can really start to improve and, if nothing else, lock in if you already feel like you have good time.

But it can improve it if you're feeling like, I don't have great time or whatever. is just make sure that you're moving your feet exactly in that time. You can also do it. I'm going to slow things down. I'm going like this. But this can become the two and four so it can be like double the tempo.

So it's like two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Okay. Now this is hard at first because it feels weird to walk like this, but dang, dang, bang, dang. So this is a little more of a challenge. You're putting your foot down on every two and four. But that's a great way to lock in that temple. You can do it as a backbeat.

Do you jack, really slow walking, but in time. You gotta be careful, you can kind of look like an idiot walking around like this, so you might want to do it in an isolated space. But once you start thinking about it like this, I think you'll find a lot of different ways to use your walking pace to lock into specific grooves.

You know, it can be in three, one, two, j, And what we're looking for with our pace is just evenness, being locked into the groove, walking in time. I mean, this is all about being able to feel that groove so that when we play, that inner pulse is there. Just like I'm walking now and I'm talking, but I'm at that pace now and it just stays there. So that's great stuff to bring back to our instrument. You know, when you've got a great drummer and bass player there, you know, you can kind of ride on them. But if you've got that groove inside of you as well, all the better you're going to be ready to

go. So all right. Well I hope you enjoyed this solo edition outdoors how to get better, how to improve as a jazz musician when you're away from your instrument. And hopefully if nothing else is really just a kind of mindset that we can always be working on improving as musicians as jazz players on our instrument even when we're not at our instruments so that we can't use the excuse of like oh I don't have access to the piano. Everybody's, the kids are at home because it's schools, there's no school, and I can't make sound. I can't concentrate or whatever. So when you go out for a walk, instead of just playing on your phone or scrolling Instagram or whatever, you know, definitely look up,

appreciate the birdies and nature and all that, but also say, you know what, maybe this is a little time for me to take a little 20-minute practice session as I walk around. All right. So thank you guys for being here. We are sponsored by Open Studio. go to open studio jazz.com to check out all our offerings and I will see you in a couple of days back with Adam. Happy practicing. Peace. You'll hear it.