You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - If You're Doing This While You Practice, You Need To STOP Practicing. - #141

Episode Date: June 22, 2018

In today's episode, Peter and Adam discuss one thing that should make you stop your practice session. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Menace. And this is Peter Martin. Oh, and you're listening to the You'll Hear at podcast. Daily Jazz advice coming at you. All right, that was a rough start, but we're going to keep going. Are we? Yeah, we're going to improvise our way through this. That's right, because we don't know how to press stop on the computer, so let's keep going.

Let's keep going, yeah. Now, on the technical day we're having today, we shouldn't jinx anything by pressing stop. Let's forge your head. All right. So what are we talking about today? Well, today, you know, we're talking about something that I was thinking about. I was practicing early this morning, and I got a little distracted by my phone. and what I wanted to talk about was

if you're doing this while you practice you need to stop practicing. You want to know what that is? Playing with your phone. Playing with your phone. Well, that's part of it though. And it's really, it's when you start to be unfocused in your practice,

when you start to kind of ramble and play things, you already know how to play mindlessly. Shibby doopo. Yeah, that's your favorite. Scoobo do be huidly. Now, you could always practice that through all 12 keys. No, but so this is something

that I think takes a lot of discipline and it takes practice to practice this way is to stay focused as you practice. If you're not focused, you need to just stop the practice session. You're wasting your time. That's right. It can even be counterproductive. You can actually slip a little bit. Yeah, because I think that anytime we're practicing, and really I would say define practicing as time we're spending with the instrument. So anytime we're practicing, it's fairly binary. You're either practicing good, productive things that are going to enhance your playing or you're practicing things that are going to degrade your plane.

That's right. I mean, it's impossible that there's a little bit of coasting in between, but it's kind of one of those things. It's probably either positive or negative. Now, I think for most of us, you know, a good 90% of the time, 85% or whatever, solid A or B, you know, pretty much most of the time we're, we're progress. We're getting better. It's positive.

But it doesn't, but it also doesn't necessarily mean that we can't be even more focused and more productive during that time. I mean, you can be barely just above water and breathing. Yeah. And not going backwards, but not really gaining that much.

And I think that the focus is the part that defines it even more than what you're practicing. Yeah. And hey, listen, if you're, if you're listening to this thing like, oh, I get unfocused all the time,

that's okay. Everybody does. We all do it. Well, it's not okay, but yeah, we all do it. No, No, no, but it is okay and that it's like there's nothing wrong with you.

Yeah. That happens to everybody. It's natural, actually. It is natural. We have to fight against it. You have to fight against it. So part of learning how to practice is learning how to deal with that focus, how to stop, how to take breaks. Yeah.

And how to really make sure that you're focusing on things. So, you know, one thing you can really do to help is to start with things that are unfamiliar. We've preached this before, but start with the hard stuff. Yeah. And actually, you know, we had the great Jeffrey Keiser in the studio this weekend recording a new lesson series. and he, you know, unprompted from us, was asked about how to practice, and he kind of reinforced what we usually say.

He said it a little bit differently, which I thought was cool. He said, start with your hardest material and then reward yourself at the end by just playing. And I think that sort of flow can be really good at keeping you focused because if it's hard to play,

you're going to have to concentrate a little more. You're going to have to really hone in and get it going to get it together, or whatever you're working on. And then once you start to sort of wander, your mind wanders and you start, maybe you then start playing just what you can play,

take a break, walk away from the instrument, step away for five minutes, take a breath, go get a glass of water, come back, try to stay focused again. If it can't happen, I would cut it short, man. I would call it.

Sorry, I wasn't paying attention. Could you repeat everything you just said? Because I'm not pretty good. I'm going to have to focus on a podcast too. I'm a waste of my time. No, no, no, I'm just kidding. No, I heard you. Yeah, and so I think that that, what you were just talking about, what Kieser brought up is speaks to the pacing and the timing of your practice.

Yeah. And getting into the flow and kind of flow state of your practice in which you are, you know, you can call it rewarding yourself or just being smart about the timing of it so that when you have, you know, either the energy and the focus a little bit more naturally, you're giving yourself those tasks and those sort of musical. experiences that will work best at that time. And then you have the period where you may be more creative, more rewarding, whatever you want to call it, when you can, you're still focused, but in a different kind of way, not as actively task oriented maybe. And then there's so many different variations on this. But I think that, you know, one of the biggest obstacles that we all have in the modern world is there's a lot of things about the modern world that are tearing our natural. focus down. Totally.

There's a lot of, bing, it's like going in the casino or something. What used to be, you'd go to Vegas, the one place.

It's like a sensory overload. That's your whole life is like that. And a lot of times we think, and I mean, you know,

the listeners of this podcast we know are from 8 to 88 or or from eight months to 108, whatever we want to say. But maybe a little bit trending more on

kind of middle age, not, but so it's easier for us to look at young people and say, oh, because they grew up in this, the age of

smartphone and the internet they can't focus but it's affected all of us oh yeah it is anyone who's participating in the modern world i mean if you're living you know little house on the prairie style still with no motors and stuff you know that's a beautiful thing because you can probably focus in a way that we can yeah you know when you're practicing it doesn't hurt to to put your phone on airplane mode you know take take the notifications away i hardly have any no notifications left in my phone just like the crucial stuff i have none on it and as you know i never answer my phone doesn't even ring phone and people get very upset they're like Like, I called you. You didn't answer.

I was like, Peter hasn't spoken on the phone in about four years. There's one person and she knows who she is that knows how to reach me on the phone because there's some sort of secret way you can call a phone, even of all the notifications, like an emergency thing, but they have to be in your VIP contacts. And then they have to call twice or something like that. So anyway, I lost my focus there for a minute. Sorry, talking about something else. Yeah, well, no, we're kind of talking about breaks.

and I was just thinking like I really don't anymore. And as I've been working on my focus, I've been getting better on it for sure. I mean, I hardly go more than 15 or 20 minutes without taking some kind of break. You know what I mean? And that's good. That's good for me because that means that I'm doing it right.

If I'm at the piano sitting for half an hour, something has gone wrong. That means that I'm just playing some BS and I should have taken a break about 10 minutes ago to like refresh and then figure out what I want to do next. Yeah, I think sometimes you can just tell, you know, even if for some people may not be able to figure out the amount of time as accurately as you just did. But if you start to pay attention to when do you get to the

point when you're not really sure what you just played. Right. You know, when you're kind of like, wait, where am I? What's going on? That's a good time to take a break, kind of gather your thoughts, you know, get up, stretch a little bit. And if that's every six minutes, that's fine. You can build it up to 20 minutes late, you know, as you improve your focus. But I think that's a kind of a good that's a good signal to yourself that you may want to think about making some adjustments because you're not going to

necessarily be in that positive productivity when you're of that kind of mindset of like, wait, what am I doing? And we've all been there. We've been there with this podcast when we're like, wait, did we do that already? Dude, what's going on? I've done it twice today. Right. And I think, you know,

it's different than when you're on the gig because there's the adrenaline of like you have an 8 o'clock gig. You can't be like, Oh, I'm not in my flow state right now. You're going to embarrass yourself. Yeah. I mean, you've got to get it together then. Yeah, yeah.

You do it. But I think with practice, and I mean, certainly you can't, you don't want to be one of these people that's like I'm waiting for all the stars to align before I can practice. And I want to be the perfect temperature. And I want to have, you know, you can kind of psych yourself out too. You just need to get stuff accomplished always. Yeah. But in terms of like that productivity to your point, like 20 to 25 minutes of really focused purposeful practice. I mean, we can get so much done.

It's true. You know, in fact, I'll give everybody a good exercise. We won't go through the whole thing so that we don't get too much dead air, as they say in the business. But have somebody like just sit in a chair, silent, no phone on, no music, no, you know, as peaceful as silent places you can. And have somebody else, I mean, you can do it yourself, but it's easier to have a friend help you with this. They're basically just going to tell you start. And then they're going to time. You're going to close your eyes.

They're going to time out one minute. not saying anything, you know, just they're going to tell you when you get to the end. But you're just going to sit there and all you need to think about is the length of a minute. I mean, you can let your mind wander and whatever and it will probably wander. But the main thing is like you want to try to raise your hand or open your eyes at one minute. And then if you get, if you haven't gotten there by the time it gets to a minute, your friend can say time's up or one minute or whatever. But this will give you a little bit of an insight into how long one minute is. it is. Yeah. I mean, for most people. Some people maybe have a good feel for it. Um, what's great is if you

kind of say, open your eyes and then they're like one minute and you've actually got to feel for what one minute is. For me, though, when I, and I, I, I remembered about this recently and tried it again. I'd done it years ago. Um, I was so amazed by how long that minute was. Oh, and the other things, you can't count. Like, I mean, look, you can do whatever you want. You're only cheating yourself. But you can't count like one. to you know, you're just sort of trying to be sort of meditative, you clear your mind, but you just want to go for more of like what it feels like, what one minute feels like. I like that a lot. That's really cool.

And then once you get that feel for what a minute is, think about what you just said, 20 minutes, 25, you know, a lot of times we're just like, oh, that isn't long enough to concentrate. But 20 minutes of concentrated, of focused attention on something. It's a long time. You can move mountains. You can move mountains. That's very true. And you know what?

This maybe sounds trivial like, oh, just practice for an hour and that's good. But this is actually really important. One of our most asked questions is about time management. A lot of people are very busy and they still want to progress as jazz musicians. And if you can master this, if you can really work on this to the point where you can concentrate for those 20-minute blocks and maybe put string together two, three, four of those, you're going to make some huge strides in your playing. It's going to be a big deal. Yeah, I would say if you had the choice between, if you had one hour to practice and you could practice. kind of just unfocused and a little bit, you know, jittery and not so purposeful for that

straight hour versus sitting there for 40 minutes and just like meditating and preparing for the perfect 20 minutes. I would do the perfect 20 minutes. Now, you've put you, you're putting a lot on yourself because now it's got to be a great 20 minutes. And really, you can't accomplish this in one day, but you can start to get there over time. Yeah, just like anything else, unfortunately, it takes just a little bit of work. Yeah, I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I know. Nothing. It's just easy off the bat. Why is that? But really for the focus thing, I mean, if you can start with three to five minutes

of really focus and then take a break and then, you know, then you can build that up to 10 minutes after a couple weeks. Yeah, just notice when you're starting to drift and gently bring yourself back or take a break and gently bring yourself back to the piano. You know, that's all it takes. Yeah. Or just drink a bunch of coffee and don't get you focused. Just blaze for five minutes and then fall asleep.

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