You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Practice Scales (And Not Get Depressed About It) - #63

Episode Date: April 3, 2018

In this episode, Peter and Adam go over some techniques to add variety to your scale practice. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Menace and I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear It podcast. Today we're going to talk about how to practice scales without getting depressed or dark about it. Okay, so this is another fictional episode of You'll Hear It. Of course. I don't believe this is possible. Well, I mean, I wake up every morning joyously prancing through a metal of scale practice. You don't?

I do, but it's pretty forced. Okay. And I can go dark very quick. All right. Well, let's help each other. How about that? All right. Well, let's start with this.

The first is to. add variety to your scale practice. Listen, practicing scales is a necessity to be good at jazz or music in general. We have to, as jazz musicians, we have to know them more than almost anybody because we have to be able to recall the notes in the scale effortlessly and as a language. We have to understand how they relate to the chord change and the melody. So it's crucial that we include scale practice at every single practice session as much as we can, every day if you can. And to do that, we can't just run them up and down, up and down, you know, the whole time, all the time.

You will go insane if you did that. Insane in the membrane. Insane in the membrane. So I'm always coming up with different ways to practice. I know you are too. That it's not just the same thing every time that you vary it up. You can do it in thirds. You can, you know, do them in triads.

you can, however, you know, start them in different places. However, there's a million ways to do it, and there's a million resources, but however you do it, vary it up. It's very important that you vary it up. Absolutely. So I like to call it creative scale practice as sort of a concept. And, you know, we've, I think we've got some episodes. Well, we'll have some more.

We've got some lessons on it. And really, it's just a concept. It's a way of life, we might even say. That's right. But I think when you adopt that mindset, and there's a lot of the kind of nitty-gritty we can get into and you can delve into deeper, But the overall concept of it being creative, it's scale, you know, creative scale practice. It's got the three elements.

You're practicing, scales, but it's creative. And so when you give the three parts of it equal weight, even just in saying it and thinking about it, your mentality starts to kind of change. So, you know, I think that the practice part is what it is. You kind of develop the discipline for it. The scales is sort of the tool or the mechanism that we're going over. But the creative, that's the area that can really go in a lot of different directions. So, you know, you're mentioning thirds and fifth. What you can do is get a certain creative way to do a scale, but then you can combine that

and get some sort of exponential possibilities with many different types of scales. And then you can take that and say, for instance, you take the third, practicing in thirds, broken thirds, and then you combine that with, say, a diminished scale. But then you can go through all the different keys. then you can combine that with the concept of contrary motion if you're a pianist, you know, starting outside and going in. You can't see my hands, but I'm doing very contrary motions with both of my hands now. So you kind of get to picture.

You know, you're combining all these different elements. So really, and I mean, I should just say, I think all this, like, you have to know the scales first. It's very hard to be creative with your scale practice when you're still learning them. So you've got to go through that part of the practice of just getting the fingerings down for your particular instrument, knowing them in all different keys. But as you're learning, that's going to be creative to you until you know them. But once you know them, there really should be no two days

where you're practicing them in the same ways. There's just too many ways to practice them. There's too many. And, you know, this is, it's so funny because, like, there's so many creative musicians, and they practice scales in a very boring way without being creative at all. And this is a time where you can flex your creativity muscle

and come up with different ways. I like to, you know, you were talking about thirds and the broken fifth, the triads or whatever. I like to run them over changes of new tunes I'm working, you know, where, like, you switch the scale. mid-change, right? Challenge yourself. Right. Yeah, absolutely. So you could take one way of practicing that you like and you find particularly creative

and I think that's what you're saying is just play that scale with that particular way of practicing it over the change is sort of in time as you go through the whole too. Changing the scale with the core change. Yeah, yeah, I like it. I like it a lot. What are some books, like some scale books? Could people always ask about those? I know I've got my favorites. You've got yours? Well, the McFerrin. That's my favorite. That's your favorite? Yeah, that's my favorite. too. Oh, good. Hey, hey. I think we had a lot in common. No, no, there's the Hanan, obviously, you know, which is, for the pianist is like, you know, that's the first technical book you usually get, but that has, that actually has some pretty good scale stuff in the back of the book.

Right, right. What about some jazz scale books? Oh, I don't know, man. I actually don't know it. I think we should write that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think some people, you know, there's, there's, well, there, no, there was one I saw with, like, different ways to practice, pentatonic scales. I mean, you know what it is? For me, part of the reason I never got, I'm sure there's some great. stuff out there. Part of the reason I didn't get real interest in those things is because it takes a little bit of the creativity away if you're just looking at how somebody else practices scales and then reading that. I think you can get some ideas from that, but then maybe apply it to your own

kind of creative ways of practicing. But to just, I don't know, I mean, it's sort of like I want to come up with an idea for a story, so I'm going to go read a book of short stories and take one of those stories. Yeah, I hear you. Yeah, I hear you. Part of an idea, but it's part of the fun is just sort of coming up with an on the fly. I agree with you too, and the fact that, you know, as improviser, once I kind of understand the mechanics of the scale and how it works over the chord, I do want to, I mean, I want ideas about how to use them, but I do want to learn them in the way that I want to apply them to my sound, right? So, you know, it's good to create your own ways of doing that. Let me ask you a question. This is more of a piano geek question.

What are your thoughts on fingerings? Like, are you very strict with yourself? I always use fingers when I play piano. I'm super strict about that. So you are strict about using fingers. I'm very strict. No, no, but fingerings, like proper fingering for scales? Yes.

So, yeah, in terms of for scales, I'm a pretty big believer, at least for me and for most students I would say in using the so-called correct scales for the standard scales. I don't actually know a lot of alternate. There's a couple I know. I mean, the ones where there's alternates, what I always encourage people to do is if you're going to do something that's kind of out of the norm for fingering, it's okay. but you need to have a specific reason for doing that. It's kind of like, you know, if you're a runner and, you know, you have different choices of running shoes,

but if you're like, you know what, I want to run barefoot. And I know some people that do this. I actually did a half marathon recently, and I was very proud of myself into a guy ran past me right at the end, you know, barefoot and looking like he just showed up and wasn't even tired. And we're running on the street, you know, and I was like, oh, I hope my foot doesn't get hurt in my fancy Nike's. and he just kind of comes by barefoot and just ran 13 miles. I don't know if it's a good idea to run barefoot on the streets of St. Louis. I know.

I know. Well, he did it. But, I mean, he has a particular reason. So he's sort of leaving the norm. I don't know what those reasons are. But, I mean, no, I guess there's whole things about, like, you know, how your foot, you don't hit your knee as much or your ankle or something. But I would just say with fingerings, it's like that, that there's a reason that these

standard fingerings have been developed and they've been tested already. So unless you find for your hands, you're. Hands, you know, some people, everybody's hands are different, but if you have some unusual attributes, notice I didn't say deformities, I said unusual attributes, that would cause you to alter it. I mean, the whole thing about the fingering is so that you can execute in terms of bringing the music out. It's not about a numbers or a mathematical thing. It's about music. So whatever in the service of music, if changing up the fingering, if that can make it easier for you to control the instrument and bring out the phrasing and the music you want to, then it's fine. Because I think fingering in scales should be, you know, you should learn it really well. But then when you execute, when you're improvising, there's no time to think about fingering. So you're going to fall back on whatever you practice in your creative scale practice. That's why it's important to get them in in your practice routine. Absolutely.

Otherwise, you'll hear it? Thanks for listening to this episode of the You'll Hear It podcast. You can go to you'll hear it.com to get more information, submit a question, or just say hello. You can do that. Absolutely. All right. And if you like what you heard, please leave it. leave a review and a rating below.

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