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

Episode Date: April 28, 2020

Peter responds to Adam's challenge with his own edition of a solo episode on what tips he keeps in mind when he practices.To get more practice instruction, Open Studio members can tune in to Adam's 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, Adam, I just listened to your episode, How to Practice from your hammock. Let's just say, I'm underwhelmed. What's up, everybody? Peter Martin here. Welcome to the Yule here at podcast, another solo version coming at you. I was challenged from my boy, Adam Manus yesterday, or a couple days ago now, I guess, to do my own How to Practice episode. he did the How to Practice AM Solo Edition.

So we're doing the PM. Now, we all know once you get in the PM, that's when it starts to jump off. So just putting that out there. But no, I'm joking. I'm joking. Got a lot of love for Adam. And that was a great episode. I just listened to it, even with his challenges. We're getting a little back and forth going, you know,

Adam's feeling confident because he's across town. And because of social distancing, he knows that he's in no danger of being beating him up like usual. you know so but that's going to end as the restrictions are pulled you better watch yourself watch your back manis but we are brought you today we're not a violent podcast by the way in case this is the first time you're listening that's the that's the most violent thing i've ever threatened and it's and it's all in love all in jest but we are brought to you by open studio go to open studio jazz com check out all of our many offerings consider becoming a member we still have choose what you pay because people are still in need of choose what you pay we hear so that is an

option for you. You can see it right there at open studio jazz.com, but we have a lot of great new courses. One I would just highlight is Brazilian jazz piano. I actually took, I studied it last week, and it was helping me prepared for my little gig that I have on Friday night. So that was exciting that I had that resource and it was a lot of fun to go through and learn a song from a modern Brazilian jazz piano master by the name of Elio Alves. So I was so glad to have that resource and so fun to go through with the living notation and learn the tune and get his great advice on that. It was like he was right there with me.

So that was cool. So today we're talking about how to practice. And I listen to Adam's edition. You can see a link below to it from a couple days ago in case you can get a chance to check it out. Although, after you hear what I do today, you're not going to need that because I'm giving you everything that you need. Okay.

But if you want to just listen to a contrasting AM version versus the PM version, you're welcome to go back. But I thought it was interesting. Adam did bring up some very good. good points. Of course, most of them were stolen from Kenny Werner's effortless mastery, but that's okay. He acknowledged it after he spoke for about four and a half minutes, like it was his own concept. But then he did give it up. I think he was afraid of the lawsuit coming from Kenny. But no, Adam, in all seriousness, got hit some great points about mindset

and attitude about practice and stuff. So I thought, you know, for my addition of this, how to practice, I would get a little bit more tactical, maybe a little bit more dogmatic in some ways, but hopefully these two different approaches can help you. You know, one thing I've found, and this is from practicing for, let's see, how many years have I been practicing? Maybe 46, 47 years. Is that possible? Because I started playing when I was two years old.

The early years might not have been my most productive practice. I'm not going to lie. But I was doing something, apparently. But, you know, the idea of a perfect practice session, I think, is something that we want to get over. Because if we think more about a productive practice session as opposed to a perfect practice session or following a certain script, I think it can be a lot more useful. Because different days, we have the ability to achieve different things. We have, we're in a different mood. It's kind of like what the weather is.

And if you're working out outside, you have to adjust to what the weather is. And so I think Adam's advice and his flow on those practices on what he talked about are really good. But I'm going to come at it from a little different approach. And I want you to think about how do you take different ideas from us and then from others as well? There's so many different great ideas and then apply them to your routine. Not every different idea every day because that's just overwhelming and confusing and will not lead to progress. But how do you take these ideas and use them on different days, upon what you want to get accomplished, what you practice the day before, what you need to prepare

for a gig. Because it's like, you know, if you have a gig that evening, and look, most of us, if not all of us, are still in a position of no gigs. So we're looking into the future in the past with this, pre-pandemic, post-pandemic. But on a day that you have a gig, it's a very different or can be quite a different mindset to what, how, and when you're practicing. as opposed to a day that you don't have a gig. And typically your gigs, if you're thinking about them being in the evening or at night,

if you have an early gig and then you practice later, that's a whole other thing. So that's one of the simplest ways to think about, like, just a different way you'd have to approach practice. You know, just like an athlete that's playing a basketball game, if they're practicing on the day of a game, they're not going at the same intensity and speed, and they're already getting their mind right for the game.

So we want to really do, I find it successful to do the same thing. thing. When you're practicing on the day of a gig, even if it's early in the morning and your gig is in the evening, you're already starting to get in that performance mindset. And that requires, you know, some different kinds of things than on a day that you know is going to be just practicing no performance. Now, we're always ready to perform, of course.

Things come up at the last minute and we want to be flexible and stuff. But I just wanted to throw that out there. And then what that can do is hopefully it can help you to absorb different ideas for, you incorporating into your practice routine from different people and they can be valid even if they seem like they're going to conflict. So you might, you know, take this idea and say, okay, on this particular day, it works maybe on another day. It doesn't. It's almost like developing a vocabulary and a repertoire of practice routines, you know. Then what you have to do is sort of start to get to know yourself and track. And I think Adam did talk about this, you know,

kind of tracking what your progress is for different types of practice because then you'll have a better idea and start to be able to predict better what that type of practice, how that affects you're playing and your progress, you know. But I really like to sort of have the highest level gauge or barometer being, you know, productivity. I love to challenge myself and happy to challenge you guys to think about a successful practice session, a successful, that's hard to say, successful practice week, a successful practice month even, as a productive one. And so when we start thinking about it like that, we can say,

okay, well, what does productive mean? How do we measure that? Well, there's things like, how many tunes have you learned? Or if it's in a day, you know, how many measures of a song that you're working on did you learn? Let's say that you're learning, you know, a couple complex tune, an in-depth tune like Lush Life, Billy Strayhorn's beautiful composition. Say you don't really know it, but you've always wanted to know so like, I'm going to learn it. Okay, you're probably not going to learn it in one day, even if you practice all day. That wouldn't be advisable because that's not the way you want to absorb it. You want to take your time with it, learn it deeply.

So, you know, but in terms of productivity and seeing what you're getting out of your practice session, you want to see actually how many measures did you learn? How many phrases, however you break it up and you want to try to break it up musically as much as possible. But I think that that's very important. It's very, you know, nuts and bolts and very, wham, thank you, ma'am. But like that's what productivity is. The other side and Adam got into the sum about, you know, the more esoteric stuff is important too. But I think, you know, knowing, it can be a great thing for your motivation to really knowing what you got accomplished.

Now, the quality, you know, you've got. quantity and quality, qualitative and quantitative. There's always a push and pull with those in practice because it cannot just be about the number of measures that you learned of a tune. If you're learning it in an inaccurate way or a non-sincere way or if you're just kind of flying through it. So you want to learn stuff deeply, but you do want to be making progress. That way, when you go back and look at, okay, like maybe you try two or three approaches to practicing learning a new tune. and you can look at what was your progress like let's assume that you're learning you know a phrase each way at the same high quality level but you can start to look at look at look i practice for an hour with

these methods how much did i actually like how quickly did i learn that at that high quality level then you can start to compare and see which way works for you because there's never any one way that works for everybody um there are ways that work for us at different times too so even if we think we know the way that works best for us, we still need to be open to trying other ways to do it. And you see this over and over again in a lot of the nuts and bolts things about playing music, be it fingering's approaches to harmony, learning tunes and all this. So we have to be flexible. We have to be open-minded in terms of how we do things.

And then we can start to work those things into a framework and a routine that works for us. So we don't want it to be so random that we're just trying stuff out every day and jumping from this to that. So that's where the routine comes in, but we do want to be flexible enough to know and to be able to pull out of our bag of tricks for practice different things that work. Okay. So when we look at productivity, let's just sort of take that through because I'm going to really make that. That's really my theme about how to practice.

And it's not the only thing I care about it. It's not the only way to practice, but I want that to be kind of the thing that you guys can take away from this. And some of you are like practicing very productively, and that's great. And you have your routine. And then this is more of a confirmation. And I think a lot of people feel like I want to be more productive in my practice. So what I want to do is just first just give you that framework, give you that mindset of because a lot of times that's what it's about.

People are like, well, what's the secret to productive practice? Well, I mean, if there is, there is no secret. It's just hard work. But if there is a little bit of a secret or at least an entry point to it, it's that you're going to consider a successful practice session a productive one. You know, sometimes you just have to sort of put it out there. and say like, you know, I am going to be productive and this is the way that I'm going to do it. And this is how I'm going to hold myself accountable.

And this is how I'm going to measure the productivity, right? A lot of times we think, oh, this is music and it's art and it's so esoteric. We just have to feel the vibe and we're going to play some and then we're going to smoke a join. Then we're going to come back. And if we're feeling it and then hopefully the magical happen. Nah, that's really not the way in my experience, you know, that I've been able to develop. to be productive, to go from point A to point B to point C to point D and to progress as a musician. Now, are there times when we need to be very open and creative and go with the flow and try to

create something and get into a kind of space and mindset that creativity can be fostered and happen? Yes, of course. And a lot of times we're talking about composing and working on advanced improvisation and stuff. But what we're talking about here is like the actual progress that you make when you practice and how productive you can be. So, yeah, so with repertoire, it's very easy to measure. It's just in terms of like how many measures, how many phrases that you're learning. And it's very easy to be goal-oriented with that once you get a flow to. You say, okay, I'm going to learn the second and third phrase of Lush Life today.

And even as opposed to saying, I'm going to do it, I'm going to practice it for 30 minutes and see how far I get. You can do that, but I think it's better to actually take pieces of music because then you can prepare. You can be listening to it. You can be focusing on that part that you know you're going to learn. And then one little tip with that, and this can apply to a lot of different parts of practice. So definitely under the how-to practice umbrella is stop spending time practicing stuff that you already know how to do. And this is so clear to see when you're learning repertoire. Okay, if you know the first half of Lush Life, but you don't know the second half. And you've got 30 minutes to practice.

Lush life. What do most people do? Well, yeah, you're saying, oh, I go right to the second half. No, you don't. Stop lying. I'm lying too if I say that all the time. I try not to, but it's such a great tune. And now that you've learned that first part, you just want to go play it, right?

Don't do that. That's not going to lead to productivity. Yes, you need to review it, but do that after. Like get some productivity. Feel good like, okay, I'm forging ahead. I've got 30 minutes. I want to spend this learning apart. I don't know.

And, you know, a lot of times you'll hear, especially in classical music and more complicated, or not more complicated, but longer jazz compositions like a lush life. You'll hear players that know the first part of the song the best. That's very simple. They've played it more. It's as simple as that. It's the whole 10,000 hours or whatever. Because they always start at the beginning. I remember learning classical music.

I had a great teacher who had me start. When I'd learn a new piece, she said, Jane Allen, wonderful teacher, RIP, she would clue me into the most difficult passages and said, you have to learn this section for next week. I was like, what about the beginning? Now you learn that later. That part's easier.

So it stands to reason you need to spend more time practicing the harder parts. So if you're going to be spending a month learning this piece, you're generally going to play, especially if you learn the hard part first, you're still going to play it and review it. and you need more time on it, and it takes you longer to absorb it. So just that little thing helped me so much. It's a little different applying it in jazz because you usually don't have that much of a variation

and the level of difficulty within the tune. But with learning solos, you definitely can. And I've carried that to much success in learning solos by jumping right to some of the more difficult, especially if it's technically difficult or very difficult to hear. So that's just really an efficiency thing that leads to more productivity, learning the song a little bit quicker,

learning more phrases, is that kind of a thing. But really, the more you can kind of cut out that practicing stuff that you already know, the better you're going to be. So that's kind of my thing on how to practice. I could go on and on and on like Adam did, but I'm a little tighter with my thing. And I know he, what else was he saying? I don't even remember now.

Oh, he was like saying, hit us up. Yeah, definitely hit us up. I know he said you could email him. Hit me up on Twitter. I've been trying to get a little more active there. So I'd love to have a dialogue about this, how to practice. Let me know how you practice. Let me know if you agree with what I'm saying or if you agree with Adam.

If you agree with both of us, maybe you're just agreeable. That's all good. But I'm at, I am Peter Martin on Twitter. That's I AM Peter Martin. You can find me there. And yeah, so we are looking for ratings and reviews. Adam was correct about that. We're back looking for that.

And the reason is, is because we love ourselves. No, it's not just because we love ourselves. It's because we love this podcast community. And the way that it spreads is, from you guys giving ratings reviews, sharing with your friends and the algorithms take over if you give us a good rating and review.

So we're 5.0 right now. We ask for 7 stars. We haven't done that in a while. You may have a problem on Google Play or Apple Podcasts or Spotify where it only allows you 5. So go ahead and put the 5 and then just write in the review

that you want to do 7 if you want. You know, it's all good. But I wanted to read a couple because we've forgotten to read them for a while because Adam gets me sidetracked. But when I'm solo, I'm on my game. I'm focused. So this is from Eric says, thanks, Peter and Adam.

I'm a huge fan and never miss an episode. I've learned so much. Thank you for your willingness and commitment to sharing your knowledge and wisdom in order to help others. Thank you, Eric, for listening and glad that some of the stuff I've said and possibly Adam has been helpful. Always good to hear. And that was from just actually a few days ago.

This was a great short five-star review from South Korea. it from South Korea. Great show guys. See, you don't have to be a verbose writer to leave us a rating and review. You can just keep it, keep it short and shorten to the point. Then I'll read one more. This is from Kazna, way over my head, but I like it anyway. These guys have a natural rapport, not today, no rapport.

And love what they do and it shows. The technical advice is often way beyond me and moves far too quickly for me to keep up with, but even then it's still fun to listen to. One tiny, uh-oh, uh-oh. one tidy criticism maybe it's time to drop the drop down and give me 20 things okay I dropped it that's right I read this before I did drop that so heard list yeah I heard you and I dropped it so what can I say um thank you guys for listening till tomorrow you'll hear you