You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Live From Instagram (5/9/20) - Part 1

Episode Date: May 13, 2020

Peter and Adam are going to be streaming live on Open Studio's Instagram every Saturday for the duration of the global health crisis. On part 1 of this week's edition, they answer questions on how to keep up motivation for practicing and advise on what type of piano you should get. For more info on the book Atomic Habits mentioned in this episode, go here.On the calendar for Open Studio events today: at 3:00 PM EDT, Adam will be taking his daily Guided Practice Session to YouTube. And at 8:00 PM EDT, join Peter Martin and Christian McBride for a virtual hang-out on YouTube. To keep up on all the live events from Open Studio, check out this handy calendar - we're adding new events regularly so pop in to see what we've got in the pipeline.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. Yo. Yo, I noticed you have your hat on. You have your hat off. Hat on, hat off. What's the rhyme or reason to that? Well, I need a haircut, and I'm extremely vain. And so I keep going back and forth between wanting to show off these glorious locks

and wanting to look my best. Right. Well, I'm all good. I'm out of menace. And I'm not. Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear a podcast. Daily Music Advice coming at you, coming at you still in semi-quarantine. Well, I mean, not a full quarantine, would we say? No. I mean, we are not in our house. I know everybody's different. And it's

fine. Everybody can have different rules. We are kind of, we have June 1st as sort of our next day that we're going to peek our heads out and see what we want to do with it. Wow. Okay. So June 1st, that's a very conservative June 1st, the hat comes off. Right. Yeah, because actually a bunch of people contacted me because I guess they saw in the news or whatever at the beginning of this week. They're like, Missouri opened up and so. But that's like the state officially where we were both, well, you live in the city of St. Louis. I live in the county of St. Louis. But they kind of go in lockstep together.

I've noticed. And they put a later date of, I think, May 18th. But I really think it's not going to be, you know, as it pertains to music, we're always talking about music here because we are daily music advice. But my feeling on it is that it's not going to be, you know, know, on a certain day. Everything's open and then everybody just rushes out to go back to the concert hall and to the club and to the conservatory and all that. It's obviously going to be a gradual process.

Yeah, it's definitely not. In fact, so I was, I've been texting back and forth with Doug, the owner of Thurman's, who I've had that regular Thursday night gig with my trio with for the last few years, three years almost. And he, I think, is going to try to open when the city is talking about opening around June 1st, maybe. Yeah. And he's like, but I don't know when the next time I can have music in. I don't even know how many people they're going to let us have in. And so I think it is going to be a small trickle. I know for for Missouri, it's one of these weird states. It's like if you live in the middle of Southern Missouri, you know, you probably don't live near anybody. Like you're naturally socially distant. Right. Just by geography. Right. And, you know, some of these, some of these counties where there's just so few people, it's like, yeah, they can open up and it's probably, you know, no corona. And it's a little bit safer to go. And

a little earlier. But, you know, then we have Kansas City and St. Louis in the surrounding areas. It's just, we're all packed in here, man. It's no different than any other major cities. So it's a, the opening the state, I can, I get it. And I think it was smart that the governor just allowed the municipalities kind of decide on their own. And it's smart of St. Louis and St. Louis County to decide not to open quite yet. Yeah, no, I agree. The fact that you use smart and our governor in the same sentence, I mean, I would have never thought that that would happen, but I never would, I know. It was accidental on both sides. No, no, no. Credit, credit, credit, credit, too. It's, I think it's solid it's a solid plan on that end there are other things that are way not solid but yeah that has been

something i don't mind anyway uh let's take some questions we got a bunch of people in here that's right and we were just as a reminder we are just to further confuse you depending on where you're listening or watching this we are on the instagram lives here this is instagram live you'll hear it's saturdays which happens every saturday at one p.m no 2 p.m. 2 p.m. Eastern standard time and uh and uh this is where you know we just get together and we look at each other and and sometimes even have some guests on, but we take questions, and then this becomes part of the podcast. So I'll take a question here from a friend, Mel Flannery, who's a great singer based out of New York, and she's a great musician, and her, and she's a great musician, great drummer,

from St. Louis originally, Danny Shear, awesome player, and both of them. And she says, Danny, horse torso, which is his handle, and I are currently trying to figure out how to fit a piano in our house, even though we have other keyboards. Can't replace the real deal. Yes. That's not even a question, but I'm just going to agree with you, Mel. Just yes, do it. And can I just suggest if you can find a Baldwin acrosonic, they're spin-it pianos and their little soulful boxes of joy. They're really, if you want, like, bang for your buck and fit a lot of, like, sound and they feel awesome and they just have a great soul to them for, you can usually find them for, you know,

too grandish for a, for a, you know, a spin-at piano, which is not that terrible, not that, cheap either, but it's worth it. I think there's some of Jackson Piano, hashtag Jackson Piano, for like $1,200 actually. But I think they're in the New York area, so I'm just, I'm inflating the price for them. Well, I think that's a good price, especially if it's in good shape and it's been, you know, kind of, you know, rejuvenated a little bit or whatever. I think a lot of times you'll see these like any kind of spinets for like $400, $500, $500. You don't know what you're getting. You got to move it. You got to do all that. Your mileage may vary.

but I agree those little ballwinds are they're very durable too and they can hold they hold a tune like nobody's business they're little tanks and I've never played an acrosonic a ball in acrosonic that was at least fun to play like even if they're if they haven't been capped up they're not in great shape they're always fun but usually they're fun and in great shape so yeah and it's not going to be a huge sound obviously but I mean per square footage or cubic meter centimeter of of piano there it's a pretty good sound actually it is a pretty good sound actually it is a pretty good sound. Ewan. Oh yeah, that was the one I was looking at. See, we are, we are, bam. I'm going to let you have it a little more. No, we're going to go back and forth, man, because that gives you a chance to indulge in your, what kind of sparkly water are we dealing with today?

I've just been doing sparkly water with citrus, you know, all the time. With citadel. So, yeah, Ewan says, how should you keep up motivation for practicing thanks from Scotland? motivation for practicing. I think there's a number of different ways to do it. So, you know, what I recommend is kind of developing several different ways so that you can draw on them at different times. Because it's like anything, you know, the motivation can wane in different areas. But if you have other ways, like I hear talking about people saying, well, you know, I started working out, but I kind of lost my motivation.

And I always think like you probably didn't lose the motivation in terms of like your overall goal. but you might have lost one of the ways that you motivate yourself, even like how you kind of talk to yourself or how you reward yourself. So there's a lot of ways we can kind of go into that deeper. We won't have time for it. But I would say in general, think about, you know, what your goal is. I always say like the goal should not be I want to practice X number of hours this week. Or I want to be, even the goal shouldn't be.

I want to be an amazing jazz pianist. I think the goal should be. I want to be a practicing pianist. I want to be somebody who practices as opposed to say, like, I want to do the certain amount. That's so true, man. You can do that immediately.

As soon as you start practicing, even if you don't like what you're hearing or you feel like not motivated, you're like, wow, well, that is who I am. And it's kind of the thing of like, yeah, you can make your goal, I want to run a marathon, but how about making a goal of I want to be a runner?

Because then you're putting yourself in that framework of like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm enjoying the problem. I'm part of the process, even when it gets hard. So the motivation, if your motivation is just to run the marathon and be the great jazz pianist, you're making it a lot harder because you're putting off the reward that you're giving yourself for achieving something. I've been reading this book, Atomic Habits by James Clear. Have you read this? Yeah, absolutely. This sounds exactly out of that,

where there's these. Yeah, he stole it all for me. There's basically the three levels of motivation for habits, right? It's to be motivated by the output, which is, the goal, right, of like, okay, I want to be a world-class jazz pianist, and that's my motivation for practicing. That is the one that least works for daily motivation. Then there's the motivation of habit, right, which is a little bit better, which is, I want to practice every day, you know, which is kind of what you were saying there. That's like, it's a better goal to have of, I should, I want to be someone who, not, I want to be someone, but I want to practice every day. That's my goal. That's a better goal.

But the third and the most important one and the one that could actually provide real motivation and real change because what it does is it takes all of the friction out of the equation is you have to become the identity of someone who practices every day. So you say, I want to be a world-class jazz pianist. That's sort of my North Star goal, right? And then you say, well, what do those people do? Well, they practice every day. They're motivated to practice every day. and every time that you practice, you vote for that's you as your identity, right? And so eventually you start shifting your identity to I am someone who is on their way to being a world-class jazz pianist or whatever your goal is.

But that includes practicing every day. That's just part of what I know is going to fulfill me and part of my identity. And it's just so much easier to change a habit or start a habit or take away a negative habit if it, aligns with what you think your overall strategy as a human being is. Like if I identify as someone who cares about the environment and I own

like 17 monster trucks and I fly and I fly to Rala Missouri back and forth every day and you know what I mean and I refuse to recycle or do anything about the environment that doesn't line. You ain't woke!

That's not really my identity. You know what I mean? So if we can like set our identity up to first and our habits become part of our identity. It's so much more powerful and easier because there's no conflict. Right, right. And I would say that I wholeheartedly agree with all that. And, you know, in terms of the question, how do you keep up your motivation for practicing? This kind of mindset shift, and it's definitely not an overnight thing.

This is not something that's like, even if it makes sense, it takes work. But it's definitely achievable. but that can start to feed your own inner motivation to practice because that's what we're always looking for. If you think about, you know, sometimes people will say like, well, like you're doing the guided practice sessions. That's like an external motivator for somebody to practice because they're meeting you every day. And then they might be like, oh, if Adam sees I'm not here or whatever. And that's a great kind of motivation to have. And that's one way that if you have access that it can be great.

but what happens on a day that your internet's out and Adam's not there? Or what happens, you know, when you need a different kind of motivation. So the inner motivation is always great. You never want to only rely on inner motivation because nobody's strong enough to always have that, you know, no matter how great your mind is. But we can only totally count on ourselves for motivation, I think, to practice. Even like, say, inspiration from, it's important to kind of separate inspiration and motivation in terms of this because sometimes inspiration can be very motivating.

but not always. So you can't just rely on like, wow, I heard this incredible McCoy Tyner solo that Adam and Peter talked about. And so it's so inspired me to practice. And so, you know, so that'll last you a little bit and can motivate you. But on another day, it could be discouraging. You're like, oh, man, McCoy Tyner, I'll never get there. So you have to have different ways to be motivated.

Hopefully some of these will resonate. But then work on all of them and then start to be confident in that you have things to draw on, you know, to motivate. But that one of like, I am a. a practicing musician. I'm a pianist that practices every day. Like once that becomes something with you, it all gets a little bit easier. Yeah, if you can identify with the people that you see that are doing it the way you want to do it and are where you want to be with it and say, I just, I don't care what it is. I just want to be one of those people. And then notice what they do to get there.

And then do that. And then you slowly start to build your habits around this identity. And then your identity kind of feeds, it starts this positive feedback loop. Right. Yeah, and you know, I'm sorry, go ahead, man. No, no, no, no. Go ahead. Well, no, I was just thinking that, and I was like to try to make it personal just so that you see kind of what our struggles and successes and how they relate. I mean, it's just our stories. And, you know, the more we share our stories with each other, we can, you never know what it's going to unlock for somebody.

But I think that the essence of what you were talking about before, Adam, is like the difference between, like, I was sort of, you know, playing around in the plant base. eating, you know, kind of vegetarian, a little bit of vegan, whatever. But at a certain point, and people are like, oh, are you vegetarian? I'm like, well, I'm not about labels or whatever. And I'm not. But I realized, like, for my own personal thing to make an eating change that I was actually very motivated to do at a certain point, I had to say, yes, I'm a vegan. I'm eating plant-based.

And, you know, I'm still even learning what the hell those mean. But, you know, you have to say it sometime. You don't have to say, like, I'm the most woke-ass plant-based, you know, earth loving vegan ever and i'm better than you that you're taking it too far but whatever it is that you want to do better it doesn't mean you're the greatest at that at that point but that's why i was that's why i'm always saying that we mean this it's like we're all jazz pianists not everybody on here i know we got some other people but if you're trying to learn to play jazz if you're a drummer or whatever you're you know embody that that's not that's not false or that's fake that's motivation

for you to be the best version of that for sure for sure um yeah and for anybody out there out that atomic habits by James Clear. It's, it's a very, a very good look at how our habits influence our identity and vice versa and ways to sort of get that together. Yeah, and on the podcast, we'll have a link below to that. For sure. Let's take one more question and then let's do another episode. What do you say? Okay. Sounds good. Janie, this is going back to our piano thing. Janie Pye 314 says, currently looking at piano options, reconditioned Steinway Model. 01930 versus new Yamaha. Any thoughts? So honestly, my knee jerk here is the new Yamaha. Even though I prefer a Steinway, 1930 is pretty old. And O is not a very great, it's not the best Steinway length that

you can get anyway. And so depending on what, all we have is a new Yamaha. So is it a new Yamaha C7, a C3, an upright? Even if it's the upright, the grand upright, the apartment piano, I might take that over a 1930 Steinway O depending on how good condition the Steinway O is in. Just saying. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, the Yamaha, it's a little hard not knowing the Yamaha model.

Is there anything on the model? Yeah. No, just new. Yeah, I mean, any new, I mean, Yamaha makes some very pedestrian new pianos. And I think they're like, what are they call them? Not conservatory model.

I don't know, something, like a lower end kind of model. So you could get into a not a great quality instrument. But whatever it is, you're getting from Yamaha. And then they make some amazing, you know, their handmade nine foot grand is like,

I mean, it rivals Steinway and Bosendorfer. It's pretty awesome. Yeah. And actually, Yamaha owns Bosendorfer now anyway. So that's almost considered a Yamaha piano.

But whatever model Yamaha you're getting, you're going to get a tighter, like without having seen the piano, we would have a better idea of what it is if it's new. Like their tolerance for different, I mean, of course, but if you know the model and it's new and you can have a technician, you know, give it a good go over.

I mean, it is what it is and it can be something from very good to just, meh. Whereas, yeah, the Steinway O could be glorious. But I mean, I couldn't imagine unless it's had a whole lot of money put into it recently and time and attention, that it is not going to be in need of quite a bit of work, especially if you want to practice on it a lot. That's become an issue with those older pianos. They can be amazing. But if they're going to be played a lot, if you're going to have, it's sitting in your living room and it's going to be mostly holding pictures, then go with the

Steinway because it probably looks amazing. It's probably a beautiful piece of furniture. It probably plays okay, you know, but you're talking about going on 90 years old. Yeah, pianos are not like violins or guitars where they, you know, they age really into themselves. In fact, they're kind of like a banana in that they're tight at first and then they have this, they have this sweet spot, where they get ripe and they're just beautiful and then they get rotten. And it's hard to get them back to that ripe space. I mean, as we were talking about the Steinway here in our studio, like it has such a great soundboard and a great sound,

but it takes a lot of money and work just to get it back to where it should be. Right. It'll probably without, unless we did maybe a complete overhaul that would be as much as a new Yamaha. Yeah, exactly. If money's no object, yeah. You can get like an 1884 beautiful Steinway Grand with like an art house case and a totally new, beautifully built, perfect soundboard from that guy in Ohio. Basically it'd be a totally new Steinway on the inside, you know, is what it would be. Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because there's nothing. You might as well just get a new Steinway. I know, exactly. That's true. But you want that beautiful art case, which doesn't really change the sound as far as I can tell at all. But I think, yeah, I mean, the big difference between the violins and stuff is like an older piano can be fantastic. for it to be as good as a new one, eventually you're replacing every single

thing on it, except for the case, I believe, right? I mean, the strings, the hammers, all the action, the keys, there's just so much, the soundboard. There's so many mechanical things that go into it. I mean, the soundboard definitely can age okay, but it's not the same as a guitar.

So I play my dad's Gibson Songbird, which is a, you know, I think he bought it new in 1996, and I think he probably paid $2,000 forward or $1,800. Like, NADA is like mid-range Gibson. But 1996 is now almost 25 years ago. Right.

So, like, the dirt that's got in there, and it's aged in every year, it just gets like a bigger, tighter, awesome sound. And I just wish my piano was the same way. Question for you, Adam. Or maybe this is for Mr. Manis for your father. In 1996, did he also purchase Kenny G's songbird on CD? That was on the regular. at our house. They had a Sony, one of those Sony two-speaker, boombox CD players, and we used to

go out to the patio, and they would drink their sparkly water and listen to Songbird. By the time this night is over. Oh, yeah. I loved it, man. By the time this night is over, little Adam was conceit. Oh, sorry, sorry, stop. Stop it, stop it. Stop it. That was there. All right, man. Well, thank you, everybody for joining us. Thanks for the Q&A. If you're listening to this on the podcast, come join us on Instagram every Saturday at 2 p.m. Eastern that's on the open studio Instagram. Hey open studio is the handle and we'll take questions and answers. And yeah, until then, you'll hear it.