You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Practicing Freely - S3E37

Episode Date: February 19, 2019

Piano Week comes to an end with a discussion on how to practice in a freeform way.Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel��and leave a comment for this episode.Interested in more jazz advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram at:https://www.facebook.com/heyopenstudiohttps://twitter.com/heyopenstudiohttps://www.instagram.com/heyopenstudio See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Adam, what's up? Are you free? Yeah, I feel free. Okay. I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear at podcast. Daily jazz advice coming at you. Freely coming at you from the great state of Missouri and the great city of St. Louis

at our great studio here at Open Studio at the Great Steinway and Sons piano. Yeah, I thought you were going to say we were coming at you from New Hampshire because they're, you know, what their state motto is. Is it the live free or die? Yeah. That's a little intense. That's a little intense. But that's what we're talking about today. We're talking about free practice.

That seems like a state that would embrace that, right? Practice free or die? That's right. Wait, that's no. No, no. We're not going to go that far. But we are going to hopefully get into some areas. Is this from a question or is this just, this is something we sensed our listeners

wanted to hear, I think? So our friend, Homerilobo. Oh, right. That's right, right. The great Homeru. Great guitarist. He was in town this past week, and I was talking to him about his practice routine. If he would want to do a video on the practice routine and he said, you know, I don't know if that's a good

idea because I don't practice how I think a lot of people practice. But I think actually a lot of people think their practice routine is different from everybody else. We all think that we have some kind of inferior practice routine. But Hamero was talking about that he doesn't just run scales or practice voicing. He's too good for that. He might be. He's mastered all that stuff. But he just starts playing to get ideas in a kind of a free form way. Yeah. Then find something that interests him. This is almost like Montessori practicing right here. It is. My kids are in elementary school. I know all about this. Well, I mean, I often think of Romero as being like the world's oldest Montessori student.

And he plays with blocks a lot on the road I've noticed, but multicolored blocks. But, you know, I heard him talk about this and I said to myself, I used to do this so much when I was younger. Yeah. I'm so much more structured now. And I think structure is absolutely essential and it's great because it keeps us going. And some days that you don't want to think about anything, you just want to like plug and practice something. Yeah. But I think it's rejuvenating.

Yeah. to just start playing and see what happens and then find something that interest you, that maybe you can't do, but you want to be able to do and just, you know, keep it, keep it going. See if you can practice it. Yeah. And I think one way to look at this is, to give it just a little bit of structure, is it's a great way to either connect or reconnect yourself with your instrument in a very, you know, natural, hopefully an organic way. and that being that you're, you know, either you're playing things that feel really good and sound really good, some kind of combination. You're not worried about, you know, all the things that we always say to worry about.

But I think this is also why you see some more advanced players. This is, I really do think that, you know, you can kind of get to the level where this can be most of your practice. Outside of like specific things, I mean, this is very high level. This is like. Yeah, if you don't know your mix relating, your dominoid scales, your work on those. If you don't know your basic guitar voicing. Yeah. Don't be trying to feel it all day.

But once you feel like not about mastering everything, but you're like you know most stuff and you're able to learn music you need to do for gigs. I mean, we still want to be learning music all the time, whether it's for a gig or for ourselves or working on things. And we, of course, we do that. But in terms of staying connected with the instrument and furthering the depth of your connection with the instrument,

I think that this is something that can be kind of a big part of your practice, but even at the more beginner intermediate levels to at least do a little bit, like all these things, It's never binary. It's never like, oh, we don't do any free form practice, and then we become masters, and then we only do free for. No, it's never that. You like that?

It was my non-free form, and then I got all that. No, but I mean, we want to incorporate elements of this. And so an analogy, I would say, and you can, you know, because all things on this podcast are on rehearsed, raw, we keep it raw up in New York. Yeah. So we haven't vetted this, but you can let me know what you think of this. That's weird.

I've been reading a script for all year. No? Not me. Not me. No, but I would say an analysis. for this would be, you know, you're a basketball player and you're working on your skills, but let's say you're LeBron James. You still need to, like, do your drills and do, you know, put up 100 or probably however many

free throws and all that. But if he just comes to the court and just like shoots and has a good time and like wherever the ball bounces, he just shoots and dunks and just runs around like a kid kind of like playing the game, he's also like he's at the level where he can do that. And his performance that evening is probably not going to suffer, you know. think this is also a great way to to help you develop your own sound. Because if you are just experimenting and just playing freely and trying to find things that resonate with you, you know, you're naturally going to gravitate towards certain things. And then, you know, the key is then

to work those out so that they become a part of you. And I think that's what Romero was trying to say. And what I would like to emphasize, too, is this doesn't have to be a free-form Keith Jarrett, you know, Kohn concert kind of experience where you're just playing freely, turn off the lights and smoke something and then just start playing. Right. Like, was he high on cold concert? No, no, I doubt it. But you can start playing, find some things that you're like, oh, that's so cool.

What is that? Or not even say what is that, but then. I'm just going to keep talking. I'll give you a little background. You start playing. You find something that you think sounds beautiful or interesting or that you might want to use. And then you can work that through in different ways. Okay, so now we're on a free form cold concert type of.

I'm just going to shut up and let you play good. Andrew, can I borrow your lighter, please? Thank you. Okay, so for me, you've already developed these like repeating note things. That could be your practice session. Right. It's practicing repeating notes, doing it in chords, doing it in both hands, doing it in all your fingers, doing it over the bar line, doing it, however you can try to get it in your soul.

You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. No, I love it. I mean, it's kind of a combination of, you know, and that sort of refocuses things a little bit towards to some kind of developmental stuff, but you're still kind of having fun, you're taking whatever idea comes first.

Free form, freely. Hey, look, we're the guys who also encourage you to keep some kind of practice journal, right? And, like, write down what you're going to practice before you practice. So I think there's room for all of this in your routine.

And in fact, it's good to definitely break it up. Well, maybe it could be like you have, you know, we've talked about before, this goes towards a little bit of organization and regiment. But,

like, you would say have 45 minutes to practice, maybe the last 10 minutes. you just say, I'm just going to play like this. I'm going to create something. And it doesn't have to be, you know, totally musically edifying any well. It's not the kind of creation that you, like, that's, I think, what you were saying as far as Cole concert. It doesn't have to be your masterpiece perfectly crafted from beginning to end like an audience is there.

It's just for you. It could just be something fun kind of, you know. And it's also a way that you're going to get ideas. Keep your journal. Yeah. And because you're not going to be able to touch on everything that you think of during these sessions. Yeah. You're just getting some shots up, some sets and reps.

You still want to do things correctly. but you're not necessarily focused in on the technique side of it. Yeah, so you can write down an idea that you might not get to flush out. You can write down maybe a melodic idea for... Flesh up. Well, if it's bad, you flush it. Does I say flush out? Yeah.

If it's bad, you flush it down the toilet. If it's good, you flesh it out. All right, don't write that down. But you know what I mean? Like, you're going to get more ideas than you can actually work on. Of course. So it's also a good idea to kind of keep track of that. Yeah.

Well, this is good. I mean, this is, I think, you know, again, we've been talking about mindset a lot lately. And I think that that's something really important. and I've been kind of on a quest for this of identifying the kinds of mindset and frameworks that I have that are working well for me and maybe making some adjustments. And I think as you think about your practice routine,

for everybody, for all of us, thinking about the different kinds of mindset one can have, it's not only, as you say, the regimented, like, that's, like, that should, mindset should accrue, and the discipline of that should accompany specific parts of your practice, obviously scales and getting through repertoire on learning a solo, these things that have a beginning and an end.

For beginning and intermediate players, that can be very important. Yeah. And don't ever think like, oh, well, it's such a different mindset. I mean, you've got to remember, like, great artists and musicians, a lot of times they have another side to them that is very analytical and very exacting. I think that those things work together. And just to apologies for keep going back to the basketball. I love me some hoops.

No, but I mean, I heard this great podcast interview with, I mean, I mean, I I don't know if they're the number 134th music podcast or not, but they did have LeBron James on there and his trainer. We should get LeBron James on here. Well, you know, we'll get there. We'll get there. But the idea was that if you think about, you know, the extreme skill that he has and how he works,

like he works in such a more regimented way still, especially like with nutrition and working out and like that kind of a thing, but also with specifically like how he spends his days on game days. It's like so specific. But then when you see him play, he plays with a lot of creativity. and so I think that it's never like mutually exclusive. It's never like you're turning yourself into a robot by too much.

But maybe this little segment of creative practice can help, you know, fire off some some electrodes on that side of your brain. I think it's important. Give it a shot. I think like any of this, man, a certain amount of structure helps with creativity. Yeah. And a certain amount of creativity helps free up the structure. I thought you can say like anything, we cannot be legally held responsible for anything we tell you. Your results may vary.

We're required to say that by the... That too. Yeah. So we don't have an ending tune for today, but we have more coming in. And if you have one that you'd like to hear at the end of our podcast, we're still accepting them.

We are. We are. You know, we might be putting up a little Adam Manus, and we never done that, have we? Well, Adam Manus tune? Yeah. We don't want to do that. We could do that.

Maybe we'll do that today. Let's do that today. What about your tune with the... What do you... Is that Ro Roa Roe Your Boat? You know the one. Oh, the Modo tune. The Modo.

Andrew put on the Moe. Andrew put on the Motto tune. Yeah. Why don't we have that take us out? Because. We'll hear it.